Another strong illusionist here. Perhaps similar to you, I ended up here because I kept running into the problem of ‘everything is made of matter’.
Because ultimately, down at the floor, it’s all just particles and forces and extremely well understood probabilities. There’s no fundamental primitive for ‘consciousness’ or ‘experience’, any more than there’s a fundamental primitive for ‘green’ or ‘traffic’ or ‘hatred’. Those particles and forces down at the floor are the territory; everything else is a label.
As I was going through the process to get here, I kept running into parts of me with the internal objection of “But it feels real! I feel like I’m conscious! I have conscious experience!” The “what does it feel like to be wrong” post was of significant help here; it makes blatantly clear that feelings and intuition don’t necessarily map the territory accurately, or even at all (in the case of being wrong and not knowing it.)
So the final picture was 1) hard materialism all the way down to fundamental physics, and 2) explicit demonstration that my feelings didn’t necessarily map to reality, no matter how real they felt. There was only one conclusion to make from there, though it did take me a few months of mulling over the problem for the majority of my cognitive apparatus to agree.
There’s no fundamental primitive for ‘consciousness’
I’m not sure if this is the case, but I’m worried that people subscribe to illusionism because they only compare it to the weakest possible alternative, which (I would say) is consciousness being an emergent phenomenon. If you just assume that there’s no primitive for consciousness, I would agree that the argument for illusionism is extremely strong since [unconscious matter spontaneously spawning consciousness] is extremely implausible.
However, you can also just dispute the claim and assume consciousness is a primitive, which gets around the hard problem. That leaves the question ‘why is consciousness a primitive’, which doesn’t seem particularly more mysterious than ‘why is matter a primitive’.
You seem to be saying that illusionism is viable because people compare it to “consciousness being an emergent phenomenon”, which you consider to be an alternative. Further, you explicitly state that “the argument for illusionism is extremely strong since [unconscious matter spontaneously spawning consciousness] is extremely implausible”.
This seems problematic to me because:
If there’s no fundamental primitive for consciousness, then pretty much by definition whatever it is that we slap the label “consciousness” on must be emergent behavior. In other words, what we call consciousness being emergent behavior is a direct and immediate consequence of reductionist beliefs, which IMO also produce strong illusionism.
You’ve stated that “[unconscious matter spontaneously spawning consciousness] is extremely implausible” without any evidence or rationale. I disagree. In my view the likelihood of “unconscious matter spontaneously spawning consciousness” approaches 1 as system complexity increases, which pretty much matches the observations of intelligence in species we see in the real world.
Apologies, I communicated poorly. ImE, discussions about consciousness are particularly prone to misunderstandings. Let me rephrase my comment.
Many (most?) people believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon but also a real thing.
My assumption from reading your first comment was that you believe #1 is close to impossible. I agree with that.
I took your first comment (in particular this paragraph)...
Because ultimately, down at the floor, it’s all just particles and forces and extremely well understood probabilities. There’s no fundamental primitive for ‘consciousness’ or ‘experience’, any more than there’s a fundamental primitive for ‘green’ or ‘traffic’ or ‘hatred’. Those particles and forces down at the floor are the territory; everything else is a label.
… as saying that #2 implies illusionism must be true. I’m saying this is not the case because you can instead stipulate that consciousness is a primitive. If every particle is conscious, you don’t have the problem of getting real consciousness out of nothing. (You do have the problem of why your experience appears unified, but that seems much less impossible.)
Or to say the same thing differently, my impression/worry is that people accept that ‘consciousness isn’t real’ primarily because they think the only alternative is ‘consciousness is real and emerges from unconscious matter’, when in fact you can have a coherent world view that disputes both claims.
Note: beware the definition of ‘real’. There is a reason I’ve been using the structure “as real as X”. We should probably taboo it.
There’s still some comm issues here I think. All following comments reply explicitly and only to the immediate parent comment. Regarding your #1 in the immediate parent:
I believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, like many other emergent phenomena we are familiar with, and is exactly as “real” as those other emergent phenomena. Examples of emergent phenomena in the same class as “consciousness” include rocks, trees, hatred, weather patterns. This is how I will be using ‘real’ for the remainder of this comment.
Regarding #2, I can’t parse it with sufficient confidence to respond.
Regarding #3, I’m saying that the lack of a ‘consciousness’ primitive means that if there’s something labelled consciousness that isn’t a primitive, then it must be emergent from the primitives we do have.
Regarding consciousness actually being a primitive: sure, that’s an option, but it’s approximately as likely to be a primitive as ‘treeness’, ‘hatred’, and ‘plastic surgery’. The fact of the matter is that we have a lot of evidence regarding what the primitives are, what they can be, and what they can do, and none of it involves ‘consciousness’ any more than it involves ‘plastic surgery’; the priors for either of these being a primitive are both incredibly small, and approximately equally likely.
Regarding the last paragraph in the immediate parent, the easiest coherent world view which disputes both claims is to say that “consciousness is real and does not emerge from unconscious matter”. However, that world view suffers a complexity penalty against either of the other two world views: “consciousness isn’t real” requires only primitives; “consciousness is real and emerges from unconscious matter” requires primitives and the possibility of emergent behavior from those primitives; while “consciousness is real and does not emerge from unconscious matter” flat out requires an additional consciousness primitive. That is an extremely nontrivial addition.
And lastly, there’s the evidenciary burden. The fact of the matter is that observation over the past century or so has gives us extremely strong evidence for a small set of very simple primitives, which have the ability to generate extremely complex emergent behavior. “Consciousness is real” is compatible with observation; “consciousness is real and emerges from unconscious matter” is compatible with observation; “consciousness is real and does not emerge from unconscious matter” requires additional laws of physics to be true.
Comparing consciousness to plastic surgery seems to me to be a false analogy. If you have your model of particles bouncing around, then plastic surgery is a label you can put on a particular class of sequences of particles doing things. If you didn’t have the name, there wouldn’t be anything to explain, the particles can still do the same thing. Consciousness/subjective experience describes something that is fundamentally non-material. It may or may not be cause by particles doing things, but it’s not itself made of particles.
If your response to this is that there is no such thing as subjective experience—which is what I thought your position was, and what I understand strong illusionism to be—then this is exactly what I mean when I say consciousness isn’t real. By ‘consciousness’, I’m exclusively referring to the qualitatively different thing called subjective experience. This thing either exists or doesn’t exist. I’m not talking about the process that makes people move their fingers to type things about consciousness.
I apologize for not tabooing ‘real’, but I don’t have a model of how ‘is consciousness real’ can be anything but a well-defined question whose answer is either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The ‘as real as X’ framing doesn’t make any sense to me. it seems like trying to apply a spectrum to a binary question.
Consciousness/subjective experience describes something that is fundamentally non-material.
More non-material than “love” or “three”?
It makes sense to me to think of “three” as being “real” in some sense independently from the existence of any collection of three physical objects, and in that sense having a non-material existence. (And maybe you could say the same thing for abstract concepts like “love”.)
And also, three-ness is a pattern that collections of physical things might correspond to.
Do you think of consciousness as being non-material in a similar way? (Where the concept is not fundamentally a material thing, but you can identify it with collections of particles.)
“Spontaneously” is your problem. It’s like creationists saying monkeys don’t spontaneously turn into humans. I don’t know if consciousness is real and if it reduces to known matter or not, but I do know that human intuition is very anti-reductionist; Anything it doesn’t understand, it likes to treat as an atomic blackbox.
That’s fair. However, if you share the intuition that consciousness being emergent is extremely implausible, then going from there directly to illusionsism means only comparing it to the (for you) weakest alternative. And that seems like the relevant step for people in this thread other than you.
I don’t at all share that intuition. My intuition is that consciousness being emergent is both extremely plausible, and increasingly likely as system complexity increases. This intuition also makes consciousness approximately as “real” as “puppies” and “social media”. All three are emergent phenomena, arising from a very small and basic set of primitives.
If you just assume that there’s no primitive for consciousness, I would agree that the argument for illusionism is extremely strong since [unconscious matter spontaneously spawning consciousness] is extremely implausible.
How is this implausible at all? All kinds of totally real phenomena are emergent. There’s no primitive for temperature, yet it emerges out of the motions of many particles. There’s no primitive for wheel, but round things that roll still exist.
feelings didn’t necessarily map to reality, no matter how real they felt
But they do map to reality, just not perfectly. “I see red stripe” approximately maps to some brain activity. Sure, feelings about them being different things may be wrong, but “illusionism about everything except physicalism” is just restating physicalism without any additional argument. So what feelings are you illusionistic about?
Some do happen to map (partially) to reality, but the key here is that there is no obligation for them to do so, and there’s nothing which guarantees that to be true.
In short, what I believe may or may not map to reality at all. Everything we “feel” is a side effect, an emergent behavior of the particles and forces at the bottom. It’s entirely an illusion.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t something going on, and that doesn’t mean that feelings don’t exist, any more than claiming bullets or trees don’t exist. But they’re no more a primitive of the universe than “bullet” or “tree” is: bullets and trees are loose collections of particles and forces we’ve decided to slap labels on; feelings, opinions, and ideas are more conceptual, but still end up being represented and generated by particles and forces. They’re no more real than trees or bullets are, though the labels are useful to us.
If you don’t have philosophical issues with trees, you shouldn’t have them with consciousness.
I appreciate the difference between absolute certainty and allowing the possibility of error, but as a matter of terminology, “illusion” is usually used to refer to things that are wrong, not merely may be wrong. Words doesn’t matter that much, of course, but I still interested in what intuitions about consciousness you consider to probably not correspond to reality at all? For example, what do you do with intuition underlying zombie argument:
Would you say the statement “we live in non-zombie world” is true?
Or the entire setup is contradictory because consciousness is a label for some arbitrary structure/algorithm and it was specified that structures match for both worlds?
Or do you completely throw away the intuition about consciousness as not useful?
From what you said I guess it’s 2 (which by the way implies that whether you/you from yesterday/LUT-you/dust-theoretic copies of you/dogs feel pain is a matter of preferences), so the next question is what evidence is there for the conclusion that the intuition about consciousness can’t map to anything other than algorithm in the brain? It can’t map to something magical but what if there is some part of reality that this intuition corresponds to?
When I first heard about p-zombies 10+ years ago, I thought the idea was stupid. I still think the idea is stupid. Depending on how you define the words, we could all be p-zombies; or we could all not be p-zombies. Regardless of how we define the words though, we’re large collections of particles and forces operating on very simple rules, and when you look at it from that standpoint, the question dissolves.
Basically yes: the p-zombie thought experiment is broken because it hinges on label definitions and ignores the fact that we have observation and evidence we can fall back on for a much, much more accurate picture (which isn’t well represented by any single word in our language.)
Intuition about consciousness is useful in the same way that intuition about quantum mechanics and general relativity is useful: for most people, basically not at all, or only in very limited regimes. Keep in mind that human intuition is no more complicated than a trained neural net trying to make a prediction about something. It can be close to right, it can be mostly wrong, it can be entirely wrong. Most people have good intuition/prediction about whether the sun will rise tomorrow; most people have bad intuition/prediction about how two charged particles in a square potential well will behave. And IMO, most people have a mistaken intuition/prediction that consciousness is somehow real and supernatural and beyond what physics can tell us. Those people would be in the ‘wrong’ bucket.
Regarding “what evidence is there for the conclusion that the intuition about consciousness can’t map to anything other than algorithm in the brain?”: I would posit for evidence the fact that people have intuitions about all kinds of completely ridiculous and crazy stuff that doesn’t make sense. I can see no reason why intuition about consciousness must somehow always be coherent, when so many people have intuitions that don’t even remotely match reality (and/or are inconsistent with each other or themselves.)
Regarding “what if there is some part of reality that this intuition corresponds to?”: I don’t understand what you’re trying to drive at here. We call intuitions like that “testable”, and upon passing those tests, we call them “likely to model or represent reality in some way”.
Hmm, I’m not actually sure about quantifying ratio of crazy/predictive intuitions (especially in case of generalizing to include perception) to arrive at low prior for intuitions. The way I see it, if everyone had an interactive map of Haiti in the corner of their vision, we should try to understand how it works and find what it corresponds to in reality—not immediately dismiss it. Hence the question about specific illusionary parts of consciousness.
Anyway, I thing the intuition about consciousness does correspond to a part of reality—to “reality” part. I.e. panpsychism is true and zombie thought experiment illustrates difference between real world and the world that does not exist. It doesn’t involve additional primitives, because physical theories already include reality, and it diverges from intuition about consciousness in unsurprising parts (like intuition being too anthropocentric).
Another strong illusionist here. Perhaps similar to you, I ended up here because I kept running into the problem of ‘everything is made of matter’.
Because ultimately, down at the floor, it’s all just particles and forces and extremely well understood probabilities. There’s no fundamental primitive for ‘consciousness’ or ‘experience’, any more than there’s a fundamental primitive for ‘green’ or ‘traffic’ or ‘hatred’. Those particles and forces down at the floor are the territory; everything else is a label.
As I was going through the process to get here, I kept running into parts of me with the internal objection of “But it feels real! I feel like I’m conscious! I have conscious experience!” The “what does it feel like to be wrong” post was of significant help here; it makes blatantly clear that feelings and intuition don’t necessarily map the territory accurately, or even at all (in the case of being wrong and not knowing it.)
So the final picture was 1) hard materialism all the way down to fundamental physics, and 2) explicit demonstration that my feelings didn’t necessarily map to reality, no matter how real they felt. There was only one conclusion to make from there, though it did take me a few months of mulling over the problem for the majority of my cognitive apparatus to agree.
I’m not sure if this is the case, but I’m worried that people subscribe to illusionism because they only compare it to the weakest possible alternative, which (I would say) is consciousness being an emergent phenomenon. If you just assume that there’s no primitive for consciousness, I would agree that the argument for illusionism is extremely strong since [unconscious matter spontaneously spawning consciousness] is extremely implausible.
However, you can also just dispute the claim and assume consciousness is a primitive, which gets around the hard problem. That leaves the question ‘why is consciousness a primitive’, which doesn’t seem particularly more mysterious than ‘why is matter a primitive’.
I am extremely confused by your answer.
You seem to be saying that illusionism is viable because people compare it to “consciousness being an emergent phenomenon”, which you consider to be an alternative. Further, you explicitly state that “the argument for illusionism is extremely strong since [unconscious matter spontaneously spawning consciousness] is extremely implausible”.
This seems problematic to me because:
If there’s no fundamental primitive for consciousness, then pretty much by definition whatever it is that we slap the label “consciousness” on must be emergent behavior. In other words, what we call consciousness being emergent behavior is a direct and immediate consequence of reductionist beliefs, which IMO also produce strong illusionism.
You’ve stated that “[unconscious matter spontaneously spawning consciousness] is extremely implausible” without any evidence or rationale. I disagree. In my view the likelihood of “unconscious matter spontaneously spawning consciousness” approaches 1 as system complexity increases, which pretty much matches the observations of intelligence in species we see in the real world.
Apologies, I communicated poorly. ImE, discussions about consciousness are particularly prone to misunderstandings. Let me rephrase my comment.
Many (most?) people believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon but also a real thing.
My assumption from reading your first comment was that you believe #1 is close to impossible. I agree with that.
I took your first comment (in particular this paragraph)...
… as saying that #2 implies illusionism must be true. I’m saying this is not the case because you can instead stipulate that consciousness is a primitive. If every particle is conscious, you don’t have the problem of getting real consciousness out of nothing. (You do have the problem of why your experience appears unified, but that seems much less impossible.)
Or to say the same thing differently, my impression/worry is that people accept that ‘consciousness isn’t real’ primarily because they think the only alternative is ‘consciousness is real and emerges from unconscious matter’, when in fact you can have a coherent world view that disputes both claims.
Note: beware the definition of ‘real’. There is a reason I’ve been using the structure “as real as X”. We should probably taboo it.
There’s still some comm issues here I think. All following comments reply explicitly and only to the immediate parent comment. Regarding your #1 in the immediate parent:
I believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, like many other emergent phenomena we are familiar with, and is exactly as “real” as those other emergent phenomena. Examples of emergent phenomena in the same class as “consciousness” include rocks, trees, hatred, weather patterns. This is how I will be using ‘real’ for the remainder of this comment.
Regarding #2, I can’t parse it with sufficient confidence to respond.
Regarding #3, I’m saying that the lack of a ‘consciousness’ primitive means that if there’s something labelled consciousness that isn’t a primitive, then it must be emergent from the primitives we do have.
Regarding consciousness actually being a primitive: sure, that’s an option, but it’s approximately as likely to be a primitive as ‘treeness’, ‘hatred’, and ‘plastic surgery’. The fact of the matter is that we have a lot of evidence regarding what the primitives are, what they can be, and what they can do, and none of it involves ‘consciousness’ any more than it involves ‘plastic surgery’; the priors for either of these being a primitive are both incredibly small, and approximately equally likely.
Regarding the last paragraph in the immediate parent, the easiest coherent world view which disputes both claims is to say that “consciousness is real and does not emerge from unconscious matter”. However, that world view suffers a complexity penalty against either of the other two world views: “consciousness isn’t real” requires only primitives; “consciousness is real and emerges from unconscious matter” requires primitives and the possibility of emergent behavior from those primitives; while “consciousness is real and does not emerge from unconscious matter” flat out requires an additional consciousness primitive. That is an extremely nontrivial addition.
And lastly, there’s the evidenciary burden. The fact of the matter is that observation over the past century or so has gives us extremely strong evidence for a small set of very simple primitives, which have the ability to generate extremely complex emergent behavior. “Consciousness is real” is compatible with observation; “consciousness is real and emerges from unconscious matter” is compatible with observation; “consciousness is real and does not emerge from unconscious matter” requires additional laws of physics to be true.
Comparing consciousness to plastic surgery seems to me to be a false analogy. If you have your model of particles bouncing around, then plastic surgery is a label you can put on a particular class of sequences of particles doing things. If you didn’t have the name, there wouldn’t be anything to explain, the particles can still do the same thing. Consciousness/subjective experience describes something that is fundamentally non-material. It may or may not be cause by particles doing things, but it’s not itself made of particles.
If your response to this is that there is no such thing as subjective experience—which is what I thought your position was, and what I understand strong illusionism to be—then this is exactly what I mean when I say consciousness isn’t real. By ‘consciousness’, I’m exclusively referring to the qualitatively different thing called subjective experience. This thing either exists or doesn’t exist. I’m not talking about the process that makes people move their fingers to type things about consciousness.
I apologize for not tabooing ‘real’, but I don’t have a model of how ‘is consciousness real’ can be anything but a well-defined question whose answer is either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The ‘as real as X’ framing doesn’t make any sense to me. it seems like trying to apply a spectrum to a binary question.
More non-material than “love” or “three”?
It makes sense to me to think of “three” as being “real” in some sense independently from the existence of any collection of three physical objects, and in that sense having a non-material existence. (And maybe you could say the same thing for abstract concepts like “love”.)
And also, three-ness is a pattern that collections of physical things might correspond to.
Do you think of consciousness as being non-material in a similar way? (Where the concept is not fundamentally a material thing, but you can identify it with collections of particles.)
“Spontaneously” is your problem. It’s like creationists saying monkeys don’t spontaneously turn into humans. I don’t know if consciousness is real and if it reduces to known matter or not, but I do know that human intuition is very anti-reductionist; Anything it doesn’t understand, it likes to treat as an atomic blackbox.
That’s fair. However, if you share the intuition that consciousness being emergent is extremely implausible, then going from there directly to illusionsism means only comparing it to the (for you) weakest alternative. And that seems like the relevant step for people in this thread other than you.
I don’t at all share that intuition. My intuition is that consciousness being emergent is both extremely plausible, and increasingly likely as system complexity increases. This intuition also makes consciousness approximately as “real” as “puppies” and “social media”. All three are emergent phenomena, arising from a very small and basic set of primitives.
How is this implausible at all? All kinds of totally real phenomena are emergent. There’s no primitive for temperature, yet it emerges out of the motions of many particles. There’s no primitive for wheel, but round things that roll still exist.
Maybe I’ve misunderstood your point though?
But they do map to reality, just not perfectly. “I see red stripe” approximately maps to some brain activity. Sure, feelings about them being different things may be wrong, but “illusionism about everything except physicalism” is just restating physicalism without any additional argument. So what feelings are you illusionistic about?
All of them.
Some do happen to map (partially) to reality, but the key here is that there is no obligation for them to do so, and there’s nothing which guarantees that to be true.
In short, what I believe may or may not map to reality at all. Everything we “feel” is a side effect, an emergent behavior of the particles and forces at the bottom. It’s entirely an illusion.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t something going on, and that doesn’t mean that feelings don’t exist, any more than claiming bullets or trees don’t exist. But they’re no more a primitive of the universe than “bullet” or “tree” is: bullets and trees are loose collections of particles and forces we’ve decided to slap labels on; feelings, opinions, and ideas are more conceptual, but still end up being represented and generated by particles and forces. They’re no more real than trees or bullets are, though the labels are useful to us.
If you don’t have philosophical issues with trees, you shouldn’t have them with consciousness.
I appreciate the difference between absolute certainty and allowing the possibility of error, but as a matter of terminology, “illusion” is usually used to refer to things that are wrong, not merely may be wrong. Words doesn’t matter that much, of course, but I still interested in what intuitions about consciousness you consider to probably not correspond to reality at all? For example, what do you do with intuition underlying zombie argument:
Would you say the statement “we live in non-zombie world” is true?
Or the entire setup is contradictory because consciousness is a label for some arbitrary structure/algorithm and it was specified that structures match for both worlds?
Or do you completely throw away the intuition about consciousness as not useful?
From what you said I guess it’s 2 (which by the way implies that whether you/you from yesterday/LUT-you/dust-theoretic copies of you/dogs feel pain is a matter of preferences), so the next question is what evidence is there for the conclusion that the intuition about consciousness can’t map to anything other than algorithm in the brain? It can’t map to something magical but what if there is some part of reality that this intuition corresponds to?
When I first heard about p-zombies 10+ years ago, I thought the idea was stupid. I still think the idea is stupid. Depending on how you define the words, we could all be p-zombies; or we could all not be p-zombies. Regardless of how we define the words though, we’re large collections of particles and forces operating on very simple rules, and when you look at it from that standpoint, the question dissolves.
Basically yes: the p-zombie thought experiment is broken because it hinges on label definitions and ignores the fact that we have observation and evidence we can fall back on for a much, much more accurate picture (which isn’t well represented by any single word in our language.)
Intuition about consciousness is useful in the same way that intuition about quantum mechanics and general relativity is useful: for most people, basically not at all, or only in very limited regimes. Keep in mind that human intuition is no more complicated than a trained neural net trying to make a prediction about something. It can be close to right, it can be mostly wrong, it can be entirely wrong. Most people have good intuition/prediction about whether the sun will rise tomorrow; most people have bad intuition/prediction about how two charged particles in a square potential well will behave. And IMO, most people have a mistaken intuition/prediction that consciousness is somehow real and supernatural and beyond what physics can tell us. Those people would be in the ‘wrong’ bucket.
Regarding “what evidence is there for the conclusion that the intuition about consciousness can’t map to anything other than algorithm in the brain?”: I would posit for evidence the fact that people have intuitions about all kinds of completely ridiculous and crazy stuff that doesn’t make sense. I can see no reason why intuition about consciousness must somehow always be coherent, when so many people have intuitions that don’t even remotely match reality (and/or are inconsistent with each other or themselves.)
Regarding “what if there is some part of reality that this intuition corresponds to?”: I don’t understand what you’re trying to drive at here. We call intuitions like that “testable”, and upon passing those tests, we call them “likely to model or represent reality in some way”.
Hmm, I’m not actually sure about quantifying ratio of crazy/predictive intuitions (especially in case of generalizing to include perception) to arrive at low prior for intuitions. The way I see it, if everyone had an interactive map of Haiti in the corner of their vision, we should try to understand how it works and find what it corresponds to in reality—not immediately dismiss it. Hence the question about specific illusionary parts of consciousness.
Anyway, I thing the intuition about consciousness does correspond to a part of reality—to “reality” part. I.e. panpsychism is true and zombie thought experiment illustrates difference between real world and the world that does not exist. It doesn’t involve additional primitives, because physical theories already include reality, and it diverges from intuition about consciousness in unsurprising parts (like intuition being too anthropocentric).