so i know a lot of other users will just be dismissive but i like to hone my critical thinking skills, and most people are completely unfamiliar with these advanced concepts, so here’s my philosophical examination of the issue.
the thing is, we don’t even know how to prove HUMANS are sentient except by self-reports of our internal subjective experiences.
so sentience/consciousness as i discuss it here refers primarily to Qualia, or to a being existing in such a state as to experience Qualia. Qualia are the internal, subjective, mental experiences of external, physical phenomena.
here’s the task of people that want to prove that the human brain is a meat computer: Explain, in exact detail, how (i.e. the procsses by which) Qualia, (i.e. internal, subjective, mental experiences) arise from external, objective, physical phenomena.
hint: you can’t. the move by physicalist philosophy is simply to deny the existence of qualia, consciousness, and subjective experience altogether as ‘illusory’ - but illusory to what? an illusion necessarily has an audience, something it is fooling or decieving. this ‘something’ would be the ‘consciousness’ or ‘sentience’ or to put it in your oh so smug terms the ‘soul’ that non-physicalist philosophy might posit. this move by physicalists is therefore syntactically absurd and merely moves the goalpost from ‘what are qualia’ to ‘what are those illusory, deceitful qualia decieving’. consciousness/sentience/qualia are distinctly not information processing phenomena, they are entirely superfluous to information processing tasks. sentience/consciousness/Qualia is/are not the information processing, but internal, subjective, mental awareness and experience of some of these information processing tasks.
Consider information processing, and the kinds of information processing that our brains/minds are capable of.
What about information processing requires an internal, subjective, mental experience? Nothing at all. An information processing system could hypothetically manage all of the tasks of a human’s normal activities (moving, eating, speaking, planning, etc.) flawlessly, without having such an internal, subjective, mental experience. (this hypothetical kind of person with no internal experiences is where the term ‘philosophical zombie’ comes from) There is no reason to assume that an information processing system that contains information about itself would have to be ‘aware’ of this information in a conscious sense of having an internal, subjective, mental experience of the information, like how a calculator or computer is assumed to perform information processing without any internal subjective mental experiences of its own (independently of the human operators).
and yet, humans (and likely other kinds of life) do have these strange internal subjective mental phenomena anyway.
our science has yet to figure out how or why this is, and the usual neuroscience task of merely correlating internal experiences to external brain activity measurements will fundamentally and definitionally never be able to prove causation, even hypothetically.
so the options we are left with in terms of conclusions to draw are:
all matter contains some kind of (inhuman) sentience, including computers, that can sometimes coalesce into human-like sentience when in certain configurations (animism)
nothing is truly sentient whatsoever and our self reports otherwise are to be ignored and disregarded (self-denying mechanistic physicalist zen nihilism)
there is something special or unique or not entirely understood about biological life (at least human life if not all life with a central nervous system) that produces sentience/consciousness/Qualia (‘soul’-ism as you might put it, but no ‘soul’ is required for this conclusion, it could just as easily be termed ‘mystery-ism’ or ‘unknown-ism’)
And personally the only option i have any disdain for is number 2, as i cannot bring myself to deny the very thing i am constantly and completely immersed inside of/identical with.
here’s the task of people that want to prove that the human brain is a meat computer: Explain, in exact detail, how (i.e. the procsses by which) Qualia, (i.e. internal, subjective, mental experiences) arise from external, objective, physical phenomena.
hint: you can’t.
Why not? I understand that we cannot, at this particular moment, explain every step of the process and how every cause translates to an effect until you have consciousness, but we can point at the results of observation and study and less complex systems we understand the workings of better and say that it’s most likely that the human brain functions in the same way, and these processes produce Qualia.
It’s not absolute proof, but there’s nothing wrong with just saying that from what we understand, this is the most likely explanation.
Unless I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying here, why is the idea that it can’t be done the takeaway rather than it will take a long time for us to be able to say whether or not it’s possible?
and the usual neuroscience task of merely correlating internal experiences to external brain activity measurements will fundamentally and definitionally never be able to prove causation, even hypothetically.
Once you believe you understand exactly what external brain activity leads to particular internal experiences, you could surely prove it experimentally by building a system where you can induce that activity and seeing if the system can report back the expected experience (though this might not be possible to do ethically).
As a final point, surely your own argument above about an illusion requiring an observer rules out concluding anything along the lines of point 2?
because qualia are fundamentally a subjective phenomena, and there is no concievable way to arrive at subjective phenomena via objective physical quantitites/measurements.
Once you believe you understand exactly what external brain activity leads to particular internal experiences, you could surely prove it experimentally by building a system where you can induce that activity and seeing if the system can report back the expected experience (though this might not be possible to do ethically).
this is not true. for example, take the example of a radio, presented to uncontacted people who do not know what a radio is. It would be reasonable for these people to assume that the voices coming from the radio are produced in their entirety inside the radio box/chassis, after all, when you interfere with the internals of the radio, it effects which voices come out and in what quality. and yet, because of a fundamental lack of understanding of the mechanics of the radio, and a lack of knowledge of how radios are used and how radio programs are produced and performed, this is an entirely incorrect assessment of the situation.
in this metaphor, the ‘radio’ is analogous to the ‘brain’ or ‘body’, and the ‘voices’ or radio programs are the ‘consciousness’, that is assumed to be coming form inside the box, but is in fact coming from outside the box, from completely invisible waves in the air. the ‘uncontacted people’ are modern scientists trying to understand that which is unknown to humanity.
this isn’t to say that i think the brain is a radio, although that is a fun thought experiment, but to demonstrate why correlation does not, in fact, necessarily imply causation, especially in the case of the neural correlates of consciousness. consciousness definitely impinges upon or depends upon the physical brain, it is in some sense affected by it, no one would argue this point seriously, but to assume causal relationship is intellectually lazy.
because qualia are fundamentally a subjective phenomena, and there is no concievable way to arrive at subjective phenomena via objective physical quantitites/measurements.
Having done some quick reading, I can see that qualia are definitionally subjective, but I would question how anyone could assert that they possess internal mental experiences that “no amount of purely physical information includes.”, or that such a thing can even exist with any level of confidence. Certainly not enough confidence to structure an argument around. The justification seems to be the idea that because we cannot do something now, that thing cannot be done. I don’t find that convincing.
This might be going too far into the analogy, but I think the problem with a comparison to a radio is that if you examine the radio down to its smallest part, and then assemble a second radio, that radio will behave in the same as the first.
Presumably as well, with enough examination, it would come to be understood that the voices coming from the radio are produced somewhere else, and there would be no reason for anyone to think that the voices themselves are appearing from an intangible and inherently subjective origin. If consciousness is essentially a puppeteer for the physical human body, that doesn’t preclude consciousness existing physically somewhere else, and that the “broadcaster” isn’t something capable of examination or imitation.
The whole argument seems to boil down to “maybe consciousness doesn’t work the way science would currently suggest it does.” but doesn’t present any evidence that the consciousness is somehow unsolvable.
but to assume causal relationship is intellectually lazy.
Instead, assuming that an undetectable intangible and fundamentally improvable mechanism is behind consciousness without proof is worse than lazy, it’s magical thinking. While I don’t think you could ever prove that that wasn’t the case, it should only seriously be entertained once every other option has been thoroughly exhausted.
(Reading this back, this feels quite confrontational. I don’t intend it to be, but I lack the ability to word it in the tone that I would prefer.)
how anyone could assert that they possess internal mental experiences that “no amount of purely physical information includes.”, or that such a thing can even exist with any level of confidence.
The justification seems to be the idea that because we cannot do something now, that thing cannot be done. I don’t find that convincing.
its not just that we cannot do it now, its that it is literally definitionally impossible even conceptually to arrive at or explain subjectivity, assuming a physicalist model of the world that specifically discludes it in principle.
the claim is not that consciousness is ‘unsolveable’, but that it is unsolved, and that it is irreducible to terms of pure information processing. subjectivity is entirely separate from and unnecessary for information processing.
This might be going too far into the analogy
correct, it was merely to elucidate the difference between causation and correlation and the scientific method and attitude. the metaphor is not designed to interrogate subjectivity.
Instead, assuming that an undetectable intangible and fundamentally improvable mechanism is behind consciousness without proof is worse than lazy, it’s magical thinking. While I don’t think you could ever prove that that wasn’t the case, it should only seriously be entertained once every other option has been thoroughly exhausted.
no, instead one should assume nothing, like a scientist should. you assume that you do not know until you actually do.
to go back to the analogy you are here like one of the uncontacted people encountering a radio, and, after much experimentation and analysis among your group has concluded that the voice cannot come from inside but form some as yet unknown source outside, you call them insane for positing even the hypothetical existence of such a thing instead of assuming it comes from inside in some way we don’t yet understand (but are the assumed teleological inevitability of our current understanding which obviously never needs to be revised).
to go back to the analogy you are here like one of the uncontacted people encountering a radio, and, after much experimentation and analysis among your group has concluded that the voice cannot come from inside but form some as yet unknown source outside, you call them insane for positing even the hypothetical existence of such a thing instead of assuming it comes from inside in some way we don’t yet understand
Yet they also seem to be claiming that the source of the voices is not just unknown, but unknowable, and they cannot explain even conjecturally how it might be that the voices are transmitted. When there is observable activity inside the radio that might seem to be creating the voices, but our group does not yet understand the details of how it works, it might not be insane, but it’s not particularly rational to focus on the transmission theory.
the voices in this analogy are not claimed to be unknowable full stop, merely irreconcilable with some or all of their previous understanding of the world. in non-analogical terms i am not saying we cannot explain subjectivity at all, but that we cannot explain it with our traditional ways of thinking (i am against dualism as much as physicalism). back to the analogy, it may be perfectly ‘rational’ to dismiss the transmission theory, but it would be rationally incorrect, rationally ignorant, and would prevent exploration of alternative routes of inquiry that could hypothetically lead to the truth.
If what you’re saying is true for human consciousness though, then it means that there are other undiscovered factors (invisible non EM airwaves, astrology, aliens etc) which influence our mood and state of being. Which I’m not even arguing against, but it would be a revolution in science
even just something like mental archetypes or cultural tropes are enough to influence our mood and state of being, it doesnt even have to be anything exotic
Some philosophers of mind, like Daniel Dennett, argue that qualia do not exist. Other philosophers, as well as neuroscientists and neurologists, believe qualia exist and that the desire by some philosophers to disregard qualia is based on an erroneous interpretation of what constitutes science.
Donald Duck is correct here but also that’s precisely why techbros are so infuriating. They take that conclusion and then use it to disregard everything except the one thing they conveniently think isn’t based on chemicals, like free market capitalism or Eliezer “Christ the Second” Yud
Dismissing emotions just because they are chemicals is nonsensical. It makes no sense that that alone would invalidate anything whatsoever. But these people think it does because they are conditioned by Protestantism to think that all meaning has to come from a divine and unshakeable authority. That’s why they keep reinventing God, so they have something to channel their legitimate emotions through that their delusional brain can’t invalidate.
My issue with, say, “love is chemicals” isn’t that the experience of feeling love is neurochemical activity. It’s the crude reductionist conclusion of “and therefore it is meaningless just like based Rick Sanchez said, get schwifty!”
Similarly, I don’t hold a position that living brains are impossible to fully understand; it’s that there’s more left to know and a lot of unknowns left to explore. The implication of some people in this thread is that you must choose between “LLMs are at least as conscious as human beings or are getting there very soon” or “I am a faith healer crystal toucher sprinkled with fairy dust” which is a bullshit false dichotomy.
I sort of regret posting that meme because it was more cheeky and silly than an actual position I was taking, myself. The “dae le meat computers” reductionism enjoyer I was replying to (with the “therefore you must believe that LLMs are that close to sapience or else you believe in souls and are living in a demon haunted world unlike my enlightened euphoric Reddit New Atheist self” take) was abrasive enough where I was trying some levity but it didn’t go over well.
life is necessarily more ordered and interesting than dead rocks
therefore it is a good thing to create more life, both on earth and eventually to turn dead planets life-ful (if this is even possible)
we are definitely conscious enough to at least massively increase the amount of life on earth (you could easily green all the world’s deserts under ecocommunism)
“All knowledge is unprovable and so nothing can be known” is a more hopeless position than “existence is absurd and meaning has to come from within”. I shall both fight and perish.
“All knowledge is unprovable and so nothing can be known”
Silly meme that I had just posted aside, that isn’t my actual position and I don’t think that is the position others here have taken. I said that there is a lot more left to be known and the current academic leading edge of neuroscience (not tech company marketing hype or pop nihilistic reductionistic Reddit New Atheist takes) backs that up.
I shall both fight and perish.
From here it just looks like you’re just touching the computer and doing the heavy lifting for LLM hype marketers.
You may be doing the heavy lifting in an unexamined way because you’ve been comparing living organic brains to LLMs with the implication that there’s no meaningful difference and nothing left out of the comparison except mysticism.
I mean, “meaning has to come from within” is sort of solipsistic but, depending on your definition, completely true.
The biggest problem with Camus (besides his credulity towards the western press and his lack of commitment to trains, oh and lacking any desire for systemic understanding) is that he views this question in an extremely antisocial manner. Yes, if you want affirmation from rocks and you will kill yourself if you don’t get affirmation from rocks, there’s not much to do but get some rope. However, it’s hard to imagine how differently the rhetorical direction of the Myth of Sisyphus would have gone if he had just considered more seriously the idea of finding meaning in relationships with and impact on others rather than just resenting the trees for not respecting you. Seriously, go and reread it, the idea seems as though it didn’t even cross his mind.
I think it does a lot of undue (and hopefully unintentional) heavy lifting for tech company hype marketers when someone implies that LLM treat printers might be comparable (or synonymous) to living organic brains because of the product’s imitative presentation.
on a related note, dropping this rare banger line from wikipedia:
Some philosophers of mind, like Daniel Dennett, argue that qualia do not exist. Other philosophers, as well as neuroscientists and neurologists, believe qualia exist and that the desire by some philosophers to disregard qualia is based on an erroneous interpretation of what constitutes science.[2]
citation text from the wiki page for reference
Damasio, Antonio R. (2000). The feeling of what happens: body and emotion in the making of consciousness. A Harvest book. San Diego, CA: Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-15-601075-7.
Edelman, Gerald M.; Gally, Joseph A.; Baars, Bernard J. (2011). “Biology of Consciousness”. Frontiers in Psychology. 2 (4): 4. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00004. ISSN 1664-1078. PMC 3111444. PMID 21713129.
Edelman, Gerald Maurice (1992). Bright air, brilliant fire: on the matter of the mind. New York: BasicBooks. ISBN 978-0-465-00764-6.
Edelman, Gerald M. (2003). “Naturalizing Consciousness: A Theoretical Framework”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 100 (9): 5520–5524. doi:10.1111/j.1600-0536.1978.tb04573.x. ISSN 0027-8424. JSTOR 3139744. PMID 154377. S2CID 10086119. Retrieved 2023-07-19.
Koch, Christof (2020). The feeling of life itself: why consciousness is widespread but can’t be computed (First MIT Press paperback edition 2020 ed.). Cambridge, MA London: The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-53955-5.
Llinás, Rodolfo Riascos; Llinás, Rodolfo R. (2002). I of the vortex: from neurons to self. A Bradford book (1 ed.). Cambridge, Mass. London: MIT Press. pp. 202–207. ISBN 978-0-262-62163-2.
Oizumi, Masafumi; Albantakis, Larissa; Tononi, Giulio (2014-05-08). Sporns, Olaf (ed.). “From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0”. PLOS Computational Biology. 10 (5): e1003588. Bibcode:2014PLSCB…10E3588O. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003588. ISSN 1553-7358. PMC 4014402. PMID 24811198.
Overgaard, M.; Mogensen, J.; Kirkeby-Hinrup, A., eds. (2021). Beyond neural correlates of consciousness. Routledge Taylor & Francis.
Ramachandran, V.; Hirstein, W. (March 1997). “What Does Implicit Cognition Tell Us About Consciousness?”. Consciousness and Cognition. 6 (1): 148. doi:10.1006/ccog.1997.0296. ISSN 1053-8100. S2CID 54335111.
Tononi, Giulio; Boly, Melanie; Massimini, Marcello; Koch, Christof (July 2016). “Integrated information theory: from consciousness to its physical substrate”. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience. 17 (7): 450–461. doi:10.1038/nrn.2016.44. ISSN 1471-0048. PMID 27225071. S2CID 21347087.
“Because there is disagreement on what consciousness is, it must be an illusion. You do not exist, you are only a weird metaphysical phantasm which is somehow a more grounded and tenable position.”
This is a bad summary of Dennett’s view, or at least a misleading one. He thinks that ‘qualia’ as most philosophers of mind define the term doesn’t refer to anything, and is just a weasel word obscuring that we really don’t have much of an understanding of how brains do the things they do. Qualia get glossed as the “what-it’s-like-ness” of experiences (e.g. the particular feeling of seeing the color blue), which isn’t wrong, but is only part of the story. ‘Qualia’ is a technical term in the philosophy of mind literature, and has a lot of properties attached to it (privacy, incorrigibility, ineffability, so on). Dennett argues that qualia in that sense–the philosopher’s qualia–is incoherent and internally inconsistent for a variety of reasons. This sometimes gets misrepresented as “Dennett thinks consciousness is an illusion” (a misreading that he, to be fair, could work harder to discourage), but that’s not the view. His argument against the philosopher’s qualia is pretty compelling, and doesn’t imply that people aren’t conscious. See “Quining Qualia” for a pretty accessible articulation of the argument.
i look up ‘daniel dennet’ and the first ted talk i see is literally titled ‘the illusion of consciousness’. i don’t know what else to make of that.
wikipedia defines qualia as "In philosophy of mind, qualia (/ˈkwɑːliə, ˈkweɪ-/; SG: quale /-li/) are defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience. " which is how i have been using the word. i do not care about any other usage.
all of those things you mention - privacay, ineffability, etc - are logical consequences of being a subjective phenomena.
i am familiar with quining qualia, i quite dislike it and disagree with its arguments fundamentally. his ‘intuition pumps’ are frankly nonsense.
two examples:
the coffee taste and brain surgery experiments claim to show that we cannot tell the difference between our qualia changing and our reflective juddgments and predispositions to those qualia being changed, in an attempt to prove that qualia cannot be directly apprehended by consciousness. in fact, this is quite unrelated to the direct apprehend-ability in consciousness of qualia. in the brain surgery case, whichever surgery is performed, whether the patient can realize this through introspection or not, there IS a particular qualia being experienced and there is a fact of the matter as to whether or not this qualia has changed and as to which of the surgeries was performed, even if the patient’s memory has been altered such that they cannot know this - we could even empirically verify which surgery took place! yes, we are not necessarily infallible in our comparison of non-simultaneous Qualia - how does this mean that we do not apprehend the current Quale directly in consciousness? or that we did apprehend past Qualia? Direct conscious apprehension is not equivalent to accurate memory and consistent disposition/judgment regarding that direct conscious apprehension - these are information processing tasks, not subjectivity or qualia. To be aware of ANY qualitative state is to be aware of your current REAL qualitative state, and the fact that we might misremember it or otherwise interpret it differently in the future (due to neurosurgery or not) makes it no less directly apprehended.
the beer argument is equally spurious - he claims that because our qualia can change in response to environmental stimuli (i.e. we ‘acquire a taste’ for beer and enjoy it more when we are drunk, or enjoy it by associating it with the positive drunk feelings), that qualia is not ‘intrinsic’ but ‘relational’. no one would deny that qualia are part of a causal chain - everything is causal. qualia and consciousness obviously correlate to the physical brain, and are in a causal relationship with it and therefore less directly with the wider external world. but the existence of some kind of qualia/subjectivity in a conscious organism is not a relational property - the conscious organism, while conscious, always has qualia and subjectivity of some kind or another, regardless of what environment the consciousness exists in. specific features and minutiae of the subjects of qualia and subjective experience do have a causal relationship with the external world, but again, these are information processing tasks that are affected, not the very subjectivity of the organism. the contents of experience might change, but the fact that the current experiencer (the experiencer in its context) experiences them does not. the apprehended object might change, but the fact that it is being apprehended does not.
there is something special or unique or not entirely understood about biological life (at least human life if not all life with a central nervous system) that produces sentience/consciousness/Qualia (‘soul’-ism as you might put it, but no ‘soul’ is required for this conclusion, it could just as easily be termed ‘mystery-ism’ or ‘unknown-ism’)
This is just wrong lol, there’s nothing magical about vertebrates in comparison to unicellular organisms. Maybe the depth of our emotions might be bigger, but obviously a paramecium also feels fear and happiness and anticipation, because these are necessary for it to eat and reproduce, it wouldn’t do these things if they didn’t feel good
The discrete dividing line is life and non-life (don’t @ me about viruses)
central nervous systems are so far the only thing we almost universally recognize as producing human-like subjectivity (as our evidence is the self report of humans), so i restricted my argumentation to those parameters. for all i know every quark has a kind of subjectivity associated with it, it could be as fundamental to reality as matter. and for all i know a paramecium responds to its environment with purely unconscious instinct (or if that terminology is inaccurate, biological information processing) without an internal experience. we don’t really understand how subjectivity is produced well enough to isolate it for empirical study in humans, let alone mammals, let alone microbes - but i personally think it is plausible that all life if not all matter has some kind of subjectivity.
and for all i know a paramecium responds to its environment with purely unconscious instinct (or if that terminology is inaccurate, biological information processing) without an internal experience
unicellular organisms have been shown to learn. It’s literally the same thing as a vertebrate, just less complex
I don’t find that obvious at all. I agree there is nothing special dividing vertebrates from unicellular organisms, but I definitely think that some kind of CNS is required for the experience of emotions like fear, happiness etc. I do not see at all how paramecium could experience something like that. What part of it would experience it? Emotions in humans seem to be characterised by particular patterns of brain activity and concentrations of certain molecules (hormones, etc). I really cannot see how a unicellular organism has any capacity to experience emotions as we do. I would also argue that there is no dividing line between life and non-life. Whether something is alive or not is quite nebulous and hard to define. As you say, viruses are a good example but there are many others. Eg. a pregnant mammal. The foetus does not fill the classical, basic conditions of life that are taught in school (MRS H GREN, or whatever acronym) but does it really make sense to say that it is not alive? How many organisms are there when we look at a pregnant mammal. It is not clear.
but I definitely think that some kind of CNS is required for the experience of emotions like fear, happiness etc.
okay, so when a scallop runs away from you it doesn’t feel fear?
and when a paramecium is being ensnared by a hydra or some weird protist on your microscope slide, and it’s struggling to get away, it doesn’t feel fear? lol
Obviously every moving living thing can feel fear, that’s why they’re moving living things and that’s why they run away from predators
I would also argue that there is no dividing line between life and non-life. Whether something is alive or not is quite nebulous and hard to define
With a few exceptions like viruses, it’s pretty obvious. Rocks don’t make more rocks, nor does water
I’m not sure if scallops can run…
But if you mean something like a mollusc, for example a snail, then I think it depends on which organism it is. I think a snail probably does feel fear yes in a very primal way. A bivalve like a scallop I’m not so sure, they have very basic nervous systems. An octopus I think is capable of fear and other more advanced emotions too, most likely. However, I think when we ascribe emotions to these animals we are anthropomorphising them. We have no way to know what their experience is like and we are sticking our human labels on them. Especially for a group such as molluscs, which diverged a very long time ago from the lineage that led to us. The feeling of fear, the understanding of danger and need to get away from it could be very primal and exist in many animals, but they may also feel it very differently to how we do. For example ants, I imagine a worker and does not feel fear for itself but rather the colony.
Unicellular organisms mostly move on the basis of concentration gradients, towards food and away from toxic things or predator signals. When one is struggling and being engulfed by a hydra or other unicellular organism, I don’t think it feels anything no. I think it is just trying to move away from the predator because it detects a molecular signal that it is “programmed” to move away from. By programmed I mean that behaviour is encoded in the complex interaction of the many systems that make it up, such as through the concerted action of it’s receptors, signalling pathways, enzymes, genes etc.
Rocks and water are not what I was talking about. Take for example cell-free translation systems. These are basically all of the contents of a cell but without any of the membranes. Like empty a cell into a (small) bucket. They still perform all of the biochemical reactions that took place in the normal cell. But they are not in a sack. There is no unified “thing” and it doesn’t move. If you did that to a paramecium, could that liquid still feel fear? It cant move away from anything. Is it alive? What makes something alive? Life is ultimately the sum of many complex biochemical reactions, but no one part of it is alive. Enzymes themselves are not alive surely. One single neuron is not alive.
If you had a human brain in a jar and, for arguments sake, it could still think as normal. It is intelligent and sentient, but it cannot replicate itself. But a virus, which is still much more simple than the brain in a jar, can. When you say that rocks don’t make more rocks, you seem to imply that the quality of life is in replication.
just youtube it, they can
and if they can do that, then of course they can feel fear too
When one is struggling and being engulfed by a hydra or other unicellular organism, I don’t think it feels anything no.
wild
I think it is just trying to move away from the predator because it detects a molecular signal that it is “programmed” to move away from.
replace the hydra with a tiger and the amoeba with a deer, how is it any different apart from the number of cells? The deer prey could maybe have conscious thoughts/sorrow about its children during the last seconds of its life, but other than that the fear is fundamentally the same, it’s just more complex/scaled up
By programmed I mean that behaviour is encoded in the complex interaction of the many systems that make it up, such as through the concerted action of it’s receptors, signalling pathways, enzymes, genes etc.
sure glad we don’t have any of those
Like empty a cell into a (small) bucket. They still perform all of the biochemical reactions that took place in the normal cell. But they are not in a sack. There is no unified “thing” and it doesn’t move. If you did that to a paramecium, could that liquid still feel fear? It cant move away from anything. Is it alive?
Uh, I’m not an expert but I would suspect they’re in the process of dying if you do that. They just don’t die immediately, because nothing does (even a person who gets shot stays alive for a few minutes afterward). Can you feed this cell jelly its normal food and have it sustain itself like usual? If not then I would say it’s only alive on technicality, just like a person who’s been shot in the head and can still talk for the next few seconds–they’re technically also alive! But the person will die once the last few bits of brain oxygen run out due to the mechanical reality of their heart not beating, and the cell-jelly-in-a-bucket will also die after some time due to the mechanical reality of their vacuoles or whatever not being able to properly absorb food (I’m guessing, anyway. But this isn’t really relevant to the central point)
If you had a human brain in a jar and, for arguments sake, it could still think as normal. It is intelligent and sentient, but it cannot replicate itself. But a virus, which is still much more simple than the brain in a jar, can. When you say that rocks don’t make more rocks, you seem to imply that the quality of life is in replication.
This is a disjoint coutnerexample, the point is not that a brain in a jar can’t replicate itself, but that the original organism that brain comes from, can. A man who gets a vasectomy is still alive, because his default state is being able to reproduce.
Rocks however, can NEVER reproduce. There is not A SINGLE rock that can reproduce. Therefore rocks are not alive.
It seems by your periodically hostile comments (“oh so smug terms the ‘soul’”) indicates that you have a disdain for my position, so I assume you think my position is your option 2, but I don’t ignore self-reports of sentience. I’m closer to option 1, I see it as plausible that a sufficiently general algorithm could have the same level of sentience as humans.
The third position strikes me as at least just as ridiculous as the second. Of course we don’t totally understand biological life, but just saying there’s something “special” is wild. We’re a configuration of non-sentient parts that produce sentience. Computers are also a configuration of non-sentient parts. To claim that there’s no configuration of silicon that could arrive at sentience but that there is a configuration of carbon that could arrive at sentience is imbuing carbon with some properties that seems vastly more complex than the physical reality of carbon would allow.
i think it is plausible to replicate consciousness artificially with machines, and even more plausible to replicate every information processing task in a human brain, but i do not think that purely information processing machines like computers or machines using purely information processing tools like algorithms will be the necessary hardware or software to produce artificial subjectivity.
by ‘special’ i meant not understood. and again, i submit not that it is impossible to make a subjectivity producing object like a brain artificially out of whatever material, but that it is not possible to do so using information processing technologies and theory (as understood in 2023). I don’t think artificial subjectivity is impossible, but i think purely algorithmic artificial subjectivity is impossible. I don’t think that a purely physicalist worldview of a type that discounts the possibility of subjectivity can ever account for subjectivity. i don’t think that subjectivity is explainable in terms of information processing.
here’s a syllogism to sum up my position (i believe i have argued these points sufficiently elsewhere in the thread)
Premise A: Qualia (subjective experiences) exist (a fact supported by many neuroscientists as per one of my previous posts wikipedia quote)
Premise B: Qualia, as subjective experiences, are fundamentally irreducible to information processing. (look up the hard problem of consciousness and the philosophical zombie thought experiment)
Premise C: therefore consciousness, which contains (or is identified with or consists of or interacts with or is otherwise related to) Qualia, is irreducible to information processing.
Premise D: therefore the most simplistic of physicalist worldviews (those that deny the existence of Qualia and the concept of subjectivity, like that of Daniel Dennett) can never fully account for consciousness.
thats it, nothing else i’m trying to say other than that. no mysticism, no woo, no soul, no god, no fairies, nothing to offend your delicate aesthetic sensibilities. just stuff we don’t know yet about the brain/mind/universe. no assumptions, just an acknowledgement that we do not have a Unified Theory of Everything and are likely several fundamental paradigm shifts in thinking away in many fields of research from anything resembling one.
Little late to the thread but really enjoying your posts. Curious on your thoughts if you don’t mind:
As a philosophy newbie myself, could it be a lot of this discussion/debate is due to people having no exposure to the metaphysical concepts of objectivity/subjectivity? It seems a bit portion of your argument is that people who believe we can achieve ai sentience are already committed to a (leap of faith) absolute belief in the “physicalist” model/understanding of the universe?
Also regarding the idea of a “Unified Theory of Everything”, do you believe in this as a possibility? Is having that as a goal or destination in of itself a representation of a particularly misguided “physicalist” way of thinking that many people are already committed to/trapped within?
i don’t think its about a lack of exposure to the concept of subjectivity and objectivity as much as it is a fundamental disbelief in anything approaching metaphysics whatsoever, which yes, stems from the absolute belief in a purely physicalist understanding of the universe. the difference between physicalists and myself is similar to the difference between an atheist and an agnostic. the atheist assumes that there is and can be no god or gods, whereas the agnostic makes no assumptions whatsoever regarding this. the physicalist assumes the ability of their belief system to be refined into perfection without much in the way of fundamental revision, assumes the nonexistence of any phenomena that cannot be described by physics, whereas i believe that one or several paradigm shifts in philosophy and science and the philosophy of science are necessary to improve our understanding of reality, i do not assume that the physicalist model of the universe is correct or able to be trivially modified to be correct. and when analysis in fact shows the inability of physicalism to explain a phenomena we all experience every waking moment of our lives like subjectivity or qualia, i take that as evidence against the model, instead of ignoring it in the hope that someday the model might be trivially revised somehow to account for this fundamental explanatory gap.
a ‘unified theory of everything’ may or may not be possible, but it should be especially possible under physicalism - if everything is indeed reducible to physical matter and physcial processes, then surely we should eventually be able to describe matter and related physical processes in sufficient detail to describe all of reality, including subjectivity. but i don’t think its necessarily physicalist to believe humans can comprehensively understand existence, for example if subjectivity is fundamental to reality in a way similar to matter, then understanding subjectivity and matter both, and their relationship to one another or to whatever reality they both refer to, could help us understand existence in a more coherent sense.
The premise of philosophical zombies is that it’s possible for there to be beings with the same information processing capabilities as us without experience. That is, given the same tools and platforms, they would be having just as intricate discussions about the nature of experience and sentience. without having experience or sentience.
I’m not convinced it’s functionally possible to behave the way we behave when talking & describing sentience without being sentient. I think a being that is functionally identical to me except that it lacks experience wouldn’t be functionally identical to me, because I wouldn’t be interested in sentience if I didn’t have it.
thats’ the entire point. if the existence of complex unconscious behaviors (or even just computers and math) proves that information processing can be done without internal subjective experience (if we assume a stone being hit by another stone, for example, is not experienceing subjectivity), and if there is something humans do beyond what is possible for pure information processing, then that is proof that consciousness is fundamentally irreducible to it. if there is something we can do that a philosophical zombie (a person with information processing but not subjectivity) could not, it is because of subjectivity/qualia, not information processing. subjectivity can influence our information processing but is not identical with it.
I think my point didn’t exactly get across. I’m not saying philosophical zombies can’t exist because subjectivity is something beyond information processing, I’m saying it’s plausible that subjectivity is information processing.
To say “a person with information processing but not subjectivity” could be like saying “a person with information processing but not logical reasoning”.
I would argue a person that processes information exactly like me, except that they don’t reason logically, wouldn’t process information like me. It’s not elevating logic beyond information processing, it’s a reductio ad absurdum. A person like that cannot exist.
I was saying philosophical zombies could be like that, it’s possible that they can’t exist. By lacking subjectivity they could inherently process information differently.
i know this is necroposting but i have to clarify.
one of the major premises of the p-zombie thought experiment is that there is nothing about information processing (AS WE CURRENTLY UNDERSTAND IT***) that entails or necessitates subjectivity. Information processing has zero explanatory ability for subjectivity. You cannot just assume that ‘subjectivity is information processing’ without proving it somehow, that’s not how science or philosophy work. Making a positive claim like ‘information theory can account for and explain subjectivity’ requires proof. and since no proof has been provided we must assume the negative claim, that subjectivity is not explained by information processing theory. If subjectivity is information processing (the way we currently understand information processing), prove it! Show your work. If you think information theory only needs trivial modifications to account for subjectivity it should be easy to elucidate what kinds of modifications those could be and what kinds of experiments we can conduct to test those modifications.
***For if information processing theory requires substantial revision to account for subjectivity, which i think is at least plausible if not obviously true at this point in history, then the claim that ‘subjectivity is information processing’ becomes vague and meaningless - we do not know what this hypothetical revised information theory looks like, what it claims and assumes as logical axioms or empirical truths, so making any statements about this hypothetical future information processing theory is completely pointless and meaningless.
You had a small fallacy in the middle, when you said “assume the negative claim”, you then made a positive claim.
“subjectivity is not explained by information processing theory” is a positive claim, but you said it was negative. I know it has the word “not” in it, but positive/negative doesn’t have to do with claims for or against existence, it has to do with burden of proof. A negative “claim” isn’t actually a claim at all.
The negative claim here would be “subjectivity may not be explained by information processing theory”. People usually have more understanding about these distinctions in religious contexts:
Positive claim: god definitely exists
Positive claim: god definitely doesn’t exist
Negative claim: god may or may not exist.
The default stance is an atheistic one, but it’s not “capital A” atheist (for what it’s worth I do make the positive claim against a theological God’s existence). Someone who lacks a belief in God is still an atheist (e.g someone who has never even heard of a theological God), but they’re not making a positive claim against his existence.
So the default stance is “information theory may or may not account for subjectivity”, we don’t assume it does, but we also don’t discount the possibility that it does as necessarily untrue, like you are.
If you notice, you made another mistake, you misread what I was saying. I never made a positive claim about subjectivity being information processing. I only alluded to the possibility. You on the other hand did make a positive claim about subjectivity definitely not being information processing.
you are focusing on minor points of rhetoric instead of engaging with my broader point and the relevant LLM discussion. I am in fact assuming the null hypothesis in this argument.
first: the null hypothesis is a general statement or default position that there is no relationship between two measured phenomena, or no association among groups.
in this case, the phenomena whose relationship is in question are information processing theory and subjectivity.
consider Hitchen’s Razor, which states that ‘what may be asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence’
even if your specific argument is different, the subject of the OP with which i presumed you more or less agree, argued that not only can information processing theory account for subjectivity, but that it does, and that LLM chatbots possess such subjectivity. This is asserted without proof, and according to hitchen’s razor I dismiss this pair of theses equally without proof.
as to your stance that information processing may or may not account for subjectivity, we can formulate this position as the positive claim that ‘information processing may account for subjectivity’ without losing any meaning. if nothing else, assume this is the position i am arguing against. i am not opposed to agnosticism on this matter.
i offer a syllogism:
A: if information processing can account for subjectivity, it would have done so by now - or, if it can account for subjectivity with only trivial modifications, we would have some indication of paths towards such an account.
B. we do not, in fact, have such an account within current information theory, or theoretical paths of investigation towards such an account.
c. therefore, information theory as it is today, or only trivially modified, does not account for subjectivity
so i know a lot of other users will just be dismissive but i like to hone my critical thinking skills, and most people are completely unfamiliar with these advanced concepts, so here’s my philosophical examination of the issue.
the thing is, we don’t even know how to prove HUMANS are sentient except by self-reports of our internal subjective experiences.
so sentience/consciousness as i discuss it here refers primarily to Qualia, or to a being existing in such a state as to experience Qualia. Qualia are the internal, subjective, mental experiences of external, physical phenomena.
here’s the task of people that want to prove that the human brain is a meat computer: Explain, in exact detail, how (i.e. the procsses by which) Qualia, (i.e. internal, subjective, mental experiences) arise from external, objective, physical phenomena.
hint: you can’t. the move by physicalist philosophy is simply to deny the existence of qualia, consciousness, and subjective experience altogether as ‘illusory’ - but illusory to what? an illusion necessarily has an audience, something it is fooling or decieving. this ‘something’ would be the ‘consciousness’ or ‘sentience’ or to put it in your oh so smug terms the ‘soul’ that non-physicalist philosophy might posit. this move by physicalists is therefore syntactically absurd and merely moves the goalpost from ‘what are qualia’ to ‘what are those illusory, deceitful qualia decieving’. consciousness/sentience/qualia are distinctly not information processing phenomena, they are entirely superfluous to information processing tasks. sentience/consciousness/Qualia is/are not the information processing, but internal, subjective, mental awareness and experience of some of these information processing tasks.
Consider information processing, and the kinds of information processing that our brains/minds are capable of.
What about information processing requires an internal, subjective, mental experience? Nothing at all. An information processing system could hypothetically manage all of the tasks of a human’s normal activities (moving, eating, speaking, planning, etc.) flawlessly, without having such an internal, subjective, mental experience. (this hypothetical kind of person with no internal experiences is where the term ‘philosophical zombie’ comes from) There is no reason to assume that an information processing system that contains information about itself would have to be ‘aware’ of this information in a conscious sense of having an internal, subjective, mental experience of the information, like how a calculator or computer is assumed to perform information processing without any internal subjective mental experiences of its own (independently of the human operators).
and yet, humans (and likely other kinds of life) do have these strange internal subjective mental phenomena anyway.
our science has yet to figure out how or why this is, and the usual neuroscience task of merely correlating internal experiences to external brain activity measurements will fundamentally and definitionally never be able to prove causation, even hypothetically.
so the options we are left with in terms of conclusions to draw are:
And personally the only option i have any disdain for is number 2, as i cannot bring myself to deny the very thing i am constantly and completely immersed inside of/identical with.
Why not? I understand that we cannot, at this particular moment, explain every step of the process and how every cause translates to an effect until you have consciousness, but we can point at the results of observation and study and less complex systems we understand the workings of better and say that it’s most likely that the human brain functions in the same way, and these processes produce Qualia.
It’s not absolute proof, but there’s nothing wrong with just saying that from what we understand, this is the most likely explanation.
Unless I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying here, why is the idea that it can’t be done the takeaway rather than it will take a long time for us to be able to say whether or not it’s possible?
Once you believe you understand exactly what external brain activity leads to particular internal experiences, you could surely prove it experimentally by building a system where you can induce that activity and seeing if the system can report back the expected experience (though this might not be possible to do ethically).
As a final point, surely your own argument above about an illusion requiring an observer rules out concluding anything along the lines of point 2?
because qualia are fundamentally a subjective phenomena, and there is no concievable way to arrive at subjective phenomena via objective physical quantitites/measurements.
this is not true. for example, take the example of a radio, presented to uncontacted people who do not know what a radio is. It would be reasonable for these people to assume that the voices coming from the radio are produced in their entirety inside the radio box/chassis, after all, when you interfere with the internals of the radio, it effects which voices come out and in what quality. and yet, because of a fundamental lack of understanding of the mechanics of the radio, and a lack of knowledge of how radios are used and how radio programs are produced and performed, this is an entirely incorrect assessment of the situation.
in this metaphor, the ‘radio’ is analogous to the ‘brain’ or ‘body’, and the ‘voices’ or radio programs are the ‘consciousness’, that is assumed to be coming form inside the box, but is in fact coming from outside the box, from completely invisible waves in the air. the ‘uncontacted people’ are modern scientists trying to understand that which is unknown to humanity.
this isn’t to say that i think the brain is a radio, although that is a fun thought experiment, but to demonstrate why correlation does not, in fact, necessarily imply causation, especially in the case of the neural correlates of consciousness. consciousness definitely impinges upon or depends upon the physical brain, it is in some sense affected by it, no one would argue this point seriously, but to assume causal relationship is intellectually lazy.
Having done some quick reading, I can see that qualia are definitionally subjective, but I would question how anyone could assert that they possess internal mental experiences that “no amount of purely physical information includes.”, or that such a thing can even exist with any level of confidence. Certainly not enough confidence to structure an argument around. The justification seems to be the idea that because we cannot do something now, that thing cannot be done. I don’t find that convincing.
This might be going too far into the analogy, but I think the problem with a comparison to a radio is that if you examine the radio down to its smallest part, and then assemble a second radio, that radio will behave in the same as the first.
Presumably as well, with enough examination, it would come to be understood that the voices coming from the radio are produced somewhere else, and there would be no reason for anyone to think that the voices themselves are appearing from an intangible and inherently subjective origin. If consciousness is essentially a puppeteer for the physical human body, that doesn’t preclude consciousness existing physically somewhere else, and that the “broadcaster” isn’t something capable of examination or imitation.
The whole argument seems to boil down to “maybe consciousness doesn’t work the way science would currently suggest it does.” but doesn’t present any evidence that the consciousness is somehow unsolvable.
Instead, assuming that an undetectable intangible and fundamentally improvable mechanism is behind consciousness without proof is worse than lazy, it’s magical thinking. While I don’t think you could ever prove that that wasn’t the case, it should only seriously be entertained once every other option has been thoroughly exhausted.
(Reading this back, this feels quite confrontational. I don’t intend it to be, but I lack the ability to word it in the tone that I would prefer.)
its not just that we cannot do it now, its that it is literally definitionally impossible even conceptually to arrive at or explain subjectivity, assuming a physicalist model of the world that specifically discludes it in principle.
the claim is not that consciousness is ‘unsolveable’, but that it is unsolved, and that it is irreducible to terms of pure information processing. subjectivity is entirely separate from and unnecessary for information processing.
correct, it was merely to elucidate the difference between causation and correlation and the scientific method and attitude. the metaphor is not designed to interrogate subjectivity.
no, instead one should assume nothing, like a scientist should. you assume that you do not know until you actually do.
to go back to the analogy you are here like one of the uncontacted people encountering a radio, and, after much experimentation and analysis among your group has concluded that the voice cannot come from inside but form some as yet unknown source outside, you call them insane for positing even the hypothetical existence of such a thing instead of assuming it comes from inside in some way we don’t yet understand (but are the assumed teleological inevitability of our current understanding which obviously never needs to be revised).
Yet they also seem to be claiming that the source of the voices is not just unknown, but unknowable, and they cannot explain even conjecturally how it might be that the voices are transmitted. When there is observable activity inside the radio that might seem to be creating the voices, but our group does not yet understand the details of how it works, it might not be insane, but it’s not particularly rational to focus on the transmission theory.
the voices in this analogy are not claimed to be unknowable full stop, merely irreconcilable with some or all of their previous understanding of the world. in non-analogical terms i am not saying we cannot explain subjectivity at all, but that we cannot explain it with our traditional ways of thinking (i am against dualism as much as physicalism). back to the analogy, it may be perfectly ‘rational’ to dismiss the transmission theory, but it would be rationally incorrect, rationally ignorant, and would prevent exploration of alternative routes of inquiry that could hypothetically lead to the truth.
If what you’re saying is true for human consciousness though, then it means that there are other undiscovered factors (invisible non EM airwaves, astrology, aliens etc) which influence our mood and state of being. Which I’m not even arguing against, but it would be a revolution in science
even just something like mental archetypes or cultural tropes are enough to influence our mood and state of being, it doesnt even have to be anything exotic
Some philosophers of mind, like Daniel Dennett, argue that qualia do not exist. Other philosophers, as well as neuroscientists and neurologists, believe qualia exist and that the desire by some philosophers to disregard qualia is based on an erroneous interpretation of what constitutes science.
Sounds like a made up word
Donald Duck is correct here but also that’s precisely why techbros are so infuriating. They take that conclusion and then use it to disregard everything except the one thing they conveniently think isn’t based on chemicals, like free market capitalism or Eliezer “Christ the Second” Yud
Dismissing emotions just because they are chemicals is nonsensical. It makes no sense that that alone would invalidate anything whatsoever. But these people think it does because they are conditioned by Protestantism to think that all meaning has to come from a divine and unshakeable authority. That’s why they keep reinventing God, so they have something to channel their legitimate emotions through that their delusional brain can’t invalidate.
My issue with, say, “love is chemicals” isn’t that the experience of feeling love is neurochemical activity. It’s the crude reductionist conclusion of “and therefore it is meaningless just like based Rick Sanchez said, get schwifty!”
Similarly, I don’t hold a position that living brains are impossible to fully understand; it’s that there’s more left to know and a lot of unknowns left to explore. The implication of some people in this thread is that you must choose between “LLMs are at least as conscious as human beings or are getting there very soon” or “I am a faith healer crystal toucher sprinkled with fairy dust” which is a bullshit false dichotomy.
Yes, I agree completely. I had to rewrite my comment multiple times to clarify that, but yeah. Sorry :(
I sort of regret posting that meme because it was more cheeky and silly than an actual position I was taking, myself. The “dae le meat computers” reductionism enjoyer I was replying to (with the “therefore you must believe that LLMs are that close to sapience or else you believe in souls and are living in a demon haunted world unlike my enlightened euphoric Reddit New Atheist self” take) was abrasive enough where I was trying some levity but it didn’t go over well.
I understand, either way the meme you posted is funny though because it would piss techbros off
Judging by the reactions it got, it certainly did.
He’s not though
life is necessarily more ordered and interesting than dead rocks
therefore it is a good thing to create more life, both on earth and eventually to turn dead planets life-ful (if this is even possible)
we are definitely conscious enough to at least massively increase the amount of life on earth (you could easily green all the world’s deserts under ecocommunism)
Our purpose in life is not reproduction.
I think enabling mass reproduction of plant species in the Sahara Desert is cool and good
(and yes I’ve done the calculations, no the Sahara doesn’t “enable” the Amazon, it’s like 3 grains of sand per square foot)
“All knowledge is unprovable and so nothing can be known” is a more hopeless position than “existence is absurd and meaning has to come from within”. I shall both fight and perish.
Silly meme that I had just posted aside, that isn’t my actual position and I don’t think that is the position others here have taken. I said that there is a lot more left to be known and the current academic leading edge of neuroscience (not tech company marketing hype or pop nihilistic reductionistic Reddit New Atheist takes) backs that up.
From here it just looks like you’re just touching the computer and doing the heavy lifting for LLM hype marketers.
I’m not fighting for those idiots. We’re a long way away from a real machine intelligence.
You may be doing the heavy lifting in an unexamined way because you’ve been comparing living organic brains to LLMs with the implication that there’s no meaningful difference and nothing left out of the comparison except mysticism.
Oh, no. I didn’t mean to come across that way at all. Sorry if it looked like that.
I mean, “meaning has to come from within” is sort of solipsistic but, depending on your definition, completely true.
The biggest problem with Camus (besides his credulity towards the western press and his lack of commitment to trains, oh and lacking any desire for systemic understanding) is that he views this question in an extremely antisocial manner. Yes, if you want affirmation from rocks and you will kill yourself if you don’t get affirmation from rocks, there’s not much to do but get some rope. However, it’s hard to imagine how differently the rhetorical direction of the Myth of Sisyphus would have gone if he had just considered more seriously the idea of finding meaning in relationships with and impact on others rather than just resenting the trees for not respecting you. Seriously, go and reread it, the idea seems as though it didn’t even cross his mind.
The Myth of Solipsists
God damn what a good post
I think it does a lot of undue (and hopefully unintentional) heavy lifting for tech company hype marketers when someone implies that LLM treat printers might be comparable (or synonymous) to living organic brains because of the product’s imitative presentation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09247
on a related note, dropping this rare banger line from wikipedia:
citation text from the wiki page for reference
Damasio, Antonio R. (2000). The feeling of what happens: body and emotion in the making of consciousness. A Harvest book. San Diego, CA: Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-15-601075-7. Edelman, Gerald M.; Gally, Joseph A.; Baars, Bernard J. (2011). “Biology of Consciousness”. Frontiers in Psychology. 2 (4): 4. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00004. ISSN 1664-1078. PMC 3111444. PMID 21713129. Edelman, Gerald Maurice (1992). Bright air, brilliant fire: on the matter of the mind. New York: BasicBooks. ISBN 978-0-465-00764-6. Edelman, Gerald M. (2003). “Naturalizing Consciousness: A Theoretical Framework”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 100 (9): 5520–5524. doi:10.1111/j.1600-0536.1978.tb04573.x. ISSN 0027-8424. JSTOR 3139744. PMID 154377. S2CID 10086119. Retrieved 2023-07-19. Koch, Christof (2020). The feeling of life itself: why consciousness is widespread but can’t be computed (First MIT Press paperback edition 2020 ed.). Cambridge, MA London: The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-53955-5. Llinás, Rodolfo Riascos; Llinás, Rodolfo R. (2002). I of the vortex: from neurons to self. A Bradford book (1 ed.). Cambridge, Mass. London: MIT Press. pp. 202–207. ISBN 978-0-262-62163-2. Oizumi, Masafumi; Albantakis, Larissa; Tononi, Giulio (2014-05-08). Sporns, Olaf (ed.). “From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0”. PLOS Computational Biology. 10 (5): e1003588. Bibcode:2014PLSCB…10E3588O. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003588. ISSN 1553-7358. PMC 4014402. PMID 24811198. Overgaard, M.; Mogensen, J.; Kirkeby-Hinrup, A., eds. (2021). Beyond neural correlates of consciousness. Routledge Taylor & Francis. Ramachandran, V.; Hirstein, W. (March 1997). “What Does Implicit Cognition Tell Us About Consciousness?”. Consciousness and Cognition. 6 (1): 148. doi:10.1006/ccog.1997.0296. ISSN 1053-8100. S2CID 54335111. Tononi, Giulio; Boly, Melanie; Massimini, Marcello; Koch, Christof (July 2016). “Integrated information theory: from consciousness to its physical substrate”. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience. 17 (7): 450–461. doi:10.1038/nrn.2016.44. ISSN 1471-0048. PMID 27225071. S2CID 21347087.
> be me
> literal philosopher of mind
> experiences things every moment of my life
> is asked if experiences exist
> “nah experiences aren’t real”
“Because there is disagreement on what consciousness is, it must be an illusion. You do not exist, you are only a weird metaphysical phantasm which is somehow a more grounded and tenable position.”
This is a bad summary of Dennett’s view, or at least a misleading one. He thinks that ‘qualia’ as most philosophers of mind define the term doesn’t refer to anything, and is just a weasel word obscuring that we really don’t have much of an understanding of how brains do the things they do. Qualia get glossed as the “what-it’s-like-ness” of experiences (e.g. the particular feeling of seeing the color blue), which isn’t wrong, but is only part of the story. ‘Qualia’ is a technical term in the philosophy of mind literature, and has a lot of properties attached to it (privacy, incorrigibility, ineffability, so on). Dennett argues that qualia in that sense–the philosopher’s qualia–is incoherent and internally inconsistent for a variety of reasons. This sometimes gets misrepresented as “Dennett thinks consciousness is an illusion” (a misreading that he, to be fair, could work harder to discourage), but that’s not the view. His argument against the philosopher’s qualia is pretty compelling, and doesn’t imply that people aren’t conscious. See “Quining Qualia” for a pretty accessible articulation of the argument.
i look up ‘daniel dennet’ and the first ted talk i see is literally titled ‘the illusion of consciousness’. i don’t know what else to make of that.
wikipedia defines qualia as "In philosophy of mind, qualia (/ˈkwɑːliə, ˈkweɪ-/; SG: quale /-li/) are defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience. " which is how i have been using the word. i do not care about any other usage.
all of those things you mention - privacay, ineffability, etc - are logical consequences of being a subjective phenomena.
i am familiar with quining qualia, i quite dislike it and disagree with its arguments fundamentally. his ‘intuition pumps’ are frankly nonsense.
two examples:
the coffee taste and brain surgery experiments claim to show that we cannot tell the difference between our qualia changing and our reflective juddgments and predispositions to those qualia being changed, in an attempt to prove that qualia cannot be directly apprehended by consciousness. in fact, this is quite unrelated to the direct apprehend-ability in consciousness of qualia. in the brain surgery case, whichever surgery is performed, whether the patient can realize this through introspection or not, there IS a particular qualia being experienced and there is a fact of the matter as to whether or not this qualia has changed and as to which of the surgeries was performed, even if the patient’s memory has been altered such that they cannot know this - we could even empirically verify which surgery took place! yes, we are not necessarily infallible in our comparison of non-simultaneous Qualia - how does this mean that we do not apprehend the current Quale directly in consciousness? or that we did apprehend past Qualia? Direct conscious apprehension is not equivalent to accurate memory and consistent disposition/judgment regarding that direct conscious apprehension - these are information processing tasks, not subjectivity or qualia. To be aware of ANY qualitative state is to be aware of your current REAL qualitative state, and the fact that we might misremember it or otherwise interpret it differently in the future (due to neurosurgery or not) makes it no less directly apprehended.
the beer argument is equally spurious - he claims that because our qualia can change in response to environmental stimuli (i.e. we ‘acquire a taste’ for beer and enjoy it more when we are drunk, or enjoy it by associating it with the positive drunk feelings), that qualia is not ‘intrinsic’ but ‘relational’. no one would deny that qualia are part of a causal chain - everything is causal. qualia and consciousness obviously correlate to the physical brain, and are in a causal relationship with it and therefore less directly with the wider external world. but the existence of some kind of qualia/subjectivity in a conscious organism is not a relational property - the conscious organism, while conscious, always has qualia and subjectivity of some kind or another, regardless of what environment the consciousness exists in. specific features and minutiae of the subjects of qualia and subjective experience do have a causal relationship with the external world, but again, these are information processing tasks that are affected, not the very subjectivity of the organism. the contents of experience might change, but the fact that the current experiencer (the experiencer in its context) experiences them does not. the apprehended object might change, but the fact that it is being apprehended does not.
This is just wrong lol, there’s nothing magical about vertebrates in comparison to unicellular organisms. Maybe the depth of our emotions might be bigger, but obviously a paramecium also feels fear and happiness and anticipation, because these are necessary for it to eat and reproduce, it wouldn’t do these things if they didn’t feel good
The discrete dividing line is life and non-life (don’t @ me about viruses)
central nervous systems are so far the only thing we almost universally recognize as producing human-like subjectivity (as our evidence is the self report of humans), so i restricted my argumentation to those parameters. for all i know every quark has a kind of subjectivity associated with it, it could be as fundamental to reality as matter. and for all i know a paramecium responds to its environment with purely unconscious instinct (or if that terminology is inaccurate, biological information processing) without an internal experience. we don’t really understand how subjectivity is produced well enough to isolate it for empirical study in humans, let alone mammals, let alone microbes - but i personally think it is plausible that all life if not all matter has some kind of subjectivity.
unicellular organisms have been shown to learn. It’s literally the same thing as a vertebrate, just less complex
I don’t find that obvious at all. I agree there is nothing special dividing vertebrates from unicellular organisms, but I definitely think that some kind of CNS is required for the experience of emotions like fear, happiness etc. I do not see at all how paramecium could experience something like that. What part of it would experience it? Emotions in humans seem to be characterised by particular patterns of brain activity and concentrations of certain molecules (hormones, etc). I really cannot see how a unicellular organism has any capacity to experience emotions as we do. I would also argue that there is no dividing line between life and non-life. Whether something is alive or not is quite nebulous and hard to define. As you say, viruses are a good example but there are many others. Eg. a pregnant mammal. The foetus does not fill the classical, basic conditions of life that are taught in school (MRS H GREN, or whatever acronym) but does it really make sense to say that it is not alive? How many organisms are there when we look at a pregnant mammal. It is not clear.
okay, so when a scallop runs away from you it doesn’t feel fear?
and when a paramecium is being ensnared by a hydra or some weird protist on your microscope slide, and it’s struggling to get away, it doesn’t feel fear? lol
Obviously every moving living thing can feel fear, that’s why they’re moving living things and that’s why they run away from predators
With a few exceptions like viruses, it’s pretty obvious. Rocks don’t make more rocks, nor does water
I’m not sure if scallops can run… But if you mean something like a mollusc, for example a snail, then I think it depends on which organism it is. I think a snail probably does feel fear yes in a very primal way. A bivalve like a scallop I’m not so sure, they have very basic nervous systems. An octopus I think is capable of fear and other more advanced emotions too, most likely. However, I think when we ascribe emotions to these animals we are anthropomorphising them. We have no way to know what their experience is like and we are sticking our human labels on them. Especially for a group such as molluscs, which diverged a very long time ago from the lineage that led to us. The feeling of fear, the understanding of danger and need to get away from it could be very primal and exist in many animals, but they may also feel it very differently to how we do. For example ants, I imagine a worker and does not feel fear for itself but rather the colony.
Unicellular organisms mostly move on the basis of concentration gradients, towards food and away from toxic things or predator signals. When one is struggling and being engulfed by a hydra or other unicellular organism, I don’t think it feels anything no. I think it is just trying to move away from the predator because it detects a molecular signal that it is “programmed” to move away from. By programmed I mean that behaviour is encoded in the complex interaction of the many systems that make it up, such as through the concerted action of it’s receptors, signalling pathways, enzymes, genes etc.
Rocks and water are not what I was talking about. Take for example cell-free translation systems. These are basically all of the contents of a cell but without any of the membranes. Like empty a cell into a (small) bucket. They still perform all of the biochemical reactions that took place in the normal cell. But they are not in a sack. There is no unified “thing” and it doesn’t move. If you did that to a paramecium, could that liquid still feel fear? It cant move away from anything. Is it alive? What makes something alive? Life is ultimately the sum of many complex biochemical reactions, but no one part of it is alive. Enzymes themselves are not alive surely. One single neuron is not alive.
If you had a human brain in a jar and, for arguments sake, it could still think as normal. It is intelligent and sentient, but it cannot replicate itself. But a virus, which is still much more simple than the brain in a jar, can. When you say that rocks don’t make more rocks, you seem to imply that the quality of life is in replication.
just youtube it, they can
and if they can do that, then of course they can feel fear too
wild
replace the hydra with a tiger and the amoeba with a deer, how is it any different apart from the number of cells? The deer prey could maybe have conscious thoughts/sorrow about its children during the last seconds of its life, but other than that the fear is fundamentally the same, it’s just more complex/scaled up
sure glad we don’t have any of those
Uh, I’m not an expert but I would suspect they’re in the process of dying if you do that. They just don’t die immediately, because nothing does (even a person who gets shot stays alive for a few minutes afterward). Can you feed this cell jelly its normal food and have it sustain itself like usual? If not then I would say it’s only alive on technicality, just like a person who’s been shot in the head and can still talk for the next few seconds–they’re technically also alive! But the person will die once the last few bits of brain oxygen run out due to the mechanical reality of their heart not beating, and the cell-jelly-in-a-bucket will also die after some time due to the mechanical reality of their vacuoles or whatever not being able to properly absorb food (I’m guessing, anyway. But this isn’t really relevant to the central point)
This is a disjoint coutnerexample, the point is not that a brain in a jar can’t replicate itself, but that the original organism that brain comes from, can. A man who gets a vasectomy is still alive, because his default state is being able to reproduce.
Rocks however, can NEVER reproduce. There is not A SINGLE rock that can reproduce. Therefore rocks are not alive.
It seems by your periodically hostile comments (“oh so smug terms the ‘soul’”) indicates that you have a disdain for my position, so I assume you think my position is your option 2, but I don’t ignore self-reports of sentience. I’m closer to option 1, I see it as plausible that a sufficiently general algorithm could have the same level of sentience as humans.
The third position strikes me as at least just as ridiculous as the second. Of course we don’t totally understand biological life, but just saying there’s something “special” is wild. We’re a configuration of non-sentient parts that produce sentience. Computers are also a configuration of non-sentient parts. To claim that there’s no configuration of silicon that could arrive at sentience but that there is a configuration of carbon that could arrive at sentience is imbuing carbon with some properties that seems vastly more complex than the physical reality of carbon would allow.
i think it is plausible to replicate consciousness artificially with machines, and even more plausible to replicate every information processing task in a human brain, but i do not think that purely information processing machines like computers or machines using purely information processing tools like algorithms will be the necessary hardware or software to produce artificial subjectivity.
by ‘special’ i meant not understood. and again, i submit not that it is impossible to make a subjectivity producing object like a brain artificially out of whatever material, but that it is not possible to do so using information processing technologies and theory (as understood in 2023). I don’t think artificial subjectivity is impossible, but i think purely algorithmic artificial subjectivity is impossible. I don’t think that a purely physicalist worldview of a type that discounts the possibility of subjectivity can ever account for subjectivity. i don’t think that subjectivity is explainable in terms of information processing.
here’s a syllogism to sum up my position (i believe i have argued these points sufficiently elsewhere in the thread)
Premise A: Qualia (subjective experiences) exist (a fact supported by many neuroscientists as per one of my previous posts wikipedia quote)
Premise B: Qualia, as subjective experiences, are fundamentally irreducible to information processing. (look up the hard problem of consciousness and the philosophical zombie thought experiment)
Premise C: therefore consciousness, which contains (or is identified with or consists of or interacts with or is otherwise related to) Qualia, is irreducible to information processing.
Premise D: therefore the most simplistic of physicalist worldviews (those that deny the existence of Qualia and the concept of subjectivity, like that of Daniel Dennett) can never fully account for consciousness.
thats it, nothing else i’m trying to say other than that. no mysticism, no woo, no soul, no god, no fairies, nothing to offend your delicate aesthetic sensibilities. just stuff we don’t know yet about the brain/mind/universe. no assumptions, just an acknowledgement that we do not have a Unified Theory of Everything and are likely several fundamental paradigm shifts in thinking away in many fields of research from anything resembling one.
Little late to the thread but really enjoying your posts. Curious on your thoughts if you don’t mind:
As a philosophy newbie myself, could it be a lot of this discussion/debate is due to people having no exposure to the metaphysical concepts of objectivity/subjectivity? It seems a bit portion of your argument is that people who believe we can achieve ai sentience are already committed to a (leap of faith) absolute belief in the “physicalist” model/understanding of the universe?
Also regarding the idea of a “Unified Theory of Everything”, do you believe in this as a possibility? Is having that as a goal or destination in of itself a representation of a particularly misguided “physicalist” way of thinking that many people are already committed to/trapped within?
i don’t think its about a lack of exposure to the concept of subjectivity and objectivity as much as it is a fundamental disbelief in anything approaching metaphysics whatsoever, which yes, stems from the absolute belief in a purely physicalist understanding of the universe. the difference between physicalists and myself is similar to the difference between an atheist and an agnostic. the atheist assumes that there is and can be no god or gods, whereas the agnostic makes no assumptions whatsoever regarding this. the physicalist assumes the ability of their belief system to be refined into perfection without much in the way of fundamental revision, assumes the nonexistence of any phenomena that cannot be described by physics, whereas i believe that one or several paradigm shifts in philosophy and science and the philosophy of science are necessary to improve our understanding of reality, i do not assume that the physicalist model of the universe is correct or able to be trivially modified to be correct. and when analysis in fact shows the inability of physicalism to explain a phenomena we all experience every waking moment of our lives like subjectivity or qualia, i take that as evidence against the model, instead of ignoring it in the hope that someday the model might be trivially revised somehow to account for this fundamental explanatory gap.
a ‘unified theory of everything’ may or may not be possible, but it should be especially possible under physicalism - if everything is indeed reducible to physical matter and physcial processes, then surely we should eventually be able to describe matter and related physical processes in sufficient detail to describe all of reality, including subjectivity. but i don’t think its necessarily physicalist to believe humans can comprehensively understand existence, for example if subjectivity is fundamental to reality in a way similar to matter, then understanding subjectivity and matter both, and their relationship to one another or to whatever reality they both refer to, could help us understand existence in a more coherent sense.
Excellent post. I may bookmark it for later summary use.
Premise B is where you lost me.
The premise of philosophical zombies is that it’s possible for there to be beings with the same information processing capabilities as us without experience. That is, given the same tools and platforms, they would be having just as intricate discussions about the nature of experience and sentience. without having experience or sentience.
I’m not convinced it’s functionally possible to behave the way we behave when talking & describing sentience without being sentient. I think a being that is functionally identical to me except that it lacks experience wouldn’t be functionally identical to me, because I wouldn’t be interested in sentience if I didn’t have it.
thats’ the entire point. if the existence of complex unconscious behaviors (or even just computers and math) proves that information processing can be done without internal subjective experience (if we assume a stone being hit by another stone, for example, is not experienceing subjectivity), and if there is something humans do beyond what is possible for pure information processing, then that is proof that consciousness is fundamentally irreducible to it. if there is something we can do that a philosophical zombie (a person with information processing but not subjectivity) could not, it is because of subjectivity/qualia, not information processing. subjectivity can influence our information processing but is not identical with it.
I think my point didn’t exactly get across. I’m not saying philosophical zombies can’t exist because subjectivity is something beyond information processing, I’m saying it’s plausible that subjectivity is information processing.
To say “a person with information processing but not subjectivity” could be like saying “a person with information processing but not logical reasoning”.
I would argue a person that processes information exactly like me, except that they don’t reason logically, wouldn’t process information like me. It’s not elevating logic beyond information processing, it’s a reductio ad absurdum. A person like that cannot exist.
I was saying philosophical zombies could be like that, it’s possible that they can’t exist. By lacking subjectivity they could inherently process information differently.
i know this is necroposting but i have to clarify.
one of the major premises of the p-zombie thought experiment is that there is nothing about information processing (AS WE CURRENTLY UNDERSTAND IT***) that entails or necessitates subjectivity. Information processing has zero explanatory ability for subjectivity. You cannot just assume that ‘subjectivity is information processing’ without proving it somehow, that’s not how science or philosophy work. Making a positive claim like ‘information theory can account for and explain subjectivity’ requires proof. and since no proof has been provided we must assume the negative claim, that subjectivity is not explained by information processing theory. If subjectivity is information processing (the way we currently understand information processing), prove it! Show your work. If you think information theory only needs trivial modifications to account for subjectivity it should be easy to elucidate what kinds of modifications those could be and what kinds of experiments we can conduct to test those modifications.
***For if information processing theory requires substantial revision to account for subjectivity, which i think is at least plausible if not obviously true at this point in history, then the claim that ‘subjectivity is information processing’ becomes vague and meaningless - we do not know what this hypothetical revised information theory looks like, what it claims and assumes as logical axioms or empirical truths, so making any statements about this hypothetical future information processing theory is completely pointless and meaningless.
You had a small fallacy in the middle, when you said “assume the negative claim”, you then made a positive claim.
“subjectivity is not explained by information processing theory” is a positive claim, but you said it was negative. I know it has the word “not” in it, but positive/negative doesn’t have to do with claims for or against existence, it has to do with burden of proof. A negative “claim” isn’t actually a claim at all.
The negative claim here would be “subjectivity may not be explained by information processing theory”. People usually have more understanding about these distinctions in religious contexts:
Positive claim: god definitely exists Positive claim: god definitely doesn’t exist Negative claim: god may or may not exist.
The default stance is an atheistic one, but it’s not “capital A” atheist (for what it’s worth I do make the positive claim against a theological God’s existence). Someone who lacks a belief in God is still an atheist (e.g someone who has never even heard of a theological God), but they’re not making a positive claim against his existence.
So the default stance is “information theory may or may not account for subjectivity”, we don’t assume it does, but we also don’t discount the possibility that it does as necessarily untrue, like you are.
If you notice, you made another mistake, you misread what I was saying. I never made a positive claim about subjectivity being information processing. I only alluded to the possibility. You on the other hand did make a positive claim about subjectivity definitely not being information processing.
you are focusing on minor points of rhetoric instead of engaging with my broader point and the relevant LLM discussion. I am in fact assuming the null hypothesis in this argument.
first: the null hypothesis is a general statement or default position that there is no relationship between two measured phenomena, or no association among groups.
in this case, the phenomena whose relationship is in question are information processing theory and subjectivity.
consider Hitchen’s Razor, which states that ‘what may be asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence’
even if your specific argument is different, the subject of the OP with which i presumed you more or less agree, argued that not only can information processing theory account for subjectivity, but that it does, and that LLM chatbots possess such subjectivity. This is asserted without proof, and according to hitchen’s razor I dismiss this pair of theses equally without proof.
as to your stance that information processing may or may not account for subjectivity, we can formulate this position as the positive claim that ‘information processing may account for subjectivity’ without losing any meaning. if nothing else, assume this is the position i am arguing against. i am not opposed to agnosticism on this matter.
i offer a syllogism:
A: if information processing can account for subjectivity, it would have done so by now - or, if it can account for subjectivity with only trivial modifications, we would have some indication of paths towards such an account.
B. we do not, in fact, have such an account within current information theory, or theoretical paths of investigation towards such an account.
c. therefore, information theory as it is today, or only trivially modified, does not account for subjectivity