If you asked me, “Is GAunt Bertha conscious”, I would confidently answer “yes”, for the same reason I would answer “yes” if asked that question about you. Namely, both you and her talk fluently about consciousness, about your inner lives, and the parsimonious explanation is that you have inner lives similar to mine.
In the case of GAunt Bertha, it is the parsimonious explanation despite her protestations to the contrary, even though they lower the prior.
In Bayesian terms, I would count those 80 years of correspondence as overwhelming evidence that she has an inner life similar to mine, and the GLUT hypothesis starts out burdened with such a large prior probabilty against it that the amount of evidence you would have to show me to convince me that Aunt Bertha was a GLUT all along would take ages longer to even convey to me.
In Bayesian terms, I would count those 80 years of correspondence as overwhelming evidence that she has an inner life similar to mine, and the GLUT hypothesis starts out burdened with such a large prior probabilty against it that the amount of evidence you would have to show me to convince me that Aunt Bertha was a GLUT all along would take ages longer to even convey to me.
Oh, sorry. I thought you were assuming Aunt Bertha was a GLUT (not just that she claimed to be), and claiming she would be conscious. I agree that if Bertha claims to be a GLUT, she’s ridiculously unlikely to actually be one, but I’m not sure why this is interesting.
Regardless....
Surely there are multiple possible conscious experiences that could be had by non-GLUT entities with Aunt Bertha’s behavior. How would you decide which one to ascribe to the GLUT?
I’m not sure I even understand the question.
If something is conscious, it seems like there should be a fact of the matter as to what it is experiencing. (There might be multiple separate experiences associated with it, but then there should be a fact of the matter as to which experiences and with what relative amounts of reality-fluid.) (If you use UDT or some such theory under which ascription of consciousness is observer-dependent, there is still a subjectively objective fact of the matter here.)
Intuitively, it seems likely that behavior underdetermines experience for non-GLUTs: that, for some set of inputs and outputs that some conscious being exhibits, there are probably two different computations that have those same inputs and outputs but are associated with different experiences.
If the totality of Aunt Bertha’s possible inputs and outputs has this property — if different non-GLUT computations associated with different experiences could give rise to them — and if GBertha is conscious, which of these experiences (or what weighting over them) does GBertha have?
If something is conscious, it seems like there should be a fact of the matter as to what it is experiencing.
Well, going back to humans for a moment, there are two kinds of fact we can ascertain:
how people behave under various experimental conditions, which include asking them what they are experiencing;
how (what we very strongly suspect is) the material substrate of their conscious experience behaves under various experimental conditions, such as MRI, etc.
For anything else of which we have provisionally reached the conclusion that it is conscious, we can broadly make the same two categories of observation. (Sometimes these two categories of observation yield result that appear paradoxical when we compare them, for instance Libet’s experiments. These paradoxes may lead us to revise and refine our concept of consciousness.)
In fact the first kind is only a particular instance of the second; all our observations about conscious beings are mediated through experimental setups of some kind, formal or informal.
I’d go further and claim (based on cumulative refinements and revisions to the notion of consciousness as I understand it) that our observations about ourselves are mediated through the same kind of (decidedly informal) experimental setup. As the Luminosity sequence suggests, the way I know how I think is the same way I know how anybody else thinks: by jotting notes to an experimenter which happens to be myself.
The “multiplicity of possible conscious experiences” isn’t a question we could ask only about GBertha, but about anything that appears conscious, including ourselves.
So, what difference does it make to my objections to a GLUT scenario?
I’m not sure I even understand the question.
If you asked me, “Is GAunt Bertha conscious”, I would confidently answer “yes”, for the same reason I would answer “yes” if asked that question about you. Namely, both you and her talk fluently about consciousness, about your inner lives, and the parsimonious explanation is that you have inner lives similar to mine.
In the case of GAunt Bertha, it is the parsimonious explanation despite her protestations to the contrary, even though they lower the prior.
In Bayesian terms, I would count those 80 years of correspondence as overwhelming evidence that she has an inner life similar to mine, and the GLUT hypothesis starts out burdened with such a large prior probabilty against it that the amount of evidence you would have to show me to convince me that Aunt Bertha was a GLUT all along would take ages longer to even convey to me.
Oh, sorry. I thought you were assuming Aunt Bertha was a GLUT (not just that she claimed to be), and claiming she would be conscious. I agree that if Bertha claims to be a GLUT, she’s ridiculously unlikely to actually be one, but I’m not sure why this is interesting.
Regardless....
If something is conscious, it seems like there should be a fact of the matter as to what it is experiencing. (There might be multiple separate experiences associated with it, but then there should be a fact of the matter as to which experiences and with what relative amounts of reality-fluid.) (If you use UDT or some such theory under which ascription of consciousness is observer-dependent, there is still a subjectively objective fact of the matter here.)
Intuitively, it seems likely that behavior underdetermines experience for non-GLUTs: that, for some set of inputs and outputs that some conscious being exhibits, there are probably two different computations that have those same inputs and outputs but are associated with different experiences.
If the totality of Aunt Bertha’s possible inputs and outputs has this property — if different non-GLUT computations associated with different experiences could give rise to them — and if GBertha is conscious, which of these experiences (or what weighting over them) does GBertha have?
Well, going back to humans for a moment, there are two kinds of fact we can ascertain:
how people behave under various experimental conditions, which include asking them what they are experiencing;
how (what we very strongly suspect is) the material substrate of their conscious experience behaves under various experimental conditions, such as MRI, etc.
For anything else of which we have provisionally reached the conclusion that it is conscious, we can broadly make the same two categories of observation. (Sometimes these two categories of observation yield result that appear paradoxical when we compare them, for instance Libet’s experiments. These paradoxes may lead us to revise and refine our concept of consciousness.)
In fact the first kind is only a particular instance of the second; all our observations about conscious beings are mediated through experimental setups of some kind, formal or informal.
I’d go further and claim (based on cumulative refinements and revisions to the notion of consciousness as I understand it) that our observations about ourselves are mediated through the same kind of (decidedly informal) experimental setup. As the Luminosity sequence suggests, the way I know how I think is the same way I know how anybody else thinks: by jotting notes to an experimenter which happens to be myself.
The “multiplicity of possible conscious experiences” isn’t a question we could ask only about GBertha, but about anything that appears conscious, including ourselves.
So, what difference does it make to my objections to a GLUT scenario?