This does not accurately describe what most people mean when they talk about consciousness. It may turn out that conscious experience can be reduced to certain neuronal interactions, but such a reduction (even establishing the existence of such a reduction) would count as a major empirical advance. If all our talk about consciousness was in fact merely a matter of convenience, then the existence of the reduction wouldn’t be an empirical question. It would be true by definition. Analogy: we now understand that heat is simply molecular motion, but that doesn’t mean that when people were talking about heat in the 18th century, it was merely a convenient way for them to talk about certain molecular motions. They were talking about a phenomenon with which they had direct experience, that subsequently turned out to be reducible to molecular motion.
When most people talk about consciousness, they are referring to phenomenal experience (the fact that it feels like something to be awake and observing the universe). Now it may turn out that this phenomenon is completely reducible to neuronal interactions, but to simply say “consciousness” is a convenient label for a set of neuronal interactions is to elide an important and substantive problem. Dualists aren’t confused about what “consciousness” means, they disagree with you on the possibility of a reduction. It’s generally not a good idea to settle a debate by mere definition.
but such a reduction (even establishing the existence of such a reduction) would count as a major empirical advance.
I think Eliezer makes the point that the specificity of the various neurological disorders and breakdowns forms some very strong evidence for how stuff happens in the brain.
to simply say “consciousness” is a convenient label for a set of neuronal interactions is to elide an important and substantive problem.
No, because you’re here, talking about phenomenal experience, and it feeling like things. Imagine following that causal trail back; where do you expect to end up as the intermediary of going from world to photons to retina to brain to ? to brain to fingers to talking about phenomenally perceiving the world? In an area underlaid with completely different physical laws, that attaches to the brain by a bridging system? What would that even explain? Nothing. It’s not an explanation, it’s mysticism slotted in to explain a mysterious-to-you process. We have not seen any evidence that the physics of the brain are in any way magical. We’ve taken apart brains and no mysterious things have happened. We’ve cut into living brains and we’ve practically watched specific pieces of functionality fall away. With modern scanning tech, we can watch as memories are retrieved. We can literally look at reconstructions of your visual imagination. What does it take?
The entirety of dualism is an argument from ignorance. “I cannot imagine how conscious experience of reality could arise from physical laws.” → “Hence, physics is not the complete answer.” No, hence your imagination is limited.
Many post-Newtonian physicists believed that physical reality consisted of just matter in motion in absolute space. For them, physicalism meant reducing everything to particle interactions. The only nodes in the fundamental causal graph were properties of particles. However, it gradually became clear that reducing all physical phenomena to this basis was a very difficult, if not insurmountable, task. But by introducing a new element into the fundamental physical ontology—fields—one could in fact formulate much better physical theories.
Now consider a hypothetical early physicalist resisting the introduction of these new nodes into the fundamental causal graph. He might have objected to simply introducing a new primitive object into the ontology on the grounds that this object is “mysterious” or “magical”. The correct response would have been, “Why is my primitive any more mysterious or magical than yours?” If introducing a new primitive allows us to construct more and better explanations, it might be worth it. Of course, the new nodes in the graph need to be doing some work, they need to be allowing for the construction of better theories and all that. You can object to them on the grounds that they do not do that work, but simply objecting to them on the grounds that they are new irreducible nodes isn’t much of an argument.
My impression is that property dualists like Chalmers think of irreducible psychological properties and laws along these lines. They are new irreducible nodes in the causal graph, yes, but they are essential for constructing good explanations. Without these “psycho-physical” laws, we don’t have any good explanations of the phenomenal quality of conscious experience. Maybe the dualists are wrong about this, but they are not (at least not necessarily) simply positing an idle dangler that does no explanatory work. They are claiming we need to add new nodes to our fundamental causal graph, and that these nodes will do important explanatory work. Also, the nodes are linked to the pre-existing nodes by law-like relationships (hence the term “psycho-physical law”), just as the new “field” nodes were linked to the pre-existing “particle” nodes by law-like relationships. If we have predictable, empirically discoverable laws connecting these nodes, I don’t know why one would describe it as “mysterious” or “magic”. Dualists of this stripe aren’t simply helping themselves to a semantic stopsign, they’re writing a promissory note. They are saying that incorporating psychological (or, perhaps more plausibly, broadly informational) properties into our fundamental ontology will lead to better theories.
All that said, I AM NOT A DUALIST. I just don’t think the rejection of dualism is virtually a priori true, that there is no non-magical alternative to reductionism. I think there is a substantive empirical disagreement about what our best theories of consciousness will look like. This is not a question that can be settled by simply defining one position to be true, by declaring that “consciousness” is just a label for a set of neural interactions. If that is what one means by “consciousness”, then the dualist position doesn’t even make sense. And if your definition of a word renders your opponents (some of whom are quite smart) incoherent, then chances are you are talking past them rather than genuinely refuting their position.
The correct response would have been, “Why is my primitive any more mysterious or magical than yours?”
Because yours doesn’t do any work; as Eliezer said, if you postulate different laws for consciousnesses then you don’t actually end up less confused about how consciousness works. Besides, I’ve never seen anybody even attempt to write down such a law, they’re just referred to as this amorphous anyblob.
I’d be more charitable if dualists got their alternative laws to do actual predictive work, even if they just predicted properties of personal experience. But no, it happens that the people who do all the useful work are neurologists. This is the universe saying “hint” pretty loudly.
Without these “psycho-physical” laws, we don’t have any good explanations of the phenomenal quality of conscious experience
But that’s my point, psychophysical laws don’t explain anything either, especially if you never get called on actually providing them! The only definition those laws have is that they ought to allow you to explain consciousness, but they never actually get around to actually doing so! This isn’t reason, it’s an escape hatch.
All that said, I AM NOT A DUALIST. I just don’t think the rejection of dualism is virtually a priori true
Neither do I, I think it’s evidentially true. (If they haven’t argued themselves into epiphenomenality again, then it’s a priori true, or at least obvious.)
A question, just to make sure we’re not totally talking past each other: What is the kind of evidence that would lead you to update in the direction of dualism being true?
Scientists cutting into a living brain and finding the interface points, brains doing physically impossible computational feats, physical systems behaving differently in the presence of brains. Hard to say more than that in the absence of specific predictions.
I gave a prediction in my other comment. Do you agree that the continuing absence of a substantive reductive theory, or even an adequate approach to a reductive theory, of phenomenal consciousness is (weak) evidence against reductionism? If so, do you consider it (weak) evidence for dualism?
Also, not all dualists are substance dualists. Chalmers doesn’t believe that brains are getting signals from some non-physical realm.
Chalmers has been declared silly in an Eliezer article somewhere on here; I agree with it completely, so just read that instead.
Regarding evidence: in fact, I’ll go the other way around, and say that the brain is a triumph of reductionism in progress. Starting from when we thought the brain was there to cool the blood, and we had no idea where reason happened, the realm of dualism has only gotten smaller; motor control, sensoric processing, reflexes, neuronal disorders disabling specific aspects of cognition—the reductionist foundation for our minds has been gaining strength so predictably that I’d call a complete reductionist explanation of consciousness a matter of when, not if.
You failed to count all the myriad aspects of minds that have reductionst explanations. Consciousness is what’s left.
You failed to count all the myriad aspects of minds that have reductionst explanations. Consciousness is what’s left.
I don’t see how this alters the claim that the continuing absence of a reductive theory of consciousness is evidence against reductionism. Counting all the myriad aspects doesn’t change that fact, and thatt’s the only claim I made. I didn’t say that the continuing absence of a reduction has demonstrated that reductionism is false. I’m only claiming that Pr(Reductionism | No Reduction of Consciousness available) < Pr(Reductionism).
I think the existence of the Bible is evidence for Jesus’s divinity. That doesn’t mean I’m discounting the overwhelming evidence telling against his divinity.
Fair enough. I just think that seen in the context of the human mind, so far the evidence in general comes down fairly solidly on the side of reductionism, so I wouldn’t recommend clinging to consciousness as the dualist liferaft in the metaphorical reductionist storm.
Because yours doesn’t do any work; as Eliezer said, if you postulate different laws for consciousnesses then you don’t actually end up less confused about how consciousness works.
I don’t see why this has to be the case. We posited different laws for fields (they don’t behave like particles), but that doesn’t mean they don’t do any work. The dualists I’m describing (and an actual example may or may not exist) aren’t describing some completely parallel psychological realm unconnected to the physical realm. They believe one can build good theories where fundamental psychological variables are causally entangled with physical variables, kind of like field variables are causally entangled with particle variables.
I agree that if these psychological properties are completely epiphenomenal then they do no work, but I don’t see why they’d have to be. That’s a substantive question. Maybe it will turn out that laws like the Weber-Fechner law are the best we can do in the relevant domain, that we can’t come up with equally useful generalizations that don’t appeal to sensations (a hypothetical example; for all I know, we have already done better in this particular case). In that case, our best theory has sensations as an irreducible component, but I don’t see why that makes it mysterious or magical.
If successful reductions are evidence for the general thesis of reductionism, then the absence of a successful reduction is evidence against the thesis. Weak evidence, perhaps, but evidence nonetheless. And the longer the absence persists, the stronger evidence it is.
I’d be more charitable if dualists got their alternative laws to do actual predictive work, even if they just predicted properties of personal experience. But no, it happens that the people who do all the useful work are neurologists. This is the universe saying “hint” pretty loudly.
Well, psychophysics is a field, even though it doesn’t presume dualism. Dualists are claiming that we can’t do better. Their position is largely a negative one, and so difficult to construct a research program around. I generally dislike positions of that kind in science, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be right. Also, I suspect the intersection of “dualists” and “neurologists” is not the empty set. Some of the neurologists doing useful work might be dualists of some stripe.
In any case, I didn’t intend to debate the efficacy (or lack thereof) of dualists. Like I said, I’m no dualist. Perhaps all dualists are crappy philosophers, terrible scientists and horribly confused individuals. Doesn’t affect the point I was making.
Neither do I, I think it’s evidentially true.
Um… OK, then I don’t see where we disagree. In the original comment you responded to, I was simply saying that “consciousness” isn’t just a label for a set of neural interactions. If you think dualism is false based on evidence, then I presume you agree. After all, if you believed that “consciousness” simply meant a set of neural interactions, then “consciousness is not reducible to neural interactions” would be false based on the meanings of the words alone, not based on empirical evidence.
I don’t see why this has to be the case. We posited different laws for fields
Sorry, let me restate my point.
if you postulate [merely the existence of] different laws for consciousnesses then you don’t actually end up less confused about how consciousness works.
Actually stating the bridging laws might help with this.
good theories where fundamental psychological variables are causally entangled with physical variables, kind of like field variables are causally entangled with particle variables.
I don’t see what making the psychology fundamental even buys you.
In that case, our best theory has sensations as an irreducible component
My standard is “could a superintelligence reduce these laws to underlying simple physics?” It’s possible that psychology will turn out to be practically irreducible; I have no beef with that claim. I don’t buy that it’s fundamentally irreducible though.
If successful reductions are evidence for the general thesis of reductionism, then the absence of a successful reduction is evidence against the thesis
to the extent that a reduction would have been expected. Give neurology some time. We’re making good progress. Remember, there was a time we didn’t even know what the brain was for. In that time, dualism would have had a much easier stance, and its island has only gotten smaller since. Winds of evidence and all.
Dualists are claiming that we can’t do better.
That we can’t, even in theory, do better. That we, as in cognitively limited humans, can’t do better is merely implausible.
Um… OK, then I don’t see where we disagree. In the original comment you responded to, I was simply saying that “consciousness” isn’t just a label for a set of neural interactions.
I think consciousness is just physics. I don’t perceive consciousness as just physics, but then again, I don’t perceive anything as just physics, even things that unambiguously are, like rocks and air and stuff. I can imagine a causal path in the brain that starts with “photons hitting a rose” and ends with me talking about the effing redness of red, and I can, in my imagination, identify this path with “redness”. I suspect this will get clearer as we become able to stimulate specific parts of the brain more easily.
This does not accurately describe what most people mean when they talk about consciousness. It may turn out that conscious experience can be reduced to certain neuronal interactions, but such a reduction (even establishing the existence of such a reduction) would count as a major empirical advance. If all our talk about consciousness was in fact merely a matter of convenience, then the existence of the reduction wouldn’t be an empirical question. It would be true by definition. Analogy: we now understand that heat is simply molecular motion, but that doesn’t mean that when people were talking about heat in the 18th century, it was merely a convenient way for them to talk about certain molecular motions. They were talking about a phenomenon with which they had direct experience, that subsequently turned out to be reducible to molecular motion.
When most people talk about consciousness, they are referring to phenomenal experience (the fact that it feels like something to be awake and observing the universe). Now it may turn out that this phenomenon is completely reducible to neuronal interactions, but to simply say “consciousness” is a convenient label for a set of neuronal interactions is to elide an important and substantive problem. Dualists aren’t confused about what “consciousness” means, they disagree with you on the possibility of a reduction. It’s generally not a good idea to settle a debate by mere definition.
I think Eliezer makes the point that the specificity of the various neurological disorders and breakdowns forms some very strong evidence for how stuff happens in the brain.
No, because you’re here, talking about phenomenal experience, and it feeling like things. Imagine following that causal trail back; where do you expect to end up as the intermediary of going from world to photons to retina to brain to ? to brain to fingers to talking about phenomenally perceiving the world? In an area underlaid with completely different physical laws, that attaches to the brain by a bridging system? What would that even explain? Nothing. It’s not an explanation, it’s mysticism slotted in to explain a mysterious-to-you process. We have not seen any evidence that the physics of the brain are in any way magical. We’ve taken apart brains and no mysterious things have happened. We’ve cut into living brains and we’ve practically watched specific pieces of functionality fall away. With modern scanning tech, we can watch as memories are retrieved. We can literally look at reconstructions of your visual imagination. What does it take?
The entirety of dualism is an argument from ignorance. “I cannot imagine how conscious experience of reality could arise from physical laws.” → “Hence, physics is not the complete answer.” No, hence your imagination is limited.
Many post-Newtonian physicists believed that physical reality consisted of just matter in motion in absolute space. For them, physicalism meant reducing everything to particle interactions. The only nodes in the fundamental causal graph were properties of particles. However, it gradually became clear that reducing all physical phenomena to this basis was a very difficult, if not insurmountable, task. But by introducing a new element into the fundamental physical ontology—fields—one could in fact formulate much better physical theories.
Now consider a hypothetical early physicalist resisting the introduction of these new nodes into the fundamental causal graph. He might have objected to simply introducing a new primitive object into the ontology on the grounds that this object is “mysterious” or “magical”. The correct response would have been, “Why is my primitive any more mysterious or magical than yours?” If introducing a new primitive allows us to construct more and better explanations, it might be worth it. Of course, the new nodes in the graph need to be doing some work, they need to be allowing for the construction of better theories and all that. You can object to them on the grounds that they do not do that work, but simply objecting to them on the grounds that they are new irreducible nodes isn’t much of an argument.
My impression is that property dualists like Chalmers think of irreducible psychological properties and laws along these lines. They are new irreducible nodes in the causal graph, yes, but they are essential for constructing good explanations. Without these “psycho-physical” laws, we don’t have any good explanations of the phenomenal quality of conscious experience. Maybe the dualists are wrong about this, but they are not (at least not necessarily) simply positing an idle dangler that does no explanatory work. They are claiming we need to add new nodes to our fundamental causal graph, and that these nodes will do important explanatory work. Also, the nodes are linked to the pre-existing nodes by law-like relationships (hence the term “psycho-physical law”), just as the new “field” nodes were linked to the pre-existing “particle” nodes by law-like relationships. If we have predictable, empirically discoverable laws connecting these nodes, I don’t know why one would describe it as “mysterious” or “magic”. Dualists of this stripe aren’t simply helping themselves to a semantic stopsign, they’re writing a promissory note. They are saying that incorporating psychological (or, perhaps more plausibly, broadly informational) properties into our fundamental ontology will lead to better theories.
All that said, I AM NOT A DUALIST. I just don’t think the rejection of dualism is virtually a priori true, that there is no non-magical alternative to reductionism. I think there is a substantive empirical disagreement about what our best theories of consciousness will look like. This is not a question that can be settled by simply defining one position to be true, by declaring that “consciousness” is just a label for a set of neural interactions. If that is what one means by “consciousness”, then the dualist position doesn’t even make sense. And if your definition of a word renders your opponents (some of whom are quite smart) incoherent, then chances are you are talking past them rather than genuinely refuting their position.
Because yours doesn’t do any work; as Eliezer said, if you postulate different laws for consciousnesses then you don’t actually end up less confused about how consciousness works. Besides, I’ve never seen anybody even attempt to write down such a law, they’re just referred to as this amorphous anyblob.
I’d be more charitable if dualists got their alternative laws to do actual predictive work, even if they just predicted properties of personal experience. But no, it happens that the people who do all the useful work are neurologists. This is the universe saying “hint” pretty loudly.
But that’s my point, psychophysical laws don’t explain anything either, especially if you never get called on actually providing them! The only definition those laws have is that they ought to allow you to explain consciousness, but they never actually get around to actually doing so! This isn’t reason, it’s an escape hatch.
Neither do I, I think it’s evidentially true. (If they haven’t argued themselves into epiphenomenality again, then it’s a priori true, or at least obvious.)
A question, just to make sure we’re not totally talking past each other: What is the kind of evidence that would lead you to update in the direction of dualism being true?
Scientists cutting into a living brain and finding the interface points, brains doing physically impossible computational feats, physical systems behaving differently in the presence of brains. Hard to say more than that in the absence of specific predictions.
I gave a prediction in my other comment. Do you agree that the continuing absence of a substantive reductive theory, or even an adequate approach to a reductive theory, of phenomenal consciousness is (weak) evidence against reductionism? If so, do you consider it (weak) evidence for dualism?
Also, not all dualists are substance dualists. Chalmers doesn’t believe that brains are getting signals from some non-physical realm.
Chalmers has been declared silly in an Eliezer article somewhere on here; I agree with it completely, so just read that instead.
Regarding evidence: in fact, I’ll go the other way around, and say that the brain is a triumph of reductionism in progress. Starting from when we thought the brain was there to cool the blood, and we had no idea where reason happened, the realm of dualism has only gotten smaller; motor control, sensoric processing, reflexes, neuronal disorders disabling specific aspects of cognition—the reductionist foundation for our minds has been gaining strength so predictably that I’d call a complete reductionist explanation of consciousness a matter of when, not if.
You failed to count all the myriad aspects of minds that have reductionst explanations. Consciousness is what’s left.
I don’t see how this alters the claim that the continuing absence of a reductive theory of consciousness is evidence against reductionism. Counting all the myriad aspects doesn’t change that fact, and thatt’s the only claim I made. I didn’t say that the continuing absence of a reduction has demonstrated that reductionism is false. I’m only claiming that Pr(Reductionism | No Reduction of Consciousness available) < Pr(Reductionism).
I think the existence of the Bible is evidence for Jesus’s divinity. That doesn’t mean I’m discounting the overwhelming evidence telling against his divinity.
Fair enough. I just think that seen in the context of the human mind, so far the evidence in general comes down fairly solidly on the side of reductionism, so I wouldn’t recommend clinging to consciousness as the dualist liferaft in the metaphorical reductionist storm.
I don’t see why this has to be the case. We posited different laws for fields (they don’t behave like particles), but that doesn’t mean they don’t do any work. The dualists I’m describing (and an actual example may or may not exist) aren’t describing some completely parallel psychological realm unconnected to the physical realm. They believe one can build good theories where fundamental psychological variables are causally entangled with physical variables, kind of like field variables are causally entangled with particle variables.
I agree that if these psychological properties are completely epiphenomenal then they do no work, but I don’t see why they’d have to be. That’s a substantive question. Maybe it will turn out that laws like the Weber-Fechner law are the best we can do in the relevant domain, that we can’t come up with equally useful generalizations that don’t appeal to sensations (a hypothetical example; for all I know, we have already done better in this particular case). In that case, our best theory has sensations as an irreducible component, but I don’t see why that makes it mysterious or magical.
If successful reductions are evidence for the general thesis of reductionism, then the absence of a successful reduction is evidence against the thesis. Weak evidence, perhaps, but evidence nonetheless. And the longer the absence persists, the stronger evidence it is.
Well, psychophysics is a field, even though it doesn’t presume dualism. Dualists are claiming that we can’t do better. Their position is largely a negative one, and so difficult to construct a research program around. I generally dislike positions of that kind in science, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be right. Also, I suspect the intersection of “dualists” and “neurologists” is not the empty set. Some of the neurologists doing useful work might be dualists of some stripe.
In any case, I didn’t intend to debate the efficacy (or lack thereof) of dualists. Like I said, I’m no dualist. Perhaps all dualists are crappy philosophers, terrible scientists and horribly confused individuals. Doesn’t affect the point I was making.
Um… OK, then I don’t see where we disagree. In the original comment you responded to, I was simply saying that “consciousness” isn’t just a label for a set of neural interactions. If you think dualism is false based on evidence, then I presume you agree. After all, if you believed that “consciousness” simply meant a set of neural interactions, then “consciousness is not reducible to neural interactions” would be false based on the meanings of the words alone, not based on empirical evidence.
Sorry, let me restate my point.
Actually stating the bridging laws might help with this.
I don’t see what making the psychology fundamental even buys you.
My standard is “could a superintelligence reduce these laws to underlying simple physics?” It’s possible that psychology will turn out to be practically irreducible; I have no beef with that claim. I don’t buy that it’s fundamentally irreducible though.
to the extent that a reduction would have been expected. Give neurology some time. We’re making good progress. Remember, there was a time we didn’t even know what the brain was for. In that time, dualism would have had a much easier stance, and its island has only gotten smaller since. Winds of evidence and all.
That we can’t, even in theory, do better. That we, as in cognitively limited humans, can’t do better is merely implausible.
I think consciousness is just physics. I don’t perceive consciousness as just physics, but then again, I don’t perceive anything as just physics, even things that unambiguously are, like rocks and air and stuff. I can imagine a causal path in the brain that starts with “photons hitting a rose” and ends with me talking about the effing redness of red, and I can, in my imagination, identify this path with “redness”. I suspect this will get clearer as we become able to stimulate specific parts of the brain more easily.