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The Hard Problem of Consciousness
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2019-04-04 at 5:03 PM UTC
Originally posted by HTS Like Gadzooks said, that is probably too firm a stance to take. It's a collection of hypotheses. An untested (or even untestable) hypothesis is not necessarily fiction. :/
Read the quotes I posted.
It could be interesting to you but it contributes little to discussion about the actual problem. -
2019-04-04 at 5:08 PM UTC
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2019-04-05 at 3:07 AM UTCOh I wanted to correct/add one thing about the phi experiment. What I'm talking about is known as the "colour phi phenomenon", where the two lights are of different colours and the subjects report seeing the colour change between the two, meaning before the second light has gone on. They see a smooth motion and intermediate transition.
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2019-05-17 at 3:04 PM UTC
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2019-05-17 at 3:04 PM UTCNagels in . Space
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2019-05-17 at 3:23 PM UTCRobert Wright is like if Jordan Peterson wasn't an idiot as a philosopher.
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2021-03-21 at 12:49 PM UTC
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2021-03-21 at 1:35 PM UTC
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2021-03-21 at 3:22 PM UTCWhat a lot of people don't recognize is the fact that their "reality" can't be confirmed any farther than the chemical and electrical impulses in their brains tell them it is, and even those chemical and electrical impulses cannot be confirmed any farther than the same chemical and electrical impulses tell them it is. What "is", to them, is not necessarily the same as what may actually be out there. In fact, what the so-called chemical and electrical stimuli report to the brain could very well be simply a product of what really is out there; we have no way to confirm one way or the other, without having to rely on the very effect we are attempting to investigate. It's a catch 22. "Reality", as we know it, is so cleverly arranged that we do not have the ability to confirm it one way or the other.
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2021-03-22 at 3:23 AM UTC
Originally posted by Lanny I think this is a good point and well put. The fact that we can report on experiential phenomena doesn't seem like a terrible challenge to the epiphenomenalist, but the fact that we have reportability on second-order things like qualia would seem to suggest that experience has a causal impact on behavior. Or at least that would seem to be the simplest explanation. I've been mulling this over since you posted it and don't have a fleshed out response. I'm not convinced it's a conclusive refutation of epiphenomenalism but it certainly is a challenge.
Just wanted to say I thought that was a good point and the reason I haven't replied is because I'm not totally sure what I think about it yet.
Reply to me cunt -
2021-03-23 at 4:55 AM UTC
Originally posted by Joseph R. Biden Jr, 46th President of the United States of America Reply to me cunt
So the basic challenge is "if physical events are not caused by mental events, how do we explain physical events like talking about mental events". The answer the epiphenomenalist kind of has to give, so far as I can tell, is to say that another physical event is the cause, and the only physical even that makes sense is the same physical event that's causative a given mental event under discussion.
I think the reason it seems like an awkward situation is the assumption that the cause of the physical behaviors involved in discussion must be, in part at least, the subject of that discussion. Concretely, that the mental world must be the cause of discussion of the mental world. But if we really unpack that, I think we can see it need not be the case. I can find myself discussing things which do not exist, rather easily actually, I could have a conversation about James Bond's cuff links, probably in some detail, but James Bond doesn't exist, so his cuff links also do not, thus they can't actually be the cause of any such discussion. The works of Ian Fleming are part of the cause for discussion, but those are clearly distinct from "James Bond's cuff links", so we need not posit any actual cuff links are physically responsible for such a discussion.
Likewise, we need not assert that mental events are the cause for a discussion of mental events. I think it's likely that physical processes that cause our mental lives are likely also the cause of our discussions of our mental lives, which would explain why the physical behaviors we find ourselves engaging in tend to line up with our mental realities. E.g. the reason my saying "I'm feeling anxious" almost always coincides with my have the experience of anxiety is not because the latter causes the former, but that both share a cause in a particular physical state of my brain.
You used the term "integrated visual experience", "integration" being something of a term of art in neurology, so I just want to clarify that I think the most likely relation between brains and minds is that visual integration is describable in purely physical terms. Perhaps it gives rise to the experience of vision, or perhaps the output of visual integration is further processed somehow to produce experience, but either way we certainly don't need to posit that extracting the shape of some object from visual input happens in the mental realm, and thus discussion of shapes need have causal dependence on any mental object.
P.S. ur mum is a whore -
2021-03-23 at 2:42 PM UTC
Originally posted by Lanny So the basic challenge is "if physical events are not caused by mental events, how do we explain physical events like talking about mental events". The answer the epiphenomenalist kind of has to give, so far as I can tell, is to say that another physical event is the cause, and the only physical even that makes sense is the same physical event that's causative a given mental event under discussion.
There is no reason to make this absurd distinction of "mental events" and "physical" events, except as mental events being a specific subset of physical events.
You can exert forces upon the world to talk about the ineffability of consciousness, how hard it is to describe it, the meditational experience of disassociating from thought and becoming pure experience, the very notion of epiphenomena whatever.
What else is left? Whatever answer you give me, if you can type it out, it proves my point. You've never once had an experience you couldn't at least bumble around physically about not being able to describe. You haven't even had an experience of an experience like that.
Imagine if you made a robot, maybe with some aspect you don't really understand like a big DNN file to power its functionality. It starts talking about how it can't even begin to describe what it is feeling, but it's feeling it, how at least it cannot doubt the reality of its own experience, how the experience night not cause its behaviour. Meanwhile we are standing there looking at something clearly exerting forces in the world to relate it. At no point should you be tempted to say it's accessing some different domain of existence, or coinciding with it, or anything like that, it's just complex.
The takeaway from that isn't that there must be some correlation between two different kinds of existence but that the very mechanism by which you're aware of anything, is ultimately physical.
The rest of your post is not really any response to my point:I think the reason it seems like an awkward situation is the assumption that the cause of the physical behaviors involved in discussion must be, in part at least, the subject of that discussion. Concretely, that the mental world must be the cause of discussion of the mental world. But if we really unpack that, I think we can see it need not be the case. I can find myself discussing things which do not exist, rather easily actually, I could have a conversation about James Bond's cuff links, probably in some detail, but James Bond doesn't exist, so his cuff links also do not, thus they can't actually be the cause of any such discussion. The works of Ian Fleming are part of the cause for discussion, but those are clearly distinct from "James Bond's cuff links", so we need not posit any actual cuff links are physically responsible for such a discussion.
Existence et al isn't the problem though.
James Bond's cufflinks don't need to physically exist somewhere in the world for talk and thought about them to be based purely on physical events. The same way a computer can generate, work with, refer to etc a "file" but you can dissect it and there's no "file" anywhere. That doesn't mean the information doesn't exist or that it's non-physical. It exists and it is physical, it's just not an object somewhere.
It is just an abstraction of complex sets of physical events.Likewise, we need not assert that mental events are the cause for a discussion of mental events. I think it's likely that physical processes that cause our mental lives are likely also the cause of our discussions of our mental lives, which would explain why the physical behaviors we find ourselves engaging in tend to line up with our mental realities. E.g. the reason my saying "I'm feeling anxious" almost always coincides with my have the experience of anxiety is not because the latter causes the former, but that both share a cause in a particular physical state of my brain.
We need not posit that mental events are distinct from physical events at all. I don't know what this "both" is, what remains? I mean even when you typed this, your fingers were very much working in self-reference to something physical. When you don't say something out loud but have the potential to say it yet bite your tongue and hold your hand over your mouth, that's also a physical event. At no point do we need something outside of the physical causal chain, in fact it would be fundamentally wrong.
What you should recognise is a gradual encroachment of the physical facts upon any phenomena you can call "mental". Once you can explain why you are talking about what you are talking about, all that remains is things you think you can't talk about, except even by making that statement you are talking about them.You used the term "integrated visual experience", "integration" being something of a term of art in neurology, so I just want to clarify that I think the most likely relation between brains and minds is that visual integration is describable in purely physical terms. Perhaps it gives rise to the experience of vision, or perhaps the output of visual integration is further processed somehow to produce experience, but either way we certainly don't need to posit that extracting the shape of some object from visual input happens in the mental realm, and thus discussion of shapes need have causal dependence on any mental object.
P.S. ur mum is a whore
We don't need to posit any kind of mental realm at all, that's the point. Even now when you are discussing mental events, what are you even talking about? You don't need to pull the visual experience out of a "mental realm", it's totally explicable by physical events even if it is really hard to parse out, because you can talk about it.
If we get to the point where whatever your mouth is saying is directly related to what your brain is thinking and it can be explained in physical terms, then you CAN just declare there is something extra missing, that's not falsifiable, but on what basis are you even firing ATPs to make that declaration?
Ps: you got Zok'd and Wires'd nigga -
2021-03-24 at 11:24 PM UTC
Originally posted by Joseph R. Biden Jr, 46th President of the United States of America There is no reason to make this absurd distinction of "mental events" and "physical" events, except as mental events being a specific subset of physical events.
Yes, I understand this point, it's certainly one worth making, I'll address it in a moment but it's important to separate it from your prior argument at the start of post #122. There you say (paraphrasing, obviously) that the fact that we communicate (physical action) about experience suggests experience is the cause of that communication. It's an interesting objection but ultimately one I don't think succeeds, I think we can communicate about a thing without that thing being a causal influence on communication.
The argument that a mental/physical divide is not necessary is one that of course needs to be addressed by the epiphenomenalist but it's distinct from this argument about causes, and the arguments needs to be treated separately.You can exert forces upon the world to talk about the ineffability of consciousness, how hard it is to describe it, the meditational experience of disassociating from thought and becoming pure experience, the very notion of epiphenomena whatever.
What else is left? Whatever answer you give me, if you can type it out, it proves my point. You've never once had an experience you couldn't at least bumble around physically about not being able to describe. You haven't even had an experience of an experience like that.
What about me talking about something makes that thing necessarily physical? Why can't I simply be talking about a non-physical experience that has no causal influence on the physical world?Existence et al isn't the problem though.
I don't think existence is the problem, but I think existence is a necessary precursor to causal influence. What doesn't exist certainly can't have any physical impact on the world. So, the example of having a coherent discussion about something that doesn't exist demonstrates that the subject of discussion need not be causally responsible for discussion.We need not posit that mental events are distinct from physical events at all. I don't know what this "both" is, what remains? I mean even when you typed this, your fingers were very much working in self-reference to something physical. When you don't say something out loud but have the potential to say it yet bite your tongue and hold your hand over your mouth, that's also a physical event. At no point do we need something outside of the physical causal chain, in fact it would be fundamentally wrong.
This is where we shift back to a different argument, which is fine, but again just keep in mind this is a different objection. I agree that all my behavior is explainable by purely physical mechanism. This actually is part of the point Chalmers tries to make. Everything we do seems to have a physical explanation, a unified physical theory could explain every behavior I ever have or will engage in, and it would do so without ever needing to make any reference experience. My eyes and brain can cooperate to avoid obstacles when walking or seek out food purely through physical causality, there is no need anywhere in the physical explanation to posit subjective experience. And yet I have absolutely convincing first hand evidence that I do in fact experience things.
Now you've sort of already presented your idea of what experience is, you think it's an "abstraction", experience is a sort of name or grouping of certain physical facts. The experience of pain, in the position I think you're representing, simply describes a subset of possible brain states that we group together and generalize and call "pain". I don't find this satisfactory though, for one experience is radically subjective. I'm literally incapable of feeling anyone's experience of pain but my own. No other physical phenomenon, or abstracted group of physical phenomena, seems to have this quality. An every day object is what it is, it presents itself the same to everything. The Eiffel Tower is a little over a thousand feet tall, that holds for you and it holds for me. It doesn't even seem to have any relation to you or me or anybody. It's just a plain old fact. My experience is only meaningful to me however, there seem to be no mind independent facts about experience. Although I generally believe there are other things having experiences in the world, I'm absolutely isolated from those experiences and no amount of physical knowledge about the world will ever give me experiential access to anything other than my own experience. This is kind of color scientist Mary, repackaged. That's pretty convincing to me, there really doesn't see to be anything physical to be said, at any level of abstraction, about experience (other than, perhaps, its physical causes). -
2021-03-26 at 4:48 PM UTC
Originally posted by Lanny There you say (paraphrasing, obviously) that the fact that we communicate (physical action) about experience suggests experience is the cause of that communication. It's an interesting objection but ultimately one I don't think succeeds, I think we can communicate about a thing without that thing being a causal influence on communication.
How do you know what a "James Bond" or a "cufflink" is?
No we cannot communicate about a thing without that thing being the causal influence.
The only arguments you have made so far are basically that we can abstract away the causal influences because they are really complex.
The formation of you as an individual happened in a wild milieu of selective processes applied to billions of years of chemistry that happened to chance upon outsized relative fitness advantages from cooperation, formed languages, and became a complex system of organisms with a cultural dimension that allowed for ideas like spies and fictional characters and shirts, with cuffs that don't have buttons but instead a space for an accessory designed to hold them together.
There is no man named James Bond and his cufflinks are not physical objects within the world. But ideas don't just spring from the ether as some separate domain of existence. It's a complex bundle of influences that you call James Bond, and that's what is having the causal effect.
The physical roots of our mental lives are complex and there's no denying that they are complex as fuck. Maybe even intractably complex for our species, or any species, or any structure of any complexity aside from the universe itself to comprehend on a physical level. Probably nobody will ever be able go write out some equations of motion for your consciousness.
But that doesn't mean it's not physically caused.What about me talking about something makes that thing necessarily physical? Why can't I simply be talking about a non-physical experience that has no causal influence on the physical world?
By what means can any entity behave in reference to any other entity that must by definition have no influence upon it?I don't think existence is the problem, but I think existence is a necessary precursor to causal influence. What doesn't exist certainly can't have any physical impact on the world. So, the example of having a coherent discussion about something that doesn't exist demonstrates that the subject of discussion need not be causally responsible for discussion.
Are we really going to go down the "durr no real circles but their ratio is pi" road again?
Something must exist physically in some capacity for you to move your lips about it, even if it's not necessarily in the particular capacity you perceive it to be. The misperception is only in our personal inability to describe it.I agree that all my behavior is explainable by purely physical mechanism. This actually is part of the point Chalmers tries to make. Everything we do seems to have a physical explanation, a unified physical theory could explain every behavior I ever have or will engage in, and it would do so without ever needing to make any reference experience. My eyes and brain can cooperate to avoid obstacles when walking or seek out food purely through physical causality, there is no need anywhere in the physical explanation to posit subjective experience. And yet I have absolutely convincing first hand evidence that I do in fact experience things.
The problem, as has been pointed out publicly to Chalmers like 600 times, is that this point is made by assumption.
From the fact that you CAN recursively talk about your consciousness, it is evident that an account of your behaviour would include an account of your subjective experience.
Start listing off what aspects of consciousness you think can't be explained by physical events, even the things you can't quite put into words, just count em. Taken as physical events, what might be a likely explanation the particular regularity of your behaviour? It might even involve concepts that don't have any existence on any individual microscopic level, like the concept of temperature to explain your experience of discomfort when it is too hot. But ultimately it will be derived from the behaviour of physical objects in space.Now you've sort of already presented your idea of what experience is, you think it's an "abstraction", experience is a sort of name or grouping of certain physical facts.
Actually I meant that when you talk about our ability to refer to "things that don't exist" like James Bond and his cufflinks, you, in the way you're characterizing it, are just abstracting away the complex set of physical influences that help you create ideas like fictional characters and cufflinks etc and then claiming it's actually nonphysical. It's a subtle but important difference. There's nothing nonphysical about it, even if the physical influences are extremely messy and hard to disentangle.
There are complex physical I fluences that we, for the sake of convenience, of perhaps even by necessity due to our limited ability to process things to the level of conscious understanding (doesn't matter either way), abstract away.The experience of pain, in the position I think you're representing, simply describes a subset of possible brain states that we group together and generalize and call "pain". I don't find this satisfactory though, for one experience is radically subjective. I'm literally incapable of feeling anyone's experience of pain but my own.
Imagine one robot saying to another robot "the unit identified as X89 is literally incapable of performing the computation of any other unit, only the computations of X89. Because even if you were to take all the information about the computation of another unit and dump it into X89, X89 can still only ever perform X89's computation of it."
This would be a massive "no shit" to a third observer and not prove or require some radical subjectivity but a totally non-radical kind of subjectivity, that semantically two different things cannot be the same because they are defined as such.No other physical phenomenon, or abstracted group of physical phenomena, seems to have this quality. An every day object is what it is, it presents itself the same to everything. The Eiffel Tower is a little over a thousand feet tall, that holds for you and it holds for me. It doesn't even seem to have any relation to you or me or anybody. It's just a plain old fact. My experience is only meaningful to me however, there seem to be no mind independent facts about experience.
Not at all, it's just one more fact. You can "know about" the stress of thousands of tonnes of steel upon the base of the eiffel tower. It's a relatively simple calculation at the end of the day. But you can't know "what it's like" to supports thousands of tons of steel. The difference isn't surprising nAlthough I generally believe there are other things having experiences in the world, I'm absolutely isolated from those experiences and no amount of physical knowledge about the world will ever give me experiential access to anything other than my own experience. This is kind of color scientist Mary, repackaged. That's pretty convincing to me, there really doesn't see to be anything physical to be said, at any level of abstraction, about experience (other than, perhaps, its physical causes).
Imagine we raise a robot called Robo-Mary from birth inside a monochrome room. She never receives a photon outside of a particular hue. Robo-Mary receives ALL the physical information about colours, light and perception, including all information about an identical Robo-Mary (let's call her Bobo) who is looking at a rainbow and receiving photons from coloured sources and processing them. Robo-Mary then makes her optical sensors output the same information to the rest of her system, as from the information provided her. Then she turns off this simulation and steps outside of the room to see a real rainbow.
We would not expect Robo Mary to receive any new information or be "surprised" at what she witnesses. By the declaration that she received all physical information about it in the first place, it is trivial. But of course she could only experience what Mary can experience, not what Bobo can experience, because she is Mary and not Bobo. But this is again trivial and nowhere do we even need to posit that Robo-Mary necessarily must be "conscious". She could be doing it in the dark, and so could Bobo. But we would see the same kind of "subjectivity problem" (the "no-shit" kind). It wouldn't indicate anything non-physical.
