It sometimes seems to me that those of us who actually have consciousness are in a minority, and everyone else is a p-zombie. But maybe that’s a selection effect, since people who realise that the stars in the sky they were brought up believing in don’t really exist will find that surprising enough to say, while everyone else who sees the stars in the night sky wonders what drugs the others have been taking, or invents spectacles.
I experience a certain sense of my own presence. This is what I am talking about, when I say that I am conscious. The idea that there is such an experience, and that this is what we are talking about when we talk about consciousness, appears absent from the article.
Everyone reading this, please take a moment to see whether you have any sensation that you might describe by those words. Some people can’t see colours. Some people can’t imagine visual scenes. Some people can’t taste phenylthiocarbamide. Some people can’t wiggle their ears. Maybe some people have no sensation of their own selves. If they don’t, maybe this is something that can be learned, like ear-wiggling, and maybe it isn’t, like phenylthiocarbamide.
Unlike the experiences reported by some, I do not find that this sensation of my own presence goes away when I stare at it. I do not even get the altered states of it that some others report.
I am also aware that I have no explanation for the existence of the phenomenon. Some philosophers have claimed that the apparent impossibility of an explanation proves that it does not exist, like a student demanding top marks for not having a clue in the exam. But for me, contemplating the seeming impossibility of the matter does not make the actual experience go away.
Here are some ideas about things that might be going on when people report that they have discovered they have no self. Discount this as you wish from typical mind fallacy, or compare it with your own experience, whatever it may be.
If you stare directly at a dim star in the night sky, it vanishes. (Try it.) Nevertheless, the star continues to exist.
If you stare directly at the sun all day, then for a different reason, you will experience disturbances of vision, and soon you will never be able to see it again. Yet it continues to exist, and after-images and blindness are not signs of enlightenment.
The sun appears to circle the Earth. When it was found that the Earth circles the sun, I doubt that anyone concluded that the sun does not exist, merely on the grounds that something we believed about it was false. (However, I would be completely unsurprised to find philosophers arguing about whether the sun that goes round the Earth and the sun that is gone round by the Earth are one thing or two.)
In the 19th century, Auguste Comte wrote that we could never know the constitution of the stars. Was any philosopher of the time so obtuse as to conclude that the stars do not exist?
I feel like the intensity of conscious experience varies greatly in my personal life. I feel less conscious when I’m doing my routines, when I’m surfing on the internet, when I’m having fun or playing an immersive game, when I’m otherwise in a flow state, or when I’m daydreaming. I feel more conscious when I meditate, when I’m in a self-referencing feedback loop, when I’m focusing on the immediate surroundings, when I’m trying to think about the fundamental nature of reality, when I’m very sad, when something feels painful or really unpleasant, when I feel like someone else is focusing on me, when I’m trying to control my behavior, when I’m trying to control my impulses and when I’m trying to do something that doesn’t come naturally.
I’m not sure if we’re talking about the same conscious experience so I try to describe it in other words. When I’m talking about the intensity of consciousness, I talking about heightened awareness and how the “raw” experience seems more real and time seems to go slower.
Anyway, my point is that if consciousness varies so much in my own life, I think it’s reasonable to think it could also vary greatly between people too. This doesn’t mean that more conscious people are in any way “better”. It’s possible to see from my list that aside from few exceptions, this particular form of consciousness is mostly connected with negative experiences. Considering that flow state and routines are less consciousness inducing activities, too much of this kind of consciousness seems to be detrimental to productivity and instrumental rationality. Unless you’re an artist or a philosopher.
Well, maybe it’s not only your consciousness that varies, but also / more so your memory of it.
When you undergo a gastroscopy and get your light dose propofol, it often happens that you’ll actually be conscious during the experience, enough so to try to wiggle free, to focus on the people around you. Quite harrowing, really. Luckily, afterwards you won’t have a memory of that.
When you consider your past degree of consciousness, you see things through the prism of your memory, which might well act as a Fourier filter-analogue. It’s not exactly vital to reliably save to memory minutiae of your routine tasks, or your conscious experience thereof, so it doesn’t always happen. Whyever would it?
(Obligatory “lack of consciousness is the mind-killer”.)
That is the kind of argument that is a bit difficult to argue against in any way because you’re always going to use your memory to assess the past degree of consciousness, but it also the kind of argument that doesn’t by itself explain why your prior should be higher for the claim “consciousness stays at the same level at all times” versus “consciousness varies throughout your daily life”. But I agree, that does happen. Your perception of past mental states is also going to be influenced by your bias and what kind of theoretical framework you have in mind.
Maybe you could set up alarms at random intervals and when alarm goes off you write down your perceived level of consciousness? Is this unreliable too? Maybe it’s impossible to compare your immediate phenomenal experience to anything, even if it happened a second before because “experience” and “memory of an experience” are always of entirely different kind of substance. Even if you used fMRI scan on a participant who estimated her level of conscious intensity to be “high” and then used that scan to compare people’s mental states, that initial estimate had to come from comparing her immediate mental state to her memories of other mental states—and like you said those memories can be unreliable.
So either you trust your memories of phenomenal experience on some level, or you accept that there’s no way to study this problem.
As I fall in the Dennett camp (qualia seems like a ridiculous concept to me), perhaps you can explain what qualia feels like to you, as the grandparent did about the subjective experience of consciousness?
When I first came across the concept of qualia, they were described as “the redness of red”. This pretty much captures what I understand by the word; when I look at an object, I observe a colour. That colour may be “red”, that colour may be “green” (or a long list of other options; let us merely consider “red” and “green” for the moment).
The physical difference between “red” and “green” lies in the wavelength of the light. Yet, when I look at a red or a green object, I do not see a wavelength—I can not see which wavelength is longer. Despite this, “red” looks extremely different to “green”; it is this mental construct, this mental colour in my mind that I label “red”, that is a quale.
I know that the qualia I have for “red” and “green” are not universal, because some people are red-green colourblind. Since my qualia for red and green are so vastly different, I conclude that such people must have different qualia—either a different “red” quale, or a different “green” quale, or, quite possibly, both differ.
“Quale” is simply a word for “sensation”—what the word used to mean, before it drifted into meaning the corresponding physical phenomena in the nerves). A quale is the sensation (in the former sense) of a sensation (in the latter sense).
I experience a certain sense of my own presence. This is what I am talking about, when I say that I am conscious. The idea that there is such an experience, and that this is what we are talking about when we talk about consciousness, appears absent from the article.
Everyone reading this, please take a moment to see whether you have any sensation that you might describe by those words. Some people can’t see colours. Some people can’t imagine visual scenes. Some people can’t taste phenylthiocarbamide. Some people can’t wiggle their ears. Maybe some people have no sensation of their own selves. If they don’t, maybe this is something that can be learned, like ear-wiggling, and maybe it isn’t, like phenylthiocarbamide.
You are not alone. This is exactly what I experience. I have, however, engaged with some people on this site about this subject who have been stubbornly dense on the subject of the subjective experience of consciousness. For example, insisting that destructive uploaders are perfectly okay with no downside to the person stepping inside one. I finally decided to update and rate more likely the possibility that others do not experience consciousness in the same way I do. This may be an instance of the mind-projection fallacy at work.
For example, insisting that destructive uploaders are perfectly okay with no downside to the person stepping inside one. I finally decided to update and rate more likely the possibility that others do not experience consciousness in the same way I do.
I’m inclined to disagree, but you might be one level beyond me. I believe many people empathize with a visceral sense of horror about (say) destructive teleportation, but intellectually come to the conclusion that those anxieties are baseless. These people may argue in a way that appears dense, but they are actually using second-level counterarguments. But perhaps you actually have counter-counter arguments, and I would appear to be dense when discussing those.
Argument in a nutshell:
Sleep might be a Lovecraftian horror. As light in front of you dims, your thoughts become more and more disorganized, and your sense of self fades until the continuation of consciousness that is you ceases to exist. A few hour later someone else wakes up who thinks that they were you. But they are not you. Every night billions of day-old consciousnesses die, replaced the next morning with billion more, deluded by borrowed memories into believing that they will live for more than a few hours. After a you next go to sleep, you will never see colors again.
People who have never slept would be terrified of sleeping. People who have never teleported are terrified of teleporting. The two fears are roughly equal in merit.
Going even further, some philosophers suggest that consciousness isn’t even continuous, e.g. as you refocus your attention, as you blink, there are gaps that we don’t notice. Just like how there are gaps in your vision when you move your eyes from one place to another, but to you it appears as a continuous experience.
Consciousness is complex. It is a structured thing, not an indivisible atom. It is changeable, not fixed. It has parts and degrees and shifting, uncertain edges.
Well of course it worries people! Precisely the function of consciousness (at least in my current view) is to “paint a picture” of wholeness and continuity that enables self-reflective cognition. Problem is, any given system doesn’t have the memory to store its whole self within its internal representational data-structures, so it has to abstract over itself rather imperfectly.
The problem is that we currently don’t know the structure, so the discord between the continuous, whole, coherent internal feeling of the abstraction and the disjointed, sharp-edged, many-pieced truth we can empirically detect is really disturbing.
It will stop being disturbing about five minutes after we figure out what’s actually going on, when everything will once again add up to normality.
It seems to only worry people when they notice unfamiliar (to them) aspects of the complexity of consciousness. Familiar changes in consciousness, such as sleep, dreams, alcohol, and moods, they never see a problem with.
That doesn’t fit predictions of the theory. As you sleep you are not forming long term memories, to various degrees (that’s why many people don’t typically remember their dreams). But your brain is still causally interconnected and continues to compute during sleep just as much as it does during waking time. Your consciousness persists, it just doesn’t remember.
Teleportation / destructive uploading is totally different. You are destroying the interconnected causal process that gives rise to the experience of consciousness. That is death. It doesn’t matter if very shortly thereafter either another physical copy of you is made or a simulation started.
Imagine I passively scanned your body to molecular detail, then somebody shoots you in the head. I carve the exact coordinates of each atom in your body on stone tablets, which are kept in storage for 20 million years. Then an advanced civilization re-creates your body from that specification, to atomic detail. What do you expect to experience after being shot in the head? Do you expect to wake up in the future?
[during sleep] Your consciousness persists, it just doesn’t remember.
Huh. Does something in your subjective experience make you think that your consciousness continues while you sleep? Aside from a few dreams, sleep to me is a big black hole in which I might as well be dead. I mean, I have nothing in my subjective experience to contradicts the hypothesis that my brain does nothing at night, and what I interpret as memories of dreams are really errors in my long-term memories that manifest in the seconds I wake-up. (I don’t actually think dreams are formed this way, but there is nothing in the way I experience consciousness that tells me so).
What do you expect to experience after being shot in the head? Do you expect to wake up in the future?
Since when growing up I didn’t take the transporter to school every morning, I would be scared of not waking up. After a few hundred round trips to and from stone tablets, not so much. Of course, it’s possible that I should be afraid of becoming a stone tablet, just as it is possible that I should be afraid of going to sleep now.
Arguments around the question “is teleportation different from sleep?” seem to me to like they center around questions of science and logic, not differences in subjective experiences of consciousness. That is, unless your experience of conciseness while sleeping differs significantly from mine.
Have you ever woken up in the process of falling asleep, or suddenly jolted awake in an adrenaline releasing situation? What was your memory of that experience?
It varies. Certainly if I’m just falling asleep, or groggy and waking up, I sometimes get the sense that I was there but not thinking the same way I do when I’m awake.
But that doesn’t mean that I’m somewhat conscious all the time. I have sat in class paying close attention to the professor, then felt my friend’s hand on my shoulder in an otherwise empty classroom. I didn’t notice myself falling asleep or waking up—time just seemed to stop.
There’s a causal chain from the thoughts I have today, to the thoughts I have tomorrow, and there’s a causal chain from the thoughts I’d have before your scanning and stone tablet procedure, and after.
(There’s however no causal chain from anything done by the original me after the scan, to anything in the copy.)
Causal chains are one possible explanation, but a weak one. There is also a causal chain from a pregnant mother to her child, indeed a much stronger connection than with stone tablets. Why doesn’t the mother “live on” in her child?
And if there is no causal chain from you-after-scanning to the copy, you seem to be accepting some sort of forking to have occurred. What basis have you for expecting to perceive waking up as the copy in the future?
There are other possible explanations than causal chain, e.g. persistence of computation, which IMHO better explain these edge cases. However the expectation of these models is different you would not expect a continuity of experience.
Well, there’s no causal chain from what the pregnant woman thinks to what the child remembers, or at least, no chain of the kind that we associate with future selves. Who knows, maybe in the future there will be a memory enhancing modification, without which our natural memories would seem fairly distant from continuation.
What basis have you for expecting to perceive waking up as the copy in the future?
I’d expect the same as if I were to e.g. somehow reset my memories to what they were 10 hours ago. I would definitely not expect subjective continuity with my current self in the case of memory reset—I wouldn’t think it’d be such a big deal though.
There are other possible explanations than causal chain, e.g. persistence of computation,
It seems to me that something like that could break down once when we try to define what we mean by persistence of computation, or indeed, by computation.
If you accept reductionism, which you really should, then a copy of your brain is a copy of your mind. I submit you don’t actually care about the interconnected causal process when you’re conscious or asleep. You probably couldn’t if you tried really hard, what does it even matter? You couldn’t even tell if that causal connection “was broken” or not.
People get drunk and wake up in some place without recollection how they got there and their life doesn’t seem particularly unworthy afterwards, though they should go easier on the liquor. The supposed problem you feel so strongly about is merely a conceptual problem, a quirk of how your mind models people and identities, not one rooted in reality. It’s all just a consequence of how you model reality in your mind and then your mind comes up with clever ideas how “being causally interconnected during sleep” somehow matters. You model yourself and the copy of yourself as two separate and distinct entities in your mind and apply all the same rules and intuitions you usually apply to any other mind that isn’t you. But those intuitions are misplaced in in this novel and very different situation where that other mind is literally you in every way you care about. Which is fine because you are and you will be separated in space and perhaps also in time, so it really makes sense modeling two instances of yourself, or at least to try. If you imagine to kill yourself and your copy goes on it really somehow fells like “I die and some impostor who isn’t me -or at least doesn’t continue my own subjective experience- lives on and my unique own inner subjective experience will be extinguished and I’ll miss out on the rest of it because someone else has internal experiences but that’s not me”. That’s just a quirk of how we tend model other minds and other people, nothing more, All the dozens of clever reasons people tend to come up with to somehow show how they won’t be able to continue their internal experience as their own copy hold no merit, it’s all just an outgrowth of that really deeply rooted intuition based on how we model ourselves and other people.
People wake up from year long comas and if you were to wake up from one you wouldn’t go: “oh no I’m suddenly not me anymore, I lost track of my causal interconnectedness because I stopped paying attention”. The fact that your brain is the result of causal things doesn’t mean “causal interconnectedness” carries any kind of actually valuable information your copy would somehow miss, or to be precise that you would miss. In fact this kind of information is lost all the time, there is nothing that keeps track of it, information about our causal past gets lost all the time as entropy increases. Eventually the universe will face its slow heat death and there will be no information about the causal chains of the past remaining at all. In the end there is maximum entropy and minimum information. It’s happening right now all around us, we’re moving towards it and information about the causal past is being lost everywhere as we speak.
Hmm, you’re right I did a lousy or non-existant job of refuting that idea. Okay let’s try a thought experiment then. Your brain got instantly-frozen close to absolute zero and could be thawed in such a way that you’d be alive after say 100 years of being completely frozen and perfectly preserved. I think it’s fair to say here your brain “stopped working” altogether during that time, while the world outside changed. Would you really expect your subjective experience to end at the moment of freezing, while some kind of new or different subjective experience suddenly starts its existence at the time of being thawed?
If you wouldn’t expect your subjective experience to end at that point, then how is it possibly any different from a perfect copy of yourself assuming you truly accept reductionism? In other words yes, for that reason and others I would expect to open MY eyes and resume MY subjective experience after being perfectly preserved in the form of stone tablets for 20 million years. It sounds strange even to me I confess, but if reductionist assumptions are true then I must accept this, my intuitions that this is not the case are just a consequence of how I model and think of my own identity. This is something I’ve grappled with for a few years now and at the beginning I came up with tons of clever reasons why it “wouldn’t really be me” but no, reason trumps intuition on this one. Also yes, destructive teleportation is a kind of “death” you don’t notice, but its also one you don’t care about because next thing you open your eyes an everything is okay you are just somewhere else, nothing else is different. That’s the idea behind the drunk analogy, it would be the same experience minus the hangover.
It sometimes seems to me that those of us who actually have consciousness are in a minority, and everyone else is a p-zombie.
When I myself run across apparent p-zombies, they usually look at my arguments as if I am being dense over my descriptions of consciousness. And I can see why, because without the experience of consciousness itself, these arguments must sound like they make consciousness out to be an extraneous hypothesis to help explain my behavior. Yet, even after reflecting on this objection, it still seems there is something to explain besides my behavior, which wouldn’t bother me if I were only trying to explain my behavior, including the words in this post.
It makes sense to me that from outside a brain, everything in the brain is causal, and the brain’s statements about truths are dependent on outside formalizations, and that everything observable about a brain is reducible to symbolic events. And so an observation of a zombie-Chalmers introspecting his consciousness would yield no shocking insights on the origins of his English arguments. And I know that when I reflect on this argument, an observer of my own brain would also find no surprising neural behaviors.
But I don’t know how to reconcile this with my overriding intuition/need/thought that I seek not to explain my behavior but the sense experience itself when I talk about it. Fully aware of outside view functionalism, the sensation of red still feels like an item in need of explanation, regardless of which words I use to describe it. I also feel no particular need to feel that this represents a confusion, because the sense experience seems to demand that it place itself in another category than something you would explain functionally from the outside. All this I say even while I’m aware that to humans without this feeling, these claims seem nothing like insane, and they will gladly inspect my brain for a (correct) functional explanation of my words.
The whole ordeal still greatly confuses me, to an extent that surprises me given how many other questions have been dissolved on reflection such as, well, intelligence.
I experience a certain sense of my own presence. This is what I am talking about, when I say that I am conscious.
I’m not sure that I mean the same thing as you do by the phrase “a sense of my own presence” (in the same way that I do not know, when you say “yellow”, whether or not we experience the colour in the same way). What I can say is that I do feel that I am present; and that I can’t imagine not feeling that I am present, because then who is there to not feel it?
I’m not sure that I mean the same thing as you do by the phrase “a sense of my own presence” (in the same way that I do not know, when you say “yellow”, whether or not we experience the colour in the same way).
Such uncertainty applies to all our sensations. There may very well be some variation in all of them, even leaving aside gross divergences such as colour blindness and Cotard’s syndrome.
What I can say is that I do feel that I am present; and that I can’t imagine not feeling that I am present, because then who is there to not feel it?
I am not present during dreamless sleep, which happens every night.
I am not present during dreamless sleep, which happens every night.
I have no memory of what (if anything) I experience during dreamless sleep. I therefore cannot say whether or not I can feel my own presence at such a time.
To be fair, that is what I would expect to say about a time in which I could not feel my own presence anywhere.
Everyone reading this, please take a moment to see whether you have any sensation that you might describe by those words.
This doesn’t make sense to me. I have nothing to compare this experience of consciousness to. I know, logically speaking, that I am often unconscious (e.g. when sleeping), but there is no way—by definition—I can experience what that unconsciousness feels like. Thus, I cannot compare my experience of being conscious with the experience of being unconscious.
Am I missing something ? I think there are drugs that can induce the experience of unconsciousness, but I’d rather not take any kind of drugs unless it’s totally necessary...
Being asleep is not being unconscious (in this sense). I don’t know about you, but I have dreams. And even when I’m not dreaming, I seem to be aware of what is going on in my vicinity. Of course I typically don’t remember what happened, but if I was woken up I might remember the last few moments, briefly. Lack of memory of what happens when I’m asleep is due to a lack of memory formation during that period, not a lack of consciousness.
The experience of sleep paralysis suggests to me that there are at least two components to sleep; paralysis and suppression of consciousness and one can have one, both, or neither. With both, one is asleep in the typical fashion. With suppression of consciousness only one might have involuntary movements or in extreme cases sleepwalking. With paralysis only one has sleep paralysis which is apparently an unpleasant remembered experience. With neither, you awaken typically. The responses made by sleeping people (sleepwalkers and sleep-talkers especially) suggest to me that their consciousness is at least reduced in the sleep state. If it was only memory formation that was suppressed during sleep I would expect to witness sleep-walkers acting conscious but not remembering it, whereas they appear to instead be acting irrationally and responding at best semi-consciously to their environment.
This doesn’t make sense to me. I have nothing to compare this experience of consciousness to. I know, logically speaking, that I am often unconscious (e.g. when sleeping), but there is no way—by definition—I can experience what that unconsciousness feels like. Thus, I cannot compare my experience of being conscious with the experience of being unconscious.
I don’t see why this is a problem. Why should I need to compare my experience of being conscious to an experience, defined to be impossible, of being unconscious? If I want to compare it with something (although I don’t see why I should need to, to have the experience) I can compare my experiences of myself at different times. It varies, even without drugs.
In what ways does it vary? Communicating internal experiences is difficult, especially when they may be idiosyncratic. When I first wake, my sense of presence is at a rather low level, but there is enough of it to be able to watch the rest of the process of properly waking up, which is like watching a slowly developing picture. There may be more dimensions to it than just intensity, but I haven’t studied it much. Perhaps that would be something to explore in meditation, instead of just contemplating my own existence.
Then it might be that you don’t have access to the sensation Richard is talking about.
I can distinguish states where I’m totally immersed in a video game and the video game world from states when I’m aware of myself and conscious of myself.
If I wanted to go more into detail I can distinguish roughly four different sensations for which I have labels under the banner of “I experience a certain sense of my own presence”.
There a fifth sensation that I used to mislabel as presence.
I can distinguish states where I’m totally immersed in a video game and the video game world from states when I’m aware of myself and conscious of myself.
Ok, so who, exactly, is it that is “totally immersed in a video game” ? If it’s still you, then you have simply lost awareness of (the majority of) your body, but you are as conscious as you were before.
Imagine there were drugs that could remove the sensation of consciousness. However, that’s all they do. They don’t knock you unconscious like an anaesthetic; you still maintain motor functions, memory, sensory, and decision-making capabilities. So you can still drive a car safely, people can still talk to you coherently, and after the drugs wear off you’ll remember what things you said and did.
Can anyone explain concretely what the effect and experience of taking such a drug would be?
If so, that might go a long way toward nailing down what the essential part of consciousness is (ie, what people really mean when they claim to be conscious). If not, it might show that consciousness is inseparable from sensory, memory, and/or decision-making functions.
For example, I can imagine an answer like “such a drug is contradictory; if it really took away what I mean by ‘consciousness’, then by definition I couldn’t remember in detail what had happened while it was in effect”. Or “If it really took away what I mean by consciousness, then I would act like I were hypnotized; maybe I could talk to people, but it would be in a flat, emotionless, robotic way, and I wouldn’t trust myself to drive in that state because I would become careless”.
Implicit memories—motor habits and recognition still work. Semantic and episodic memories are pretty separate things. You can answer some factual questions without involving your more visceral kind of memory about the experience later. Planning couldn’t be totally gone, but it would operate at a much lower level so I wouldn’t recommend driving...
Imagine there were drugs that could remove the sensation of consciousness. However, that’s all they do. They don’t knock you unconscious like an anaesthetic; you still maintain motor functions, memory, sensory, and decision-making capabilities. So you can still drive a car safely, people can still talk to you coherently, and after the drugs wear off you’ll remember what things you said and did.
That doesn’t make any sense to me. If you were on that drug and I asked you “how do you feel?” and you said “I feel angry” or “I feel sad” ,,, that would be a conscious experience. I don’t think the setup makes any sense. If you are going about your day doing your daily things, you are conscious. And this has nothing to do with remembering what happened—as I said in a different reply, you are also conscious in the grandparent’s sense when you are dreaming, even if you don’t remember the dream when you wake up.
Jbay didn’t specify that the drug has to leave people able to answer questions about their own emotional state. And in fact there are some people who can’t do that, even though they’re otherwise functional.
I wasn’t limiting it to just emotional state. If there is someone experiencing something, that someone is conscious, whether or not they are self-aware enough to describe that feeling of existing.
Yes. Really to be completely unconscious you’d have to be dead. But I do acknowledge that this is degrees on a spectrum, and probably the closest drug to what you want is whatever they use in general anesthesia.
It sometimes seems to me that those of us who actually have consciousness are in a minority, and everyone else is a p-zombie. But maybe that’s a selection effect, since people who realise that the stars in the sky they were brought up believing in don’t really exist will find that surprising enough to say, while everyone else who sees the stars in the night sky wonders what drugs the others have been taking, or invents spectacles.
I experience a certain sense of my own presence. This is what I am talking about, when I say that I am conscious. The idea that there is such an experience, and that this is what we are talking about when we talk about consciousness, appears absent from the article.
Everyone reading this, please take a moment to see whether you have any sensation that you might describe by those words. Some people can’t see colours. Some people can’t imagine visual scenes. Some people can’t taste phenylthiocarbamide. Some people can’t wiggle their ears. Maybe some people have no sensation of their own selves. If they don’t, maybe this is something that can be learned, like ear-wiggling, and maybe it isn’t, like phenylthiocarbamide.
Unlike the experiences reported by some, I do not find that this sensation of my own presence goes away when I stare at it. I do not even get the altered states of it that some others report.
I am also aware that I have no explanation for the existence of the phenomenon. Some philosophers have claimed that the apparent impossibility of an explanation proves that it does not exist, like a student demanding top marks for not having a clue in the exam. But for me, contemplating the seeming impossibility of the matter does not make the actual experience go away.
Here are some ideas about things that might be going on when people report that they have discovered they have no self. Discount this as you wish from typical mind fallacy, or compare it with your own experience, whatever it may be.
If you stare directly at a dim star in the night sky, it vanishes. (Try it.) Nevertheless, the star continues to exist.
If you stare directly at the sun all day, then for a different reason, you will experience disturbances of vision, and soon you will never be able to see it again. Yet it continues to exist, and after-images and blindness are not signs of enlightenment.
The sun appears to circle the Earth. When it was found that the Earth circles the sun, I doubt that anyone concluded that the sun does not exist, merely on the grounds that something we believed about it was false. (However, I would be completely unsurprised to find philosophers arguing about whether the sun that goes round the Earth and the sun that is gone round by the Earth are one thing or two.)
In the 19th century, Auguste Comte wrote that we could never know the constitution of the stars. Was any philosopher of the time so obtuse as to conclude that the stars do not exist?
I feel like the intensity of conscious experience varies greatly in my personal life. I feel less conscious when I’m doing my routines, when I’m surfing on the internet, when I’m having fun or playing an immersive game, when I’m otherwise in a flow state, or when I’m daydreaming. I feel more conscious when I meditate, when I’m in a self-referencing feedback loop, when I’m focusing on the immediate surroundings, when I’m trying to think about the fundamental nature of reality, when I’m very sad, when something feels painful or really unpleasant, when I feel like someone else is focusing on me, when I’m trying to control my behavior, when I’m trying to control my impulses and when I’m trying to do something that doesn’t come naturally.
I’m not sure if we’re talking about the same conscious experience so I try to describe it in other words. When I’m talking about the intensity of consciousness, I talking about heightened awareness and how the “raw” experience seems more real and time seems to go slower.
Anyway, my point is that if consciousness varies so much in my own life, I think it’s reasonable to think it could also vary greatly between people too. This doesn’t mean that more conscious people are in any way “better”. It’s possible to see from my list that aside from few exceptions, this particular form of consciousness is mostly connected with negative experiences. Considering that flow state and routines are less consciousness inducing activities, too much of this kind of consciousness seems to be detrimental to productivity and instrumental rationality. Unless you’re an artist or a philosopher.
Well, maybe it’s not only your consciousness that varies, but also / more so your memory of it.
When you undergo a gastroscopy and get your light dose propofol, it often happens that you’ll actually be conscious during the experience, enough so to try to wiggle free, to focus on the people around you. Quite harrowing, really. Luckily, afterwards you won’t have a memory of that.
When you consider your past degree of consciousness, you see things through the prism of your memory, which might well act as a Fourier filter-analogue. It’s not exactly vital to reliably save to memory minutiae of your routine tasks, or your conscious experience thereof, so it doesn’t always happen. Whyever would it?
(Obligatory “lack of consciousness is the mind-killer”.)
That is the kind of argument that is a bit difficult to argue against in any way because you’re always going to use your memory to assess the past degree of consciousness, but it also the kind of argument that doesn’t by itself explain why your prior should be higher for the claim “consciousness stays at the same level at all times” versus “consciousness varies throughout your daily life”. But I agree, that does happen. Your perception of past mental states is also going to be influenced by your bias and what kind of theoretical framework you have in mind.
Maybe you could set up alarms at random intervals and when alarm goes off you write down your perceived level of consciousness? Is this unreliable too? Maybe it’s impossible to compare your immediate phenomenal experience to anything, even if it happened a second before because “experience” and “memory of an experience” are always of entirely different kind of substance. Even if you used fMRI scan on a participant who estimated her level of conscious intensity to be “high” and then used that scan to compare people’s mental states, that initial estimate had to come from comparing her immediate mental state to her memories of other mental states—and like you said those memories can be unreliable.
So either you trust your memories of phenomenal experience on some level, or you accept that there’s no way to study this problem.
I wonder sometimes about Dennett et al.: “qualia blind” or just stubborn?
As I fall in the Dennett camp (qualia seems like a ridiculous concept to me), perhaps you can explain what qualia feels like to you, as the grandparent did about the subjective experience of consciousness?
When I first came across the concept of qualia, they were described as “the redness of red”. This pretty much captures what I understand by the word; when I look at an object, I observe a colour. That colour may be “red”, that colour may be “green” (or a long list of other options; let us merely consider “red” and “green” for the moment).
The physical difference between “red” and “green” lies in the wavelength of the light. Yet, when I look at a red or a green object, I do not see a wavelength—I can not see which wavelength is longer. Despite this, “red” looks extremely different to “green”; it is this mental construct, this mental colour in my mind that I label “red”, that is a quale.
I know that the qualia I have for “red” and “green” are not universal, because some people are red-green colourblind. Since my qualia for red and green are so vastly different, I conclude that such people must have different qualia—either a different “red” quale, or a different “green” quale, or, quite possibly, both differ.
Does that help?
“Quale” is simply a word for “sensation”—what the word used to mean, before it drifted into meaning the corresponding physical phenomena in the nerves). A quale is the sensation (in the former sense) of a sensation (in the latter sense).
You are not alone. This is exactly what I experience. I have, however, engaged with some people on this site about this subject who have been stubbornly dense on the subject of the subjective experience of consciousness. For example, insisting that destructive uploaders are perfectly okay with no downside to the person stepping inside one. I finally decided to update and rate more likely the possibility that others do not experience consciousness in the same way I do. This may be an instance of the mind-projection fallacy at work.
Nice to know that I’m not alone though :)
I’m inclined to disagree, but you might be one level beyond me. I believe many people empathize with a visceral sense of horror about (say) destructive teleportation, but intellectually come to the conclusion that those anxieties are baseless. These people may argue in a way that appears dense, but they are actually using second-level counterarguments. But perhaps you actually have counter-counter arguments, and I would appear to be dense when discussing those.
Argument in a nutshell:
Sleep might be a Lovecraftian horror. As light in front of you dims, your thoughts become more and more disorganized, and your sense of self fades until the continuation of consciousness that is you ceases to exist. A few hour later someone else wakes up who thinks that they were you. But they are not you. Every night billions of day-old consciousnesses die, replaced the next morning with billion more, deluded by borrowed memories into believing that they will live for more than a few hours. After a you next go to sleep, you will never see colors again.
People who have never slept would be terrified of sleeping. People who have never teleported are terrified of teleporting. The two fears are roughly equal in merit.
Going even further, some philosophers suggest that consciousness isn’t even continuous, e.g. as you refocus your attention, as you blink, there are gaps that we don’t notice. Just like how there are gaps in your vision when you move your eyes from one place to another, but to you it appears as a continuous experience.
Consciousness is complex. It is a structured thing, not an indivisible atom. It is changeable, not fixed. It has parts and degrees and shifting, uncertain edges.
This worries some people.
Well of course it worries people! Precisely the function of consciousness (at least in my current view) is to “paint a picture” of wholeness and continuity that enables self-reflective cognition. Problem is, any given system doesn’t have the memory to store its whole self within its internal representational data-structures, so it has to abstract over itself rather imperfectly.
The problem is that we currently don’t know the structure, so the discord between the continuous, whole, coherent internal feeling of the abstraction and the disjointed, sharp-edged, many-pieced truth we can empirically detect is really disturbing.
It will stop being disturbing about five minutes after we figure out what’s actually going on, when everything will once again add up to normality.
It seems to only worry people when they notice unfamiliar (to them) aspects of the complexity of consciousness. Familiar changes in consciousness, such as sleep, dreams, alcohol, and moods, they never see a problem with.
We only ever have approxmate models of external things, too.
That doesn’t fit predictions of the theory. As you sleep you are not forming long term memories, to various degrees (that’s why many people don’t typically remember their dreams). But your brain is still causally interconnected and continues to compute during sleep just as much as it does during waking time. Your consciousness persists, it just doesn’t remember.
Teleportation / destructive uploading is totally different. You are destroying the interconnected causal process that gives rise to the experience of consciousness. That is death. It doesn’t matter if very shortly thereafter either another physical copy of you is made or a simulation started.
Imagine I passively scanned your body to molecular detail, then somebody shoots you in the head. I carve the exact coordinates of each atom in your body on stone tablets, which are kept in storage for 20 million years. Then an advanced civilization re-creates your body from that specification, to atomic detail. What do you expect to experience after being shot in the head? Do you expect to wake up in the future?
Huh. Does something in your subjective experience make you think that your consciousness continues while you sleep? Aside from a few dreams, sleep to me is a big black hole in which I might as well be dead. I mean, I have nothing in my subjective experience to contradicts the hypothesis that my brain does nothing at night, and what I interpret as memories of dreams are really errors in my long-term memories that manifest in the seconds I wake-up. (I don’t actually think dreams are formed this way, but there is nothing in the way I experience consciousness that tells me so).
Since when growing up I didn’t take the transporter to school every morning, I would be scared of not waking up. After a few hundred round trips to and from stone tablets, not so much. Of course, it’s possible that I should be afraid of becoming a stone tablet, just as it is possible that I should be afraid of going to sleep now.
Arguments around the question “is teleportation different from sleep?” seem to me to like they center around questions of science and logic, not differences in subjective experiences of consciousness. That is, unless your experience of conciseness while sleeping differs significantly from mine.
Have you ever woken up in the process of falling asleep, or suddenly jolted awake in an adrenaline releasing situation? What was your memory of that experience?
It varies. Certainly if I’m just falling asleep, or groggy and waking up, I sometimes get the sense that I was there but not thinking the same way I do when I’m awake.
But that doesn’t mean that I’m somewhat conscious all the time. I have sat in class paying close attention to the professor, then felt my friend’s hand on my shoulder in an otherwise empty classroom. I didn’t notice myself falling asleep or waking up—time just seemed to stop.
There’s a causal chain from the thoughts I have today, to the thoughts I have tomorrow, and there’s a causal chain from the thoughts I’d have before your scanning and stone tablet procedure, and after.
(There’s however no causal chain from anything done by the original me after the scan, to anything in the copy.)
Causal chains are one possible explanation, but a weak one. There is also a causal chain from a pregnant mother to her child, indeed a much stronger connection than with stone tablets. Why doesn’t the mother “live on” in her child?
And if there is no causal chain from you-after-scanning to the copy, you seem to be accepting some sort of forking to have occurred. What basis have you for expecting to perceive waking up as the copy in the future?
There are other possible explanations than causal chain, e.g. persistence of computation, which IMHO better explain these edge cases. However the expectation of these models is different you would not expect a continuity of experience.
Well, there’s no causal chain from what the pregnant woman thinks to what the child remembers, or at least, no chain of the kind that we associate with future selves. Who knows, maybe in the future there will be a memory enhancing modification, without which our natural memories would seem fairly distant from continuation.
I’d expect the same as if I were to e.g. somehow reset my memories to what they were 10 hours ago. I would definitely not expect subjective continuity with my current self in the case of memory reset—I wouldn’t think it’d be such a big deal though.
It seems to me that something like that could break down once when we try to define what we mean by persistence of computation, or indeed, by computation.
If you accept reductionism, which you really should, then a copy of your brain is a copy of your mind. I submit you don’t actually care about the interconnected causal process when you’re conscious or asleep. You probably couldn’t if you tried really hard, what does it even matter? You couldn’t even tell if that causal connection “was broken” or not.
People get drunk and wake up in some place without recollection how they got there and their life doesn’t seem particularly unworthy afterwards, though they should go easier on the liquor. The supposed problem you feel so strongly about is merely a conceptual problem, a quirk of how your mind models people and identities, not one rooted in reality. It’s all just a consequence of how you model reality in your mind and then your mind comes up with clever ideas how “being causally interconnected during sleep” somehow matters. You model yourself and the copy of yourself as two separate and distinct entities in your mind and apply all the same rules and intuitions you usually apply to any other mind that isn’t you. But those intuitions are misplaced in in this novel and very different situation where that other mind is literally you in every way you care about. Which is fine because you are and you will be separated in space and perhaps also in time, so it really makes sense modeling two instances of yourself, or at least to try. If you imagine to kill yourself and your copy goes on it really somehow fells like “I die and some impostor who isn’t me -or at least doesn’t continue my own subjective experience- lives on and my unique own inner subjective experience will be extinguished and I’ll miss out on the rest of it because someone else has internal experiences but that’s not me”. That’s just a quirk of how we tend model other minds and other people, nothing more, All the dozens of clever reasons people tend to come up with to somehow show how they won’t be able to continue their internal experience as their own copy hold no merit, it’s all just an outgrowth of that really deeply rooted intuition based on how we model ourselves and other people.
People wake up from year long comas and if you were to wake up from one you wouldn’t go: “oh no I’m suddenly not me anymore, I lost track of my causal interconnectedness because I stopped paying attention”. The fact that your brain is the result of causal things doesn’t mean “causal interconnectedness” carries any kind of actually valuable information your copy would somehow miss, or to be precise that you would miss. In fact this kind of information is lost all the time, there is nothing that keeps track of it, information about our causal past gets lost all the time as entropy increases. Eventually the universe will face its slow heat death and there will be no information about the causal chains of the past remaining at all. In the end there is maximum entropy and minimum information. It’s happening right now all around us, we’re moving towards it and information about the causal past is being lost everywhere as we speak.
Did you even read my post? Getting drunk and not remembering things or being in a coma are not states where the brain stops working altogether.
Hmm, you’re right I did a lousy or non-existant job of refuting that idea. Okay let’s try a thought experiment then. Your brain got instantly-frozen close to absolute zero and could be thawed in such a way that you’d be alive after say 100 years of being completely frozen and perfectly preserved. I think it’s fair to say here your brain “stopped working” altogether during that time, while the world outside changed. Would you really expect your subjective experience to end at the moment of freezing, while some kind of new or different subjective experience suddenly starts its existence at the time of being thawed?
If you wouldn’t expect your subjective experience to end at that point, then how is it possibly any different from a perfect copy of yourself assuming you truly accept reductionism? In other words yes, for that reason and others I would expect to open MY eyes and resume MY subjective experience after being perfectly preserved in the form of stone tablets for 20 million years. It sounds strange even to me I confess, but if reductionist assumptions are true then I must accept this, my intuitions that this is not the case are just a consequence of how I model and think of my own identity. This is something I’ve grappled with for a few years now and at the beginning I came up with tons of clever reasons why it “wouldn’t really be me” but no, reason trumps intuition on this one. Also yes, destructive teleportation is a kind of “death” you don’t notice, but its also one you don’t care about because next thing you open your eyes an everything is okay you are just somewhere else, nothing else is different. That’s the idea behind the drunk analogy, it would be the same experience minus the hangover.
When I myself run across apparent p-zombies, they usually look at my arguments as if I am being dense over my descriptions of consciousness. And I can see why, because without the experience of consciousness itself, these arguments must sound like they make consciousness out to be an extraneous hypothesis to help explain my behavior. Yet, even after reflecting on this objection, it still seems there is something to explain besides my behavior, which wouldn’t bother me if I were only trying to explain my behavior, including the words in this post.
It makes sense to me that from outside a brain, everything in the brain is causal, and the brain’s statements about truths are dependent on outside formalizations, and that everything observable about a brain is reducible to symbolic events. And so an observation of a zombie-Chalmers introspecting his consciousness would yield no shocking insights on the origins of his English arguments. And I know that when I reflect on this argument, an observer of my own brain would also find no surprising neural behaviors.
But I don’t know how to reconcile this with my overriding intuition/need/thought that I seek not to explain my behavior but the sense experience itself when I talk about it. Fully aware of outside view functionalism, the sensation of red still feels like an item in need of explanation, regardless of which words I use to describe it. I also feel no particular need to feel that this represents a confusion, because the sense experience seems to demand that it place itself in another category than something you would explain functionally from the outside. All this I say even while I’m aware that to humans without this feeling, these claims seem nothing like insane, and they will gladly inspect my brain for a (correct) functional explanation of my words.
The whole ordeal still greatly confuses me, to an extent that surprises me given how many other questions have been dissolved on reflection such as, well, intelligence.
I’m not sure that I mean the same thing as you do by the phrase “a sense of my own presence” (in the same way that I do not know, when you say “yellow”, whether or not we experience the colour in the same way). What I can say is that I do feel that I am present; and that I can’t imagine not feeling that I am present, because then who is there to not feel it?
Such uncertainty applies to all our sensations. There may very well be some variation in all of them, even leaving aside gross divergences such as colour blindness and Cotard’s syndrome.
I am not present during dreamless sleep, which happens every night.
I have no memory of what (if anything) I experience during dreamless sleep. I therefore cannot say whether or not I can feel my own presence at such a time.
To be fair, that is what I would expect to say about a time in which I could not feel my own presence anywhere.
This doesn’t make sense to me. I have nothing to compare this experience of consciousness to. I know, logically speaking, that I am often unconscious (e.g. when sleeping), but there is no way—by definition—I can experience what that unconsciousness feels like. Thus, I cannot compare my experience of being conscious with the experience of being unconscious.
Am I missing something ? I think there are drugs that can induce the experience of unconsciousness, but I’d rather not take any kind of drugs unless it’s totally necessary...
Being asleep is not being unconscious (in this sense). I don’t know about you, but I have dreams. And even when I’m not dreaming, I seem to be aware of what is going on in my vicinity. Of course I typically don’t remember what happened, but if I was woken up I might remember the last few moments, briefly. Lack of memory of what happens when I’m asleep is due to a lack of memory formation during that period, not a lack of consciousness.
The experience of sleep paralysis suggests to me that there are at least two components to sleep; paralysis and suppression of consciousness and one can have one, both, or neither. With both, one is asleep in the typical fashion. With suppression of consciousness only one might have involuntary movements or in extreme cases sleepwalking. With paralysis only one has sleep paralysis which is apparently an unpleasant remembered experience. With neither, you awaken typically. The responses made by sleeping people (sleepwalkers and sleep-talkers especially) suggest to me that their consciousness is at least reduced in the sleep state. If it was only memory formation that was suppressed during sleep I would expect to witness sleep-walkers acting conscious but not remembering it, whereas they appear to instead be acting irrationally and responding at best semi-consciously to their environment.
I don’t see why this is a problem. Why should I need to compare my experience of being conscious to an experience, defined to be impossible, of being unconscious? If I want to compare it with something (although I don’t see why I should need to, to have the experience) I can compare my experiences of myself at different times. It varies, even without drugs.
In what ways does it vary? Communicating internal experiences is difficult, especially when they may be idiosyncratic. When I first wake, my sense of presence is at a rather low level, but there is enough of it to be able to watch the rest of the process of properly waking up, which is like watching a slowly developing picture. There may be more dimensions to it than just intensity, but I haven’t studied it much. Perhaps that would be something to explore in meditation, instead of just contemplating my own existence.
Then it might be that you don’t have access to the sensation Richard is talking about.
I can distinguish states where I’m totally immersed in a video game and the video game world from states when I’m aware of myself and conscious of myself.
If I wanted to go more into detail I can distinguish roughly four different sensations for which I have labels under the banner of “I experience a certain sense of my own presence”. There a fifth sensation that I used to mislabel as presence.
Ok, so who, exactly, is it that is “totally immersed in a video game” ? If it’s still you, then you have simply lost awareness of (the majority of) your body, but you are as conscious as you were before.
Maybe you’re on to something...
Imagine there were drugs that could remove the sensation of consciousness. However, that’s all they do. They don’t knock you unconscious like an anaesthetic; you still maintain motor functions, memory, sensory, and decision-making capabilities. So you can still drive a car safely, people can still talk to you coherently, and after the drugs wear off you’ll remember what things you said and did.
Can anyone explain concretely what the effect and experience of taking such a drug would be?
If so, that might go a long way toward nailing down what the essential part of consciousness is (ie, what people really mean when they claim to be conscious). If not, it might show that consciousness is inseparable from sensory, memory, and/or decision-making functions.
For example, I can imagine an answer like “such a drug is contradictory; if it really took away what I mean by ‘consciousness’, then by definition I couldn’t remember in detail what had happened while it was in effect”. Or “If it really took away what I mean by consciousness, then I would act like I were hypnotized; maybe I could talk to people, but it would be in a flat, emotionless, robotic way, and I wouldn’t trust myself to drive in that state because I would become careless”.
I can almost picture it.
Implicit memories—motor habits and recognition still work. Semantic and episodic memories are pretty separate things. You can answer some factual questions without involving your more visceral kind of memory about the experience later. Planning couldn’t be totally gone, but it would operate at a much lower level so I wouldn’t recommend driving...
That doesn’t make any sense to me. If you were on that drug and I asked you “how do you feel?” and you said “I feel angry” or “I feel sad” ,,, that would be a conscious experience. I don’t think the setup makes any sense. If you are going about your day doing your daily things, you are conscious. And this has nothing to do with remembering what happened—as I said in a different reply, you are also conscious in the grandparent’s sense when you are dreaming, even if you don’t remember the dream when you wake up.
Jbay didn’t specify that the drug has to leave people able to answer questions about their own emotional state. And in fact there are some people who can’t do that, even though they’re otherwise functional.
I wasn’t limiting it to just emotional state. If there is someone experiencing something, that someone is conscious, whether or not they are self-aware enough to describe that feeling of existing.
Good! I’m glad to hear an answer like this.
So does that mean that, in your view, a drug that removes consciousness must necessarily be a drug that impairs the ability to process information?
Yes. Really to be completely unconscious you’d have to be dead. But I do acknowledge that this is degrees on a spectrum, and probably the closest drug to what you want is whatever they use in general anesthesia.
I think my opinion is the same as yours, but I’m curious about whether anybody else has different answers.