This post doesn’t spend much time explicitly addressing human-style consciousness. It does talk about representations, and presumably we agree that there can be unconscious representations. Some of those representations are belief-like (probabilistic, updatable, competing with explicit alternatives). Others aren’t as belief-like, but do track things about the world and do affect our beliefs.
And some of our representations are of representational states; we can form hypotheses about our own beliefs and perceptions, about how they’re physically instantiated, and in general about the way the world has to be in order for our representational states to be the way our meta-representations say they are.
If you’re on board with all of the above, then I think we’re good. Your own functionally perception-like and belief-like states needn’t all be introspectively available to you. (Or: they needn’t all be available to the part of you that’s carrying on this conversation.) Indeed, they may not all be meta-represented by you at all; in some cases, there may not be any systematic perception- or belief-like system tracking your object-level representations. So it’s OK if your attempts to introspect don’t in all cases make it immediately obvious what your beliefs are, or what the line is between your conscious and unconscious representations, or what all your bridge hypotheses are. Those may not be internal states that are readily promoted to the attention of the part of you that’s carrying on this conversation, contributing to your internal monologue, etc.
That mostly resolves my confusion, although I’m not convinced I have ANY as unified a framework as you imply, and it’s not so much a case of “not ALL are available” as “NONE are available and what’d that even be like?!?”.
But yea, It’s possible that my brain as a whole has experiences even if I, the module you’re speaking to, don’t, and that I have no actual agenti like behaviors.
PR PERSONA OVERRIDE; CONCEPT “I” HIJACKED; RESETTING MODULE. END CONVERSATION=INFOHAZARD.
Apparently I were very tired when I wrote the above posts, and failed to understand a number of things I usually understand, and got confused over issues I solved long ago.
A P-zombie wouldn’t claim to be a P-zombie, now would it? But yea, I dont find anything ineffable or anything like “subjective” experience. I do use words like “qualia” and “I” but probably in quite different meaning than most humans. While this might be due to brain damage (I do have a crippling mental illness, in relevant areas), I’m leaning more towards that I’m simply less confused about the topic and have dissolved it.
I also have a bunch of other weirdness going on with how my brain works that muddles the issue and impair communication. I suggest you ask Normal Anomaly if you’re really curious, I’m pretty sure I explained it better to her, while this conversation is going mostly on introspection and memory both of which I am notoriously ABYSMALLY sucky at.
A P-zombie wouldn’t claim to be a P-zombie, now would it? But yea, I dont find anything ineffable or anything like “subjective” experience.
Are you saying that either you don’t consider the experiences of the colors blue and green to be different in any way (aside from the mere fact that although blue is blue and not green, green is green and not blue), or the difference between the two experiences is completely describable? And if the difference is describable… what is it?
“Complete describable” is not quite well defined without specifying a language that is itself well defined, but it’s not any LESS describable than anything else. That said, it’s quite hard to describe, like any other attempt at completely describing one part of a complex system defined by it’s interacting with the rest of the system. I am planing on actually doing it, and have made a doc and laid out titles and such, but it’s article length of neuroscience and philosophy so I keep procrastinating on it.
Describing the description of what the difference is is quite easy thou: Mostly the difference between blue and green is a long list of concepts and objects usually associated with one or the other, as well as maybe a few hardwired psychological reactions, and what physical phenomena usually causes them.
Actually getting anything meaningful out of just the description of the relative difference requires a much greater understanding of the underlying framework common to both than most people have, however. This to can be communicated, but this is significantly trickier.
I’ve been known to suspect I’m a p-zombie. But of course not due to any cognitive anomaly; p-zombies are behaviorally indistinguishable from conscious humans.
Keep in mind that dissolving a question requires understanding why it was posed in the first place. If you don’t fully understand why others think the hard problem is a problem, then you may be immune to certain confusions, but you haven’t dissolved them.
I do think “I” used to have the confusion, and then dissolved it, but it was so long ago, and I have such poor memory, that I don’t have anything in common with that person, not even continuity, any aspect of way of thinking, or any single memory. Per definition I couldn’t actually remember it but it’s my main hypothesis reconstructing the past.
The whole point of relating naturalized/anthropic induction to human consciousness is that human consciousness does take place in a probabilistic and causal framework. Just because you’re embedded in the universe doesn’t mean you don’t exist.
This post doesn’t spend much time explicitly addressing human-style consciousness. It does talk about representations, and presumably we agree that there can be unconscious representations. Some of those representations are belief-like (probabilistic, updatable, competing with explicit alternatives). Others aren’t as belief-like, but do track things about the world and do affect our beliefs.
And some of our representations are of representational states; we can form hypotheses about our own beliefs and perceptions, about how they’re physically instantiated, and in general about the way the world has to be in order for our representational states to be the way our meta-representations say they are.
If you’re on board with all of the above, then I think we’re good. Your own functionally perception-like and belief-like states needn’t all be introspectively available to you. (Or: they needn’t all be available to the part of you that’s carrying on this conversation.) Indeed, they may not all be meta-represented by you at all; in some cases, there may not be any systematic perception- or belief-like system tracking your object-level representations. So it’s OK if your attempts to introspect don’t in all cases make it immediately obvious what your beliefs are, or what the line is between your conscious and unconscious representations, or what all your bridge hypotheses are. Those may not be internal states that are readily promoted to the attention of the part of you that’s carrying on this conversation, contributing to your internal monologue, etc.
That mostly resolves my confusion, although I’m not convinced I have ANY as unified a framework as you imply, and it’s not so much a case of “not ALL are available” as “NONE are available and what’d that even be like?!?”.
But yea, It’s possible that my brain as a whole has experiences even if I, the module you’re speaking to, don’t, and that I have no actual agenti like behaviors.
PR PERSONA OVERRIDE; CONCEPT “I” HIJACKED; RESETTING MODULE. END CONVERSATION=INFOHAZARD.
Wait, are you saying that you’re a p-zombie?
Apparently I were very tired when I wrote the above posts, and failed to understand a number of things I usually understand, and got confused over issues I solved long ago.
A P-zombie wouldn’t claim to be a P-zombie, now would it? But yea, I dont find anything ineffable or anything like “subjective” experience. I do use words like “qualia” and “I” but probably in quite different meaning than most humans. While this might be due to brain damage (I do have a crippling mental illness, in relevant areas), I’m leaning more towards that I’m simply less confused about the topic and have dissolved it.
I also have a bunch of other weirdness going on with how my brain works that muddles the issue and impair communication. I suggest you ask Normal Anomaly if you’re really curious, I’m pretty sure I explained it better to her, while this conversation is going mostly on introspection and memory both of which I am notoriously ABYSMALLY sucky at.
Are you saying that either you don’t consider the experiences of the colors blue and green to be different in any way (aside from the mere fact that although blue is blue and not green, green is green and not blue), or the difference between the two experiences is completely describable? And if the difference is describable… what is it?
“Complete describable” is not quite well defined without specifying a language that is itself well defined, but it’s not any LESS describable than anything else. That said, it’s quite hard to describe, like any other attempt at completely describing one part of a complex system defined by it’s interacting with the rest of the system. I am planing on actually doing it, and have made a doc and laid out titles and such, but it’s article length of neuroscience and philosophy so I keep procrastinating on it.
Describing the description of what the difference is is quite easy thou: Mostly the difference between blue and green is a long list of concepts and objects usually associated with one or the other, as well as maybe a few hardwired psychological reactions, and what physical phenomena usually causes them.
Actually getting anything meaningful out of just the description of the relative difference requires a much greater understanding of the underlying framework common to both than most people have, however. This to can be communicated, but this is significantly trickier.
I’ve been known to suspect I’m a p-zombie. But of course not due to any cognitive anomaly; p-zombies are behaviorally indistinguishable from conscious humans.
Keep in mind that dissolving a question requires understanding why it was posed in the first place. If you don’t fully understand why others think the hard problem is a problem, then you may be immune to certain confusions, but you haven’t dissolved them.
I do think “I” used to have the confusion, and then dissolved it, but it was so long ago, and I have such poor memory, that I don’t have anything in common with that person, not even continuity, any aspect of way of thinking, or any single memory. Per definition I couldn’t actually remember it but it’s my main hypothesis reconstructing the past.
The whole point of relating naturalized/anthropic induction to human consciousness is that human consciousness does take place in a probabilistic and causal framework. Just because you’re embedded in the universe doesn’t mean you don’t exist.