How is “clean substructure” different in principle from a garden-variety high-level description? Crepes are a thin pancake made with approximately equal parts egg, milk, and flour, potentially with sugar, salt, oil, or small amounts of leavening, spread in a large pan and cooked quickly. This english sentence is radically simpler than a microscopic description of a crepe. As a law of crepeitude, it has many admirable practical qualities, allowing me to make crepes, and to tell which recipes are for crepes and which are not, even if they’re slightly different from my description.
A similar high-level description for consciousness might start with “Conscious beings are a lot like humans—they do a lot of information processing, have memories and imaginations and desires, think about the world and make plans, feel emotions like happiness or sadness, and often navigate the world using bodies that are in a complex feedback loop with their central information processor.” This english sentence is, again, a lot simpler than a microscopic description of a person. It is, all in all, a remarkable feat of compression.
Of course, I suspect this isn’t what you want—you hope that consciousness is obligingly simple in ways that cut out the reliance on human interpretation from the above description, while still being short enough to fit on a napkin. The main way that this sort of thing has been true in physics and chemistry is when humans are noticing some pattern in the world with a simple explanation in terms of underlying essences. The broad lack of such essences in philosophy explains the historical failure of myriad simple and objective theories of humanity, life, the good, etc.
To compress a lot of thoughts into a small remark, I think both possibilities (consciousness is like electromagnetism in that it has some deep structure to be formalized, vs consciousness is like elan vital in that it lacks any such deep structure) are live possibilities. What’s most interesting to me is doing the work that will give us evidence which of these worlds we live in. There are a lot of threads mentioned in my first comment that I think can generate value/clarity here; in general I’d recommend brainstorming “what would I expect to see if I lived in a world where consciousness does, vs does not, have a crisp substructure?”
How is “clean substructure” different in principle from a garden-variety high-level description? Crepes are a thin pancake made with approximately equal parts egg, milk, and flour, potentially with sugar, salt, oil, or small amounts of leavening, spread in a large pan and cooked quickly. This english sentence is radically simpler than a microscopic description of a crepe. As a law of crepeitude, it has many admirable practical qualities, allowing me to make crepes, and to tell which recipes are for crepes and which are not, even if they’re slightly different from my description.
A similar high-level description for consciousness might start with “Conscious beings are a lot like humans—they do a lot of information processing, have memories and imaginations and desires, think about the world and make plans, feel emotions like happiness or sadness, and often navigate the world using bodies that are in a complex feedback loop with their central information processor.” This english sentence is, again, a lot simpler than a microscopic description of a person. It is, all in all, a remarkable feat of compression.
Of course, I suspect this isn’t what you want—you hope that consciousness is obligingly simple in ways that cut out the reliance on human interpretation from the above description, while still being short enough to fit on a napkin. The main way that this sort of thing has been true in physics and chemistry is when humans are noticing some pattern in the world with a simple explanation in terms of underlying essences. The broad lack of such essences in philosophy explains the historical failure of myriad simple and objective theories of humanity, life, the good, etc.
Hi Charlie,
To compress a lot of thoughts into a small remark, I think both possibilities (consciousness is like electromagnetism in that it has some deep structure to be formalized, vs consciousness is like elan vital in that it lacks any such deep structure) are live possibilities. What’s most interesting to me is doing the work that will give us evidence which of these worlds we live in. There are a lot of threads mentioned in my first comment that I think can generate value/clarity here; in general I’d recommend brainstorming “what would I expect to see if I lived in a world where consciousness does, vs does not, have a crisp substructure?”