Consciousness is not at all epiphenomenal, it’s just not the whole mind and not doing everything. We don’t have full control over our behavior, but we have a lot. While the output bandwidth is low, it can be applied to the most important things.
Maybe a point that was missing from my thesis is that one can have a higher-level psychological theory in terms of life-drives and death-drives which then addresses the important phenomenal activities but doesn’t model everything. And then if one asks for an explanation of the unmodelled part, the answer will have to be consciousness. But then because the important phenomenal part is already modelled by the higher-level theory, the relevant theory of consciousness is ~epiphenomenal.
I guess I have no idea what you mean by “consciousness” in this context. I expect consciousness to be fully explained and still real. Ah, consciousness. I’m going to mostly save the topic for if we survive AGI and have plenty of spare time to clarify our terminology and work through all of the many meanings of the word.
Edit—or of course if something else was meant by consciousness, I expect a full explanation to indicate that thing isn’t real at all.
I’m an eliminativist or a realist depending on exactly what is meant. People seem to be all over the place on what they mean by the word.
Reductionists like to describe all motion in terms of low-level physical dynamics, but that is extremely computationally intractable and arguably also misleading because it obscures entropy.
Physicists avoid reductionism by instead factoring their models into macroscopic kinetics and microscopic thermodynamics. Reductionistically, heat is just microscopic motion, but microscopic motion that adds up to macroscopic motion has already been factored out into the macroscopic kinetics, so what remains is microscopic motion that doesn’t act like macroscopic motion, either because it is ~epiphenomenal (heat in thermal equilibrium) or because it acts very different from macroscopic motion (heat diffusion).
Similarly, reductionists like to describe all psychology in terms of low-level Bayesian decision theory, but that is extremely computationally intractable and arguably also misleading because it obscures entropy.
You can avoid reductionism by instead factoring models into some sort of macroscopic psychology-ecology boundary and microscopic neuroses. Luckily Bayesian decision theory is pretty self-similar, so often the macroscopic psychology-ecology boundary fits pretty well with a coarse-grained Bayesian decision theory.
Now, similar to how most of the kinetic energy in a system in motion is usually in the microscopic thermal motion rather than in the macroscopic motion, most of the mental activity is usually with the microscopic neuroses instead of the macroscopic psychology-ecology. Thus, whenever you think “consciousness”, “self-awareness”, “personality”, “ideology”, or any other broad and general psychological term, it’s probably mostly about the microscopic neuroses. Meanwhile, similar to how tons of physical systems are very robust to wide ranges of temperatures, tons of psychology-ecologies are very robust to wide ranges of neuroses.
As for what “consciousness” really means, idk, currently I’m thinking it’s tightly intertwined with the attentional highlight, but because the above logic applies to many general psychological characteristics, really it doesn’t depend hugely on how precisely you model it.
Consciousness is not at all epiphenomenal, it’s just not the whole mind and not doing everything. We don’t have full control over our behavior, but we have a lot. While the output bandwidth is low, it can be applied to the most important things.
Maybe a point that was missing from my thesis is that one can have a higher-level psychological theory in terms of life-drives and death-drives which then addresses the important phenomenal activities but doesn’t model everything. And then if one asks for an explanation of the unmodelled part, the answer will have to be consciousness. But then because the important phenomenal part is already modelled by the higher-level theory, the relevant theory of consciousness is ~epiphenomenal.
I guess I have no idea what you mean by “consciousness” in this context. I expect consciousness to be fully explained and still real. Ah, consciousness. I’m going to mostly save the topic for if we survive AGI and have plenty of spare time to clarify our terminology and work through all of the many meanings of the word.
Edit—or of course if something else was meant by consciousness, I expect a full explanation to indicate that thing isn’t real at all.
I’m an eliminativist or a realist depending on exactly what is meant. People seem to be all over the place on what they mean by the word.
A thermodynamic analogy might help:
Reductionists like to describe all motion in terms of low-level physical dynamics, but that is extremely computationally intractable and arguably also misleading because it obscures entropy.
Physicists avoid reductionism by instead factoring their models into macroscopic kinetics and microscopic thermodynamics. Reductionistically, heat is just microscopic motion, but microscopic motion that adds up to macroscopic motion has already been factored out into the macroscopic kinetics, so what remains is microscopic motion that doesn’t act like macroscopic motion, either because it is ~epiphenomenal (heat in thermal equilibrium) or because it acts very different from macroscopic motion (heat diffusion).
Similarly, reductionists like to describe all psychology in terms of low-level Bayesian decision theory, but that is extremely computationally intractable and arguably also misleading because it obscures entropy.
You can avoid reductionism by instead factoring models into some sort of macroscopic psychology-ecology boundary and microscopic neuroses. Luckily Bayesian decision theory is pretty self-similar, so often the macroscopic psychology-ecology boundary fits pretty well with a coarse-grained Bayesian decision theory.
Now, similar to how most of the kinetic energy in a system in motion is usually in the microscopic thermal motion rather than in the macroscopic motion, most of the mental activity is usually with the microscopic neuroses instead of the macroscopic psychology-ecology. Thus, whenever you think “consciousness”, “self-awareness”, “personality”, “ideology”, or any other broad and general psychological term, it’s probably mostly about the microscopic neuroses. Meanwhile, similar to how tons of physical systems are very robust to wide ranges of temperatures, tons of psychology-ecologies are very robust to wide ranges of neuroses.
As for what “consciousness” really means, idk, currently I’m thinking it’s tightly intertwined with the attentional highlight, but because the above logic applies to many general psychological characteristics, really it doesn’t depend hugely on how precisely you model it.