BTW, in this line of thinking, there’s nothing really special or mysterious about consciousness. It’s just a mind or a part of a mind with verbal abilities.
Huh? I am conscious of a lot of things that don’t involve words. In fact, words are a very small part of my awareness, except when I’m actually using them, e.g. composing a comment like this one. They’re a major way of communicating one’s state of mind to someone else, but to identify consciousness with that facility would be like mistaking a computer screen for the computer.
I suppose that might change if one were to practice one of those meditation exercises in which one deliberately labels every moment of experience; but I don’t know why one would want to do that.
I’m not sure that identifying consciousness with access to verbal ability is the right way to go, but it is the approach taken “in this line of thinking”, and I was trying to explore its implications. Quoting from the second post in orthonormal’s sequence:
So within Martha’s graph, there’s a relatively small subgraph that’s hooked up to the language areas; we’ll call this her conscious subgraph.
I notice that you didn’t object when orthonormal wrote that. Do you think what I wrote is substantially different, or ….? (ETA: we can discuss your disagreement with this approach too, but first I’d like to know whether I’ve misunderstood orthonormal somehow.)
I notice that you didn’t object when orthonormal wrote that.
I don’t necessarily read everything on LW. I didn’t pay all that much attention to the original post, because a wall of text on yet another thought experiment designed to elucidate the nature of qualia wasn’t something I wanted to read. But I noticed your comment, and my response, had I made one, to orthonormal’s “we’ll call this her conscious subgraph” would have been on the same lines.
I’m not sure that identifying consciousness with access to verbal ability is the right way to go, but it is the approach taken “in this line of thinking”, and I was trying to explore its implications.
I think that this line of thinking leads nowhere, as every other line of thinking on the subject has done. Maybe I should write a top-level post on this, but it seems to me that no-one, on LessWrong or anywhere else that I’ve read, has explicitly faced up to the basic problem of consciousness/subjective experience/qualia/whatever you want to call it. You have the unstoppable force of materialism, the fundamental insight that “it’s all atoms!”, which has successfully solved or dissolved so many questions about the world, and then you have the immovable rock of conscious experience. The two are starkly incompatible. The question is too big to Ignore, Worshipping the mystery isn’t an option (and is just a way of Ignoring while pretending not to), but no-one has any idea of what an Explanation could even look like. Every purported explanation of consciousness, on closer examination, turns out to be an explanation of something else, such as how an unconscious system might come to make assertions about consciousness.
I don’t have a solution either. Explain, Worship, or Ignore? I can’t hit any of those buttons.
I’d seriously like to read such a post, were you to get round to writing it. Something very odd is going on, it seems to me, but I can’t even express the problem.
I think it’s more accurate to say that the part of our mind that is conscious is the part that uses words, since when you want to tell if someone knows something consciously or unconsciously, you ask them about it.
That’s the same fallacy as I was trying to get at. I am conscious of a thing, or not, whether or not I tell anyone else, and it is easy to think of situations in which I can tell whether someone else is conscious of something without their saying anything. Words can tell you a lot, but they’re telling you about something which is not those words, and is not the mechanism of producing those words.
Huh? I am conscious of a lot of things that don’t involve words. In fact, words are a very small part of my awareness, except when I’m actually using them, e.g. composing a comment like this one. They’re a major way of communicating one’s state of mind to someone else, but to identify consciousness with that facility would be like mistaking a computer screen for the computer.
I suppose that might change if one were to practice one of those meditation exercises in which one deliberately labels every moment of experience; but I don’t know why one would want to do that.
I’m not sure that identifying consciousness with access to verbal ability is the right way to go, but it is the approach taken “in this line of thinking”, and I was trying to explore its implications. Quoting from the second post in orthonormal’s sequence:
I notice that you didn’t object when orthonormal wrote that. Do you think what I wrote is substantially different, or ….? (ETA: we can discuss your disagreement with this approach too, but first I’d like to know whether I’ve misunderstood orthonormal somehow.)
I don’t necessarily read everything on LW. I didn’t pay all that much attention to the original post, because a wall of text on yet another thought experiment designed to elucidate the nature of qualia wasn’t something I wanted to read. But I noticed your comment, and my response, had I made one, to orthonormal’s “we’ll call this her conscious subgraph” would have been on the same lines.
I think that this line of thinking leads nowhere, as every other line of thinking on the subject has done. Maybe I should write a top-level post on this, but it seems to me that no-one, on LessWrong or anywhere else that I’ve read, has explicitly faced up to the basic problem of consciousness/subjective experience/qualia/whatever you want to call it. You have the unstoppable force of materialism, the fundamental insight that “it’s all atoms!”, which has successfully solved or dissolved so many questions about the world, and then you have the immovable rock of conscious experience. The two are starkly incompatible. The question is too big to Ignore, Worshipping the mystery isn’t an option (and is just a way of Ignoring while pretending not to), but no-one has any idea of what an Explanation could even look like. Every purported explanation of consciousness, on closer examination, turns out to be an explanation of something else, such as how an unconscious system might come to make assertions about consciousness.
I don’t have a solution either. Explain, Worship, or Ignore? I can’t hit any of those buttons.
I’d seriously like to read such a post, were you to get round to writing it. Something very odd is going on, it seems to me, but I can’t even express the problem.
I think it’s more accurate to say that the part of our mind that is conscious is the part that uses words, since when you want to tell if someone knows something consciously or unconsciously, you ask them about it.
That’s the same fallacy as I was trying to get at. I am conscious of a thing, or not, whether or not I tell anyone else, and it is easy to think of situations in which I can tell whether someone else is conscious of something without their saying anything. Words can tell you a lot, but they’re telling you about something which is not those words, and is not the mechanism of producing those words.