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.
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?