I want to respond to this, but I’m someone who cares intensely about animal rights and thus I have to work around my instinctive reaction of blind rage at someone who implies they might not be conscious, and try to communicate in a reasonable, respectful way.
My best counterargument to all this is the simple fact that humans have dreams. No one is self-aware in a sufficiently nonlucid dream. I have never once that I know of made a clear plan in a dream—I only ever react to what is happening around me. Nonetheless I experience qualia.
Also I wildly disagree with you that consciousness and self-awareness have anything to do with one another. The latter is an accident of evolution that humans have found quite useful, but it’s not intrinsically special or necessary. In fact I don’t even think self-awareness is morally relevant—only consciousness in general is—and I think that panpsychism is true—that is, qualia are universal and exist in every physical system which is doing any kind of computation, but they have degrees of complexity that differ, and ours happen to be rather complex.
All of these are my opinions though, and they are partly emotionally motivated; I’m not sure how to actually provide any kind of counterargument, other than the copernican principle: anything that implies humans are radically different from other animals in a qualitative way, rather than merely having crossed a quantitative threshold over which some abilities manifest that were only latent before, is frankly absurd.
Note, I’m not saying your analysis here doesn’t have value—it’s a great explanation of the kinds of qualia only self-aware beings have—but not qualia in themselves. I do not have to be able to perceive my own existence in order to perceive colors, sounds, and sensations, and people who are asleep or partly so, or otherwise have their self-awareness heavily modified, nonetheless experience qualia.
I want to respond to this, but I’m someone who cares intensely about animal rights and thus I have to work around my instinctive reaction of blind rage at someone who implies they might not be conscious, and try to communicate in a reasonable, respectful way.
I appreciate it.
No one is self-aware in a sufficiently nonlucid dream
And when a person closes their eyes, they stop being able to see. Their inner planner starts to ignore visual input, or might not make active plans at all if you’re just taking a moment to rest. Does that mean that the machinery for vision disappears?
Dreams, or moments of intense pain as the post I’d linked to describes, are just the analogue for qualia. It keeps generating self-reports and keeps storing them in memory, but the planner simply doesn’t use them. But when you wake up, and turn your attention to your dream-memories, they’re there for you to look at.
I think that panpsychism is true—that is, qualia are universal and exist in every physical system which is doing any kind of computation
But what does that mean? When you imagine a non-self-aware entity perceiving colors, what do you imagine happening in its mind, algorithmically?
Dreams don’t suddenly become real only after you wake up. That’s utterly absurd. I know for a fact I am conscious while I am dreaming—it’s not just a bunch of memories I can only access later. I’m frankly flabbergasted that you believe otherwise.
When I imagine a non-self-aware entity perceiving colors, I imagine that the part of their brain involved in sensory processing is… doing the sensory processing! There is something which it is like to have a temporal lobe analyzing data filtered through the retina, regardless of what else is in your brain! You can’t just be doing complex computations like that without experiencing them.
And by the way, when I close my eyes, I can still see. There might not be much to look at, but my visual processing still works. That part of your response was badly worded.
Your “planner” seems like a confused, pseudo-physicalized version of a soul to me. You haven’t actually solved the problem of how qualia arise in the first place, you’ve just shoved it into a corner of the brain and claimed to dissolve the problem. Okay, so suppose you’re right and only the planner part of the brain has qualia, and qualia exist only because of it—but what are they? We both know there is, in fact a difference between qualia and basically everything else in the universe. You can’t solve the hard problem by saying “aha, the brain doesn’t do it, a specific part of the brain does it!”
Meanwhile, if you believe as I do that qualia are just what computations of all kinds “look like from the inside”, the problem actually does dissolve. If you haven’t looked into integrated information theory, I would suggest you do so: I think they are somehow incorrect as their theory makes a few unintuitive predictions, but it’s the closest to what I think of as a reasonable theory of consciousness that I’ve ever seen.
I want to respond to this, but I’m someone who cares intensely about animal rights and thus I have to work around my instinctive reaction of blind rage at someone who implies they might not be conscious, and try to communicate in a reasonable, respectful way.
My best counterargument to all this is the simple fact that humans have dreams. No one is self-aware in a sufficiently nonlucid dream. I have never once that I know of made a clear plan in a dream—I only ever react to what is happening around me. Nonetheless I experience qualia.
Also I wildly disagree with you that consciousness and self-awareness have anything to do with one another. The latter is an accident of evolution that humans have found quite useful, but it’s not intrinsically special or necessary. In fact I don’t even think self-awareness is morally relevant—only consciousness in general is—and I think that panpsychism is true—that is, qualia are universal and exist in every physical system which is doing any kind of computation, but they have degrees of complexity that differ, and ours happen to be rather complex.
All of these are my opinions though, and they are partly emotionally motivated; I’m not sure how to actually provide any kind of counterargument, other than the copernican principle: anything that implies humans are radically different from other animals in a qualitative way, rather than merely having crossed a quantitative threshold over which some abilities manifest that were only latent before, is frankly absurd.
Note, I’m not saying your analysis here doesn’t have value—it’s a great explanation of the kinds of qualia only self-aware beings have—but not qualia in themselves. I do not have to be able to perceive my own existence in order to perceive colors, sounds, and sensations, and people who are asleep or partly so, or otherwise have their self-awareness heavily modified, nonetheless experience qualia.
No one is self-aware in a sufficiently nonlucid X, no matter what X is.
I appreciate it.
And when a person closes their eyes, they stop being able to see. Their inner planner starts to ignore visual input, or might not make active plans at all if you’re just taking a moment to rest. Does that mean that the machinery for vision disappears?
Dreams, or moments of intense pain as the post I’d linked to describes, are just the analogue for qualia. It keeps generating self-reports and keeps storing them in memory, but the planner simply doesn’t use them. But when you wake up, and turn your attention to your dream-memories, they’re there for you to look at.
But what does that mean? When you imagine a non-self-aware entity perceiving colors, what do you imagine happening in its mind, algorithmically?
Dreams don’t suddenly become real only after you wake up. That’s utterly absurd. I know for a fact I am conscious while I am dreaming—it’s not just a bunch of memories I can only access later. I’m frankly flabbergasted that you believe otherwise.
When I imagine a non-self-aware entity perceiving colors, I imagine that the part of their brain involved in sensory processing is… doing the sensory processing! There is something which it is like to have a temporal lobe analyzing data filtered through the retina, regardless of what else is in your brain! You can’t just be doing complex computations like that without experiencing them.
And by the way, when I close my eyes, I can still see. There might not be much to look at, but my visual processing still works. That part of your response was badly worded.
Your “planner” seems like a confused, pseudo-physicalized version of a soul to me. You haven’t actually solved the problem of how qualia arise in the first place, you’ve just shoved it into a corner of the brain and claimed to dissolve the problem. Okay, so suppose you’re right and only the planner part of the brain has qualia, and qualia exist only because of it—but what are they? We both know there is, in fact a difference between qualia and basically everything else in the universe. You can’t solve the hard problem by saying “aha, the brain doesn’t do it, a specific part of the brain does it!”
Meanwhile, if you believe as I do that qualia are just what computations of all kinds “look like from the inside”, the problem actually does dissolve. If you haven’t looked into integrated information theory, I would suggest you do so: I think they are somehow incorrect as their theory makes a few unintuitive predictions, but it’s the closest to what I think of as a reasonable theory of consciousness that I’ve ever seen.