Mercurial

• MercurialNov 16, 2011, 4:11 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: XFrequentist’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Dojo Ex­am­ples?

  I second that. There’s a fair number of people down here in southern California, and I suspect that many of us would be quite happy to be guinea pigs for rationality dojo training.

• MercurialNov 16, 2011, 4:08 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Dojo Ex­am­ples?

  I’m glad to hear this. Can you tell us at least a little bit about what kind of general structure to anticipate? To give a few examples of the level of thing I’m asking about:

  • Maybe it’s being planned as Boot Camp trainings paired with teaching manuals, to create and then support people who can run LW Meetups as Dojos. Maybe even with “ranks” and objective standards of excellence, if you really want to extend the martial arts metaphor. (In martial arts, it’s common for instructors of local dojos to go to regular seminars where high-ranking masters refine and update the skills of the local-dojo instructors.)

  • Maybe a Khan Academy setup, where SIAI offers some kind of general guidelines about what sort of results (both positive and challenging) to expect from certain kinds of group activities. So this would be less centralized and standardized than the first option.

  • Maybe just a set of descriptions of exercises that seem to work well at cultivating certain aspects of Awesomeness. Perhaps paired with key references (e.g., Cialdini).

  I’m not offering suggestions per se, though you’re very welcome to take them. I’d just like to know what level of organization to expect so I know what my job is with meetups I am or will be involved in. For instance, if it’s basically the last of the examples I give above, I’ll end up wanting to apply my experience with research in educational psychology to basically develop the guidelines mentioned in the second example. But if that’s what you guys are doing anyway, I’d like to know so I don’t waste my time!

  So can you tell us on that level of scope what you’re cooking up?

Meetup : San Diego meetup

• MercurialNov 10, 2011, 7:19 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: What vi­sion­ary pro­ject would you fund?

  I agree. Any impression I give otherwise is an artifact of my brevity.

• MercurialNov 10, 2011, 7:11 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Bugmaster’s comment on: Hu­man con­scious­ness as a tractable sci­en­tific problem

  It’s nice to see this discussion converging! I was afraid we’d get myred in confusing language forever and have to give up at some point. :-(

  Bah ! Curse you, machine overlords ! shakes fist

  :-D

  ...my P and Q categories were meant to be purely descriptive, not explanatory. Your conscious experience, of whose existence you are certain, and which you are experiencing at this very minute, is P. Other people’s conscious experience, whose existence you can never personally experience, but can only infer based on available evidence, intuition, or whatever, is Q.

  Ah, okay. I thought you meant, “Given a subject, that subject’s experience is P, and others’ is Q.” The above distinction seems more coherent.

  Let’s do away with possessive pronouns when referring to P and Q, then. We’ll say P is phenomenal experience (what I’m tempted to call “my experience” but am explicitly avoiding assigning to a particular subject since my sense of myself as a subject might well arise from the existence of P), and Q is the part of P that gives the impression that we describe as “Others seem to be conscious.” I think we can agree that those two phenomena are different, even if Q seems to be a part of P. (I have a hard time conceiving of a kind of experience that’s not part of P, for that matter!)

  Sound good?

  ...you are confusing the terminology...

  Sorry about that. I see what you mean.

  (my apologies if I seem to be quote-mining you out of context, please let me know if I’d done so on accident)

  It doesn’t look that way to me at first brush. Thanks for the consideration, though. :-)

  You appear to be very committed to the idea that your own experience is categorically different from anyone else’s, and that a general model of consciousness—assuming it was even possible to create such a thing—may not tell you anything about your own experience.

  I think here is where the use of possessive pronouns betrays us. What I’m very committed to is that P is more than Q, so a priori knowing everything about Q doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about why P arises in the first place. The only reason we seem to think this is likely, as far as I know, is that Q is specifically the impression that P-like phenomena exist “in others.” (I honestly can’t think of a way to describe the relationship between P and Q without talking about Q in terms of others. I think that might be intrinsic to the definition of Q.)

  What we will have explained with a full and robust theory of Q is why the impression of “others who have P-type experience” arises. (Again, I don’t know how else to phrase that.) That wouldn’t tell us why red appears as red, although it would tell us why others who are conscious (if any) would be under the impression that we experience red as red.

  Or said a little differently, it seems perfectly plausible to me that my impression that others are conscious might have nothing to do with why I’m conscious. It might be based solely on the fact that I’m conscious.

  Now, if it turns out that those two really don’t have anything to do with one another, that would be surprising to me because of the nature of Q: my impression is that others are conscious for the same reason I am. But my evidence for others’ consciousness is of a completely different nature than that of my own. So, if they really don’t have anything to do with one another, then solipsism seems much more likely.

  But even in that solipsistic case, I wouldn’t say that there’s something special about me. I’d say there’s something special about P in that it’s the only perspective possible. It just so happens that from the only possible perspective, there is this impression of a particular identity, which is under the delusion that there are other, comparable identities “out there”. In this situation, there’s no other perspective one can don in order to say that there’s nothing special about me as compared to any other random human. I’m special because I’m the one whose identity is wrapped up in P, and in a solipsistic universe there’s no one else like that. As far as I know, that’s what solipsism means.

  (Of course, because of Q, I would predict that you would make the same argument about yourself. But I know better! :-P )

  I’ll say once more that I suspect that a full theory of Q would, indeed, go a long way to explaining P. But I’m also aware that I’m under this impression because of Q. This makes it extremely difficult to fathom what the connection between a Q-explanation and a P-explanation could possibly look like. After all, if such a connection did not exist, I would still have a strong suspicion that a Q-explanation would yield a P-explanation.

  Sure, it feels special in a truly visceral way, but there are lots of things we feel that aren’t actually true: the Earth is not flat, the stars are really huge and really hot, but very far away; choosing a different door in the Monty Hall scenario is the correct choice, etc.

  I don’t think this comparison works because of a recursive element that’s in consciousness. With those other phenomena, we can look at an aspect of P, apply a mental model, and predict what the next experience in P will be. But what is to be explained is the arising of P in the first place. It’s hard to make sense of what making predictions in that context would even mean, in part because we can’t experience P from outside of P. We can’t look at P as a whole the way we can look at our visual impression that the Earth is flat.

  Empiricism is based on the foundation of avoiding cognitive biases, and I am inclined to treat the (admittedly, very strong) intuition that I am very special as just another kind of a cognitive bias.

  I’m inclined to agree. The problem is that there isn’t a perspective to take from where you can say that your ability to take perspectives is an external phenomenon. It becomes very convoluted to even try to say what it would mean for the fact that your subjective experience is special to you is a bias. Biased for whom, in what way? What’s the objective truth that this “bias” is causing you to mentally deviate from? It’s not an impression that my consciousness is different to me than my impression of others’ consciousness is; rather, it’s a fact, as objective as any fact could possibly be. I could totally believe that there’s some kind of weird cognitive illusion trick being played on me such that I’m not actually writing these words, but there is no possible way for my impression that I’m writing these words to not actually exist. What would that even mean? I’m more certain that I’m under the impression that I’m experiencing what I’m experiencing than of anything else, bar none. And I can be so certain of this because the only way to offer me evidence to the contrary is through experience.

  I think part of the tangle here is this implicit idea that there’s what Nagel calls a “view from nowhere” that we can always take to describe phenomena. It is, for instance, the idea that 2+2=4 is an objective fact that is part of the universe itself rather than just a facet of how we happen to experience it. It’s true no matter who is talking, and disagreement with that fact is a form of being objectively wrong. But that model—the idea that there’s this objective truth out there independent of subjective experience—is not something we can ever even in principle get evidence for. It’s much like how you can never know for sure that you’re not dreaming: any test you can perform is a test you can dream. There’s no way out even in principle. This doesn’t mean you are dreaming, but it does mean that you can’t use the supposed fact that you’re not dreaming as part of your evidence that you’re not dreaming. In the same sort of way, there’s no way to get evidence that there’s an objective world outside of your experience. That doesn’t mean it isn’t there, but it does mean that there’s no way to get evidence for that world’s existence. Any such evidence is evidence you’d have to experience.

  (Let me emphasize here that I’m not arguing against reductionistic materialism. I’m just pointing out a tangle in attempts to use reductionistic materialism to explain the ability to experience. I’m sure we can come up with a model of consciousness that works within reductionistic materialism, but it’s not at all clear how that model could possibly be true to the a priori fact that the model itself arises out of our experiences.)

  So how do you get outside of experience in order to demonstrate how experience itself arises?

  The question doesn’t seem even in principle answerable.

  That’s why it’s called the hard problem of consciousness!

• MercurialNov 9, 2011, 7:06 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: What vi­sion­ary pro­ject would you fund?

  I totally agree with you. What I mean is that most of the money currently being poured into, say, repairing heart disease damage could instead be poured into researching the nature of metabolism in general. Trying to manage the symptoms for heart disease, morbid obesity, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and all the other diseases associated with aging just doesn’t seem nearly as efficient as fixing the common problem causing all of these. We would still want to explore the nature of biology once something like SENS succeeds, true, but we wouldn’t need to do so by dumping tons of money into repairing people who are dying right now of those diseases. It becomes “How does this work?” research instead of “How do we keep these people from dying tomorrow?” research.

• MercurialNov 9, 2011, 4:47 PM

  7 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: What vi­sion­ary pro­ject would you fund?

  I daresay that most reasonably well-funded medical research would become almost entirely obsolete if SENS were to work. It’s hard to justify researching more effective heart attack medication when no one gets biologically old enough for heart attacks to be a serious problem anymore.

• MercurialNov 9, 2011, 3:45 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: Science of hu­man dom­i­nance?

  Aha! I didn’t think to attach “hierarchy” to the Wikipedia search. The chapter looks promising, too. Thank you!

• MercurialNov 9, 2011, 6:30 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: Grognor’s comment on: Look­ing for Article

  I think that’s possibly the best pun I’ve ever seen.

• MercurialNov 9, 2011, 1:28 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: atucker’s comment on: Science of hu­man dom­i­nance?

  I’ve just ordered a copy. It keeps coming up as a useful reference, even if it might not be exactly what I’m looking for. Thanks for bringing it up!

• MercurialNov 9, 2011, 1:21 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: Science of hu­man dom­i­nance?

  This seems to be more about environmental issues (using “dominance” in the sense of humans being dominant over the environment) than about social dynamics between individuals. That’s not quite what I’m looking for. But thanks anyway!

• MercurialNov 9, 2011, 1:19 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Science of hu­man dom­i­nance?

  Excellent! This certainly looks relevant. Thank you!

• MercurialNov 9, 2011, 1:19 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: Unnamed’s comment on: Science of hu­man dom­i­nance?

  Thank you, this looks quite promising.

Science of hu­man dom­i­nance?

• MercurialNov 8, 2011, 10:18 PM

  3 points

  on: Look­ing for Article

  Is this what you’re looking for?

• MercurialNov 8, 2011, 8:57 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: EvelynM’s comment on: Good re­source for mar­ket­ing re­search?

  Would you grant me an explanation about why ‘actually knowing’ is important?

  Sorry I missed this question earlier. It’s not important per se, but not actually knowing when one is under the impression of knowing is a problem.

  In this case, a lot of entrepreneurs who have started successful businesses have a lot of opinions about why they succeeded while others failed. But their self-reports don’t necessarily tell us why they succeeded; those reports tell us only what they think was responsible for their success. Someone who insists that their aggressive advertising campaign was essential to their success might totally miss that a vastly more important factor was actually, say, that they exude more pheromones than average.

  So, I’m weary of success advice even from successful people because it’s all too common for people to be oblivious to the most potent factors responsible for their success.

• MercurialNov 7, 2011, 6:43 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Mercurial’s comment on: Hu­man con­scious­ness as a tractable sci­en­tific problem

  PART 2:

  I think you are contemplating a situation where we remove a person’s consciousness, and yet his behavior (which includes talking about his consciousness) remains exactly the same. I argue that, if such a thing is possible, then consciousness is a null concept, since it has literally no effect on anything we could ever detect.

  Yep. I believe that’s Eliezer’s argument (the “anti-zombie principle” I think it was called), and I agree. That’s why I prefaced it with saying that my understanding of the universe would have to be pretty far off in order for my self-zombification to even be possible. So, given the highly improbable event that p-zombies are possible, I sure wouldn’t want to become one! Ergo, my own qualia matter a great deal to me regardless of anyone else’s ability to detect them.

  As far as I understand, you agree with me with respect to Q, but disagree with respect to P. But then, you must necessarily believe that P is categorically different from Q, somehow… mustn’t you ?

  ...

  I’m not sure what it would mean for me to agree in terms of Q but not P. I’m not quite sure what you’re suggesting I’m saying. So maybe you’re right, but I honestly don’t know!

  If you do believe this, then you must also believe that any model of consciousness that we could possibly build will work correctly for anyone other than yourself. This seems highly unlikely to me, however—what makes you such an outlier ? You are a human like the rest of us, after all.

  Mmm… I’m not saying that I, personally, am special. I’m saying that an experiencing subject is special from the point of view of the experiencing subject, precisely because P is not the same as Q. It so happens that I’m an experiencing subject, so from my point of view my perspective is extremely special.

  Remember that science doesn’t discover anything at all. Scientists do. Scientists explore natural phenomena and run experiments and experience the results and come to conclusions. So it’s not that exploring Q would just happen and then a model emerges from the mist. Instead, people explore Q and people develop a model that people can see predicts their impressions of Q. That’s what empiricism means!

  I emphasize this because every description is always from some point of view. For most phenomena, we’ve found a way to take a point of view that doesn’t make the difference between P and Q all that relevant. A passive-voice description of gravity seems to hold from both P and Q, for instance. But when we’re trying to explore what makes P and Q different, we can’t start by modulating their difference. We have to decide what the point of view we’re taking is, and since part of what we’re studying is the phenomenon of there being points of view in the first place, that decision is going to matter a lot.

  And if you are not an outlier, and yet you believe that the model won’t function for you, then you must believe that such a model cannot be built in principle (i.e., it won’t function for anyone else, either), and yet I think you would deny this.

  I think that if a model of Q fails to inform us about P, then it will fail for P regardless of whose perspective we take.

  However, I suspect that a good model of Q will tell us pretty much everything about P. I just can’t fathom at this point how it might do so.

  As I see it, the only way to reconcile these contradictions is to reject the idea that P is categorically different from Q, and thus there’s nothing special about your own qualia, and thus the problem consciousness isn’t any harder than the problem of, say, unifying gravity with the other fundamental forces (which is pretty hard, admittedly).

  Well, part of the problem is that we know P is categorically different than Q. Or rather, I know my P is categorically different than Q, and if Q is going to have any fidelity, everyone else will be under the same impression from their own points of view.

  I can guarantee that any model that claims I don’t have conscious experience is flat-out wrong. This is perhaps the only thing I’d be willing to say has a probability of 1 of being true. I might discover that I’m not experiencing what I thought I was, but the fact that I’m under the impression of seeing these words, for instance, is something for which I believe it is not possible even in principle to provide me evidence against. (Yes, I know how strong a claim that is. I suppose that since I’m open to having this perspective challenged, I should still assign a probability of less than 1 to it. But if anything deserves a probability of 1 of being true, I’d say the fact that there is P-type experience is it!)

  However, I can’t make a claim like that about Q. I’m certainly under the impression that my wife is conscious, but maybe she’s not. Maybe she doesn’t have P-type experience. I don’t know how I could discover that, but if it were possible to discover it and it turned out that she were not conscious, I wouldn’t view that as a contradiction in terms. It would just accent the difference between P-type experience and my impression of Q-type experience. Getting evidence for my wife not being conscious doesn’t seem to violate what it means for something to be evidence the way “evidence” against my own consciousness would be.

  I’m oversimplifying somewhat since consciousness almost certainly isn’t a “yes” or “no” thing. Buddhists often claim that P-type consciousness can be made “more conscious” through mindfulness, and that once you’ve developed somewhat in that direction you’ll be able to look back and consider your past self to not have been “truly” conscious. However, the point I’m trying to make here is that we actually start with the immediate fact that P is different than Q, and it’s upon this foundation that empiricism is built. We can’t then turn around and deny the difference from an empirical point of view!

  However, in spirit I think I agree with you. I think we’ll end up understanding P through Q. I don’t see how since I don’t see how to connect the two empirically even in principle. But science has surprised philosophers for three hundred years, so why stop now? :-D

• MercurialNov 7, 2011, 6:43 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Bugmaster’s comment on: Hu­man con­scious­ness as a tractable sci­en­tific problem

  Apparently my reply is “too long”, so I’ll reply in two parts.

  PART 1:

  Sorry, you’re right, I tend to do that a lot :-(

  Hey, apparently I do too!

  That’s correct, I think

  Excellent.

  I think it’s not entirely clear what that pathway is, but there are some very good clues regarding what that pathway could be, since certain aspects of consciousness (such as vision, f.ex.) are reasonably well understood.

  Um… Sure, let’s go with that. There’s a nuance here that’s disregarding the hard problem, but I don’t think we’ll get much mileage repeating the same kind of detail-focusing we’ve been doing. :-P

  I think we should make a distinction between a person’s own qualia, as experienced by the person, and the qualia of other people, from the point of view of that same person. Let’s call the person’s own qualia “P” and everyone else’s qualia (from the point of view of the person) “Q”.

  Sure, agreed.

  I should warn you, though, that I’m not sure that this distinction is coherent. There’s some reason to suspect that our perception of others as conscious is part of how we construct our sense of self. So, it might not make sense to talk about “my” conscious experience as distinct from “your” conscious experience as though we start with a self and then grant it consciousness. It might be the other way around.

  I emphasize this because explaining Q without ever touching P might not tell us much about P. If we start with conscious experience and then define the line between “my” experience and “others’” experience by the distinction between P and Q, all we do by detailing Q is explain our impression that others are conscious. We might think we’re addressing others’ P, but we never actually address our P (which, it seems, is the only P we can ever have access to—which might be because we define “me” in part by “that which has access to P” and “not me” by “that which doesn’t have access to P”).

  So with that warning, I’ll just run with the intuitive distinction between P and Q that I believe you’re suggesting.

  Obviously, each person individually can detect P. Until some sort of telepathy gets developed (assuming that such a thing is possible in principle), no person can detect Q (at least, not directly).

  I agree, and I would go just a little bit farther: I would argue that it’s not possible even in principle to detect Q as a kind of P. If I experience another person’s experience from a first-person perspective, it’s not their experience anymore. It’s mine. Sure, we might share it, like two people watching the same movie. But the P I have access to is still my own, and the Q that I’m supposedly accessing as a kind of P is still removed: I still have to assume that the person sitting next to me is also experiencing the movie.

  You seem to be saying—and I could be wrong about this, so I apologize in advance if that’s the case—that, in order to build a general theory of consciousness, we need to figure out a way to study P in an objective way. This is hard (I would say, impossible), since P is by its nature subjective, and thus inaccessible to anyone other than yourself.

  Yeah, I think that’s a reasonably fair summary. :-)

  I, on the other hand, am arguing that a general theory of consciousness can be built based solely on the same kind of evidence that compels us to believe that other people experience things—i.e., that Q exists and is reducible to brain states.

  I agree with you on this. I just think it’s important to recognize that what we will have explained is our impression that others are conscious. That might give us insight into P, and it seems implausible that it wouldn’t, but it also doesn’t seem clear what kind of mechanism it could possibly reveal for P. At least to me!

  I think you would you agree that such a model can, in principle, exist (though please correct me if I’m wrong).

  Yes, I agree.

  Then, would you agree that this model can also predict what you, yourself, will experience in a given situation ? If not, then why not ? If yes, then how is P any different from Q ?

  I’m going to go with “maybe”, which I think requires me to answer both the “yes” and “no” branches. :-P

  I think it’s certainly plausible that this model of Q could predict the behavior of P. But it needn’t do so. Why not? Because P and Q are different for precisely the reason that we gave them different names. I’m under the impression that my wife is conscious as a sort of immediate perception; surely I deduce it somehow, probably by my perception of her as a social entity with whom I could in principle interact, but that isn’t how it seems to me. I just see her as conscious. So when we explore my perception of her as conscious and we develop a thorough model of her consciousness as perceived by me (and others), what that model does is predict how our perception of her conscious experience changes.

  But it requires an extra step to say that if I were her, I would be experiencing those changes as P.

  Now, I suspect that this model would work out just fine. I suspect that when we determine that we’ve modeled Q, that the model of Q will predict my P. (I see this in the Enneagram all the time, in fact: it describes others’ experiences, and when I spell out their experiences they often give an “I’ve been caught!” kind of reaction. When someone does the same to me, I sure feel caught!) After all, part of the impression I get of Q comes from the fact that I know that I would react they way the other is reacting if I were to experience X, which draws me to think that they’re experiencing X. So for it to fail to model P, it seems likely that I’d have to react in a way that I would not recognize from the outside (assuming experiencing my own P as Q can be turned into a coherent idea). That seems like it’d be pretty weird.

  But we’re still left with the fact that the application of the theory to Q feels tremendously different than its application to P. The fact that the model is attempting to explain in part why P and Q are different in the first place makes it difficult for me to see how an explanation of Q alone is going to do it. It feels as though its ability to capture P would be almost coincidental.

  (continued...)

• MercurialNov 7, 2011, 5:12 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: Bugmaster’s comment on: Hu­man con­scious­ness as a tractable sci­en­tific problem

  You know, I think we’re getting lost in the little details here, and we keep communicating past one another.

  First, let me emphasize that I do think we’ll eventually be able to explain consciousness in a reductionist way. I’ve tried to make that clear, but some of your arguments make me wonder if I’ve failed to convey that.

  Second, remember that this whole discussion arose because you questioned the value of trying to answer the hard problem of consciousness. I now suspect what you originally meant was that you don’t think there is a hard problem, so there wasn’t anything to answer. And in an ultimate sense, I think you’re right: I think people like Thomas Nagel are trying to argue that we need a complete paradigm shift in order to explain how qualia exist, and I think they’re wrong. Eventually it almost certainly comes down to brain behavior. Even if it’s not clear what that pathway could be, that’s a description of human creativity and not of the intrinsic mysteriousness of the phenomenon.

  But what you said was this:

  Is the answer even relevant ?

  As far as I understand, there currently exists no “qualia-detector”, and building one may be impossible in principle. Thus, in the absence of any ability to detect qualia, and given the way you’d set up your thought experiment about the sleepwalker, there’s absolutely no way to tell a perfect sleepwalker from an awake person. As far as everyone—including the potential sleepwalker—is concerned, the two cases are completely functionally equivalent. Thus, it doesn’t matter who has qualia and who doesn’t, since these qualia do not affect anything that we can detect. They are kind of like souls or Saganesque teapots that way.

  This, to me, really sounds like you’re saying we can’t detect qualia, so we might as well assume there are no qualia, so we shouldn’t worry about how qualia arise. Maybe that wasn’t your point. But if it was, I stand in firm disagreement because I think that qualia are the only things we can care about!

  For some reason I can’t seem to convey why I think that. I feel rather like I’m pointing at the sun and saying “Look! Light!” and you’re responding with “We don’t have a way of detecting the light, so we might as well assume it isn’t there.” (Please excuse the flaw in the analogy in that we can detect light. Pretend for the moment that we can’t.) All I can do is blink stupidly and point again at the sun. If I can’t get you to acknowledge that you, too, can see, then no amount of argumentation is going to get the point across.

  So all I’m left with is an insistence that if my understanding of the universe is completely off and it turns out to be possible to remove conscious experience from people, I most certainly would not want that done to me—not that I could care afterwards, but I absolutely would care beforehand! So to me, the presence or absence of qualia matters a lot.

  But if you cannot relate to that at all, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to convey why I feel that way. I’m completely at a loss as to how this could possibly be a topic of disagreement.

• MercurialNov 5, 2011, 7:05 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Bugmaster’s comment on: Hu­man con­scious­ness as a tractable sci­en­tific problem

  Basically, try as I might, I can’t think of any piece of evidence that would let you distinguish between a being—other than yourself—who is consciousness and experiences qualia, and a being who pretends to be conscious with perfect fidelity, but does not in fact experience qualia. I don’t think that such evidence could even exist, given the existence of perfect zombies (since they would be imperfect if such evidence existed). Thus, you are forced to conclude that the only being who is conscious is yourself, which is a kind of solipsism (though not the classic, existential kind).

  Ah! Okay. Three points:

  • I think you’re arguing for something I agree with anyway. I don’t think of qualia as being inherently independent of everything else. I think of qualia as self-evident. I don’t think my experience of green can be entirely separated from the physical process of perceiving light of a certain wavelength, but I do think it’s fair to say that I’m conscious of the green color of the “Help” link below this text box.

  • Even if I did think qualia were divisible from the physical processes involved in perception (which I think would force dualism), I wouldn’t be able to conclude that I’m the only one who is conscious. I would have to conclude that as far as I currently know, I have no way of knowing who else is or isn’t conscious. So solipsism would then be a possibility, but not a logical necessity.

  • I’m not arguing that p-zombies can exist. I seriously doubt they can. If this is a point you’ve been trying to argue me into agreeing, please note that we started out agreeing in the first place!

  It seems like we agree on this point, then—yey ! Of course, I would go one step further, and argue that there’s nothing special about our subconscious mind.

  Er… Except that we’re not conscious of it! I’d say that’s pretty special—as long as we agree that “special” means “different” rather than “mysterious”.

  I don’t just think it would be odd, I think it would be logically inconsistent, as long as you’re willing to assume that people other than yourself are, in fact, conscious.

  Sorry, I meant “odd” in the artistically understated sense. We agree on this.

  I reject the existence of qualia as an independent entity altogether.

  So here, I think, is a source of our miscommunication. I also reject qualia as being independent.

  I think part of the problem we’re running into here is that by naming qualia as nouns and talking about whether it’s possible to add or remove them, we’ve inadvertently employed our parietal cortices to make sense of conscious experience. It’s like how people talk about “government” as though it’s a person when, really, they’re just reifying complex social behavior (and as a result often hiding a lot of complexity from themselves).

  “Quale” is a name that has been, sadly, agreed upon to capture the experience of blueness, or the sense of a melody, or what-have-you. We needed some kind of word to distinguish these components of conscious experience from the physical mechanisms of perception because there is a difference, just like there’s a difference between a software program and the physical processes that result in the program running. Yes, as far as the universe is concerned, it’s just quarks quarking about. But just like it’s helpful to talk about chairs and doors, it’s helpful to talk about qualia in order to understand what our experience consists of.

  I suspect in the future we’ll be able to agree that “qualia” was actually a really bad term to use, with the benefit of hindsight. I suspect consciousness will turn out to be a reification, and thus talking about its components as though they’re things just throws us off the track and creates confusion in the guise of a mystery. But even if we dump the term “qualia”, we’re still stuck with the fact that we experience, and there’s a qualitative sense in which experience doesn’t seem like it’s even in-principle describable in terms of firing neurons. If you told me that it was discovered that there’s actually a region of the brain that’s responsible for adding qualia to vision (pardoning the horrid implicit metaphor), I wouldn’t feel like hardly anything had been explained. So you found circuitry that, when monkeyed with, makes all yellow vanish from my conscious awareness. But how did yellow appear in the first place, as opposed to being just neuronal signals bouncing around? Pointing to a region of the brain and saying “That does it” still leaves me baffled as to how. I don’t see how explaining the circuitry of that brain region in perfect synapse-level detail could answer that question.

  However, I could totally see consciousness turning out to have this “hard problem” because it’s like trying to describe where Mario is in terms of the transistors in a game console.

  Similarly, “qualia” and “consciousness” are just abstractions that you’d created in order to talk about human brains—including your own brain. I understand that you can observe your own consciousness “from the inside”, which is not true of magnets, but I don’t see this as an especially interesting fact.

  On this point, I think we might just be frozen in disagreement. You seem to be taking as practically axiomatic that there’s nothing significantly different about consciousness as compared to anything else, like gravity. To me, that view of consciousness is internally incoherent. You can make sense of gravity as an outside observer, but you can’t make sense of your own consciousness as an outside observer. That’s hugely relevant for any attempt to approach consciousness with the same empirical eye as used on gravity, or magnetism, or any other physical phenomenon. We can look at those phenomena from a position that largely doesn’t interact with them in a relevant way, but I cannot fathom a comparable place to stand in order to be conscious of consciousness while not interacting with it.

  This is not to say that consciousness is intrinsically more mysterious than gravity. I’m just utterly dumbfounded that you can think that your ability to be aware of anything is somehow no more interesting than any other random phenomenon in the universe.

  I don’t think that we need to necessarily pin down a single part of the brain that is the “seat of consciousness”.

  I don’t think so either.

  We can’t pin down a single part that constitutes the “seat of vision”, either, but human vision is nonetheless fairly well understood by now.

  ...

  We seem to keep doing this. I agree, because that’s part of the point I was making.

  Similarly, we can’t just “remove consciousness”, although we can remove parts of it (e.g., cutting out the narrator or messing with the coordination, as in meditation or alcohol).

  I’m not sure I follow your reasoning here. What do you mean by “removing consciousness” and “cutting out the narrator”, and why is it important ? Drunk (or meditating) people are still conscious, after a fashion.

  Removing consciousness is exactly the process that would turn a person into a p-zombie, yes? So what I’ve suggested as a general direction to consider for how consciousness appears passes the sanity test of not allowing p-zombies.

  As for the narrator… Well, you know how there’s a kind of running commentary going on in your mind? It’s possible to stop that narration, and if you do so it changes the quality of consciousness by quite a lot.

  Meditation, alcohol, and quite a number of other things can all monkey with the way parts of the mind coordinate and also get the narrator to stop narrating (or at least not become an implicit center of attention anymore). And I’m not claiming that doing these things removes consciousness. Quite the opposite, I’m pointing out that drunk and meditating people have a different kind of conscious experience.