I always get confused by these articles about “experience”, but this is a good article because I get confused in an interesting way, (and also a less condescending way).
Normally, I just shrug and say “well, I don’t have one”. In regards to “human-style conscious experience” my answer is probably still “well, I don’t have one”. However, clearly even if imperfect there is have some sort of semi functional agency behavior in this brain, and so I must have some form of bridge hypothesis and sensory “experience”… but I can’t find either. I can track the chain of causality from retina to processing to stored beliefs to action, but no point seems privileged or subjective, and yet it doesn’t feel like there’s anything missing or anything mysterious the way other people describe.
Thus, a seeming discrepancy; I can’t find any flaw in your argument that any agent must have feature X, but I have an example of an agent in which I can not find X. In at least one of the objects I’ve examined, i must have missed something.
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.
I can track the chain of causality from retina to processing to stored beliefs to action, but no point seems privileged or subjective, and yet it doesn’t feel like there’s anything missing or anything mysterious the way other people describe.
Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: not simultaneously concisely, in detail, accurately, without looking up neuroscience articles, and without more expenditure of time and effort than I am willing to give it in the forseeable future.
“fully describe” is again a tricky thing to do about ANYTHING. Can you fully describe how your OS works?
The point of the hard problem argument is describability in proinciple: I cna describe how my OS works in principle.
Why would you need to look up neursicence to describe your subjective experience, as introspected by you? If you think “describe your experience” means “describe what happens in your head when you experiene as it appears to someone else, from an objective, 3rd person point of view”, natruially you are not going to encounter anything subjective,
Very much so. I tend to go out of my way to make things look just right, and add an artistic perspective and flare to everything, even things nobody will ever see.
What colours are appropriate for something depends on context. There are tastes and smells that act as strong punishment and forces avoidance and escape behaviors although I’m not sure I’d call it a preference.
Well yea that possible, and given that I do generally suck at introspection even plausible. However, is it relevant? If I don’t experience experiencing something, then in what sense is it me experiencing it and not some other entity that may or may not be residing in the same brain?
I always get confused by these articles about “experience”, but this is a good article because I get confused in an interesting way, (and also a less condescending way).
Normally, I just shrug and say “well, I don’t have one”. In regards to “human-style conscious experience” my answer is probably still “well, I don’t have one”. However, clearly even if imperfect there is have some sort of semi functional agency behavior in this brain, and so I must have some form of bridge hypothesis and sensory “experience”… but I can’t find either. I can track the chain of causality from retina to processing to stored beliefs to action, but no point seems privileged or subjective, and yet it doesn’t feel like there’s anything missing or anything mysterious the way other people describe.
Thus, a seeming discrepancy; I can’t find any flaw in your argument that any agent must have feature X, but I have an example of an agent in which I can not find X. In at least one of the objects I’ve examined, i must have missed something.
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.
Can you fully describe every stage?
Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: not simultaneously concisely, in detail, accurately, without looking up neuroscience articles, and without more expenditure of time and effort than I am willing to give it in the forseeable future.
“fully describe” is again a tricky thing to do about ANYTHING. Can you fully describe how your OS works?
The point of the hard problem argument is describability in proinciple: I cna describe how my OS works in principle.
Why would you need to look up neursicence to describe your subjective experience, as introspected by you? If you think “describe your experience” means “describe what happens in your head when you experiene as it appears to someone else, from an objective, 3rd person point of view”, natruially you are not going to encounter anything subjective,
Oh, I missunderstood. That’s much easier, here, have it in 3 different notations for extra clarity:
“”
[]
NULL
Do you have any aesthetic prefernces?
Very much so. I tend to go out of my way to make things look just right, and add an artistic perspective and flare to everything, even things nobody will ever see.
Do you have preferences about colours, tastes and smells?
What colours are appropriate for something depends on context. There are tastes and smells that act as strong punishment and forces avoidance and escape behaviors although I’m not sure I’d call it a preference.
That’s funciontality, not aesthetics.
Aesthetics is a subset of functionality, specifically functionality at evoking a specific psychological response.
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Well yea that possible, and given that I do generally suck at introspection even plausible. However, is it relevant? If I don’t experience experiencing something, then in what sense is it me experiencing it and not some other entity that may or may not be residing in the same brain?
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