The author (Peter Hankins) does an excellent job of summarizing and critiquing current research papers in philosophy and neuroscience, and the comments on the articles are often very informative.
Can we the mystery of human consciousness in the 21st century? Ok, ok, maybe we should start with a definitions...
Or, perhaps, the implications of that.
I think one of the underlying problems is that people want a cold, objective quantification of a word that is inherently emotional and subjective. So when the objective definition does not align with the emotional experience, they dip into mysticism or philosophy, neither of which is testable science.
Really, the word "consciousness" is not a scientific word, it's kind of like trying to quantify God.
Can we test a being's self-awareness, decision-making ability, etc.? Yes. Is there something "consciousness" that is not testable? Then that part is not science. We can really really want it to be science, and keep looking for ways to test it, but until we do, it's just conjecture. (Personally, I think that once we're able to model brains that we agree "are conscious", all of this feeling of mystery will fall away.)
We don't push back those models because they are "uncomfortable", make us feel bad, or inferior, or anything like that - but because they are simply non-functional! There are many aspects and phenomena in the world, in human interactions, in my own consciousness - which are simply not explained by the reductionist view! "Based on some complicated network of neurons" is not good enough! I clearly have these phenomena and experience, and this "complicated network" explanation just gives no explanation at all really! While other less scientific models do.
I'm like "sure, I can accept whatever science you can give me and become a fully logical being, but don't ask me to ignore obvious phenomena that I know I have and experience, that is just stupid!".
Sometimes they mean that the phenomenon under consideration is always reducible to a common set of basic physical underpinnings, which is something for which we have never conclusively observed a contradiction.
Other times, they mean to say that the phenomenon in question can be well understood using a lower level set of abstractions than we initially considered and that there is no need for further abstraction. This is observably not true, i.e. the workings of an internal combustion engine are not practically modelled by combining a model for each of its individual atoms.
I think consciousness might eventually be reducible in the first, but not in the second sense. Of course, crude initial models don't explain a lot, but I don't think that has much bearing on a thing being reducible.
Less scientific models can be simpler and functional, but that doesn't mean that they’re more correct.
(This would work for a purely mechanical computer made out of rocks, too.)
Personally, with enough knowledge about how modern AI works, and a reasonable understanding of the neuroscience literature, I feel there is no fundamental mystery to consciousness, only awe at the level of complexity harnessed.
In the same sense one could say that people on your side of the argument are simply "uncomfortable" with the notion that not everything can be understood logically and predicted, including big important things in their own life, but also the larger truths of the universe. And so instead of looking at the other experiences and data, which don't fit into an understandable paradigm - they tend to ignore or deny them.
I agree that many people tend to “over-science” and ignore inconvenient data, but this is not a core component of the basic scientific method. In fact, many of the most useful predictions are probabilistic in nature, and so you would expect the data to be fuzzy and the models to be imprecise in the early stages of formation.
Scientific method is a great tool - for the tasks that it can handle. I can argue that there are many tasks which it cannot handle. Areas of knowledge which cannot be studied with scientifid method exactly.
Another limitation of it is obviously that it needs a hypothesis - which means it requires a preconceived notion of the world, before any testing can actually take place. Which means that the tester is responsible for the basic paradigm and worldview, from which they ultimately produce the hypothesis to test, to begin with. Obviously, the scientific method is less proficient in handling these preconceived prejudices and worldviews, because it comes in after they have been already applied. (It can help indirectly by verifying the hypothesis and perhaps sort out some worldviews, but it can naturally not create a new worldview by itself.)
So what happens when there are multiple hypothesis from completely different paradigms that show some evidence? Or what happens when there is a hypothesis which you just cannot disprove directly? This is where other paradigms ultimately come in.
I suspect that the question of consciousness is ultimately one of these questions, where we will need help from many other areas, before the scientific method can ever be applied here. Before a testable model can even be conceived.
If you're talking about the neural correlates of consciousness, you're right that we're removing a lot of the mystery. But if you're talking about the mystery that is your own subjective being, then we may never solve that problem. As Susan Greenfield states, "we can't turn the water into wine"
Sam Harris does a great 5m summary on the hard problem of consciousness that's worth a watch:
There should be nothing mysterious in 2018 about a biological being that has an internal self-model, memory, and processes sensory stimuli and internal neural firings over time, both of which have a direct relation to the physical basis of that self-model. That is what self-awareness is.
"Experience can't be explained by science because science only arises in experience" sounds profound but contributes nothing -- if you invalidate the content of your experience, then you no longer have any reliable axioms on which to build any argument whatsoever, and we might as well all go home.
The Sam Harris video you linked makes a good point -- that we want an explanation of consciousness that intuitively makes sense. I'm saying that if you study enough AI and neuroscience, it does intuitively make sense.
His counterexample of explaining the "brittleness of glass" is intuitively OK with us even if we don't actually personally understand all of the details of the molecular and atomic interactions, because it does not fundamentally challenge our beliefs of who we are. If there's some explanation of consciousness that does challenge our beliefs of who we are, you better believe you're going to need a more comprehensive and complex explanation before you're going to intuitively believe it.
The OP article makes the point that we haven't got near to cracking the problem.
Personally, I think we have a category issue. We simply don't know what category to put consciousness in, and all attempts to solve it thus far have been category mistakes.
For your consideration:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0050...
> Personally, I think we have a category issue. We simply don't know what category to put consciousness in, and all attempts to solve it thus far have been category mistakes.
Consider the possibility that the category you've implicitly created for consciousness doesn't actually exist.
It'd be nice to think that consciousness wasn't real, because then science could explain mostly everything. Very comforting. But it can't.
And consciousness does not have the long history you describe.
And "unable to model" is a huge stretch. You can't measure something that has no definition or understood boundaries. When the rest if our perceptual and cognitive faculties are explained, you'll find there's nothing left for consciousness. It's the new god of the gaps argument.
“Researchers have learned a great deal about the neural mechanisms underlying global states of consciousness, distinctions between conscious and unconscious perception, and self-consciousness. Further progress will depend on specifying closer explanatory mappings between (first-person subjective) phenomenological descriptions and (third-person objective) descriptions of (embodied and embedded) neuronal mechanisms.”
I wouldn’t call that “haven’t got near to cracking”, especially when the technologies needed to specify those closer mappings are clearly defined and already under development.
"We cannot yet know whether today’s students will find the solution to the ‘problem of consciousness’ or whether the problem as currently set forth is simply misconceived."
And all the while we're making that same category error: Mapping subjective experience to neural correlates. This is like someone claiming that they know how internal combustion works because when they push the pedal the car goes faster.
This is a case where more science could probably help philosophy.
I'd take that bet. Physics already tells us that humans are merely finite state automatons (due to the Bekenstein bound), so the logic needed to describe us needn't even be that powerful. And given our behaviours were largely shaped to be fairly energy efficient due to evolutionary pressures, consciousness will turn out to be one or more cognitive tricks that convey some adaptive advantage.
The hurdle people typically have to accepting this inevitability is because of the internal perception of cognitive continuity, but this property is clearly false. There's are many obvious cases where continuity fails, like sleep, anaesthetic, etc.
You're simply assuming there must be a separate category either because you want one to exist, or because you've been fooled into thinking consciousness has some properties that you consider irreducible to more basic components.
There are many intuition pumps discussing surgical or other interventions that tweak qualia in various seemingly reasonable ways, to the extent that the concept of qualia itself becomes increasingly unreasonable. Dennett has covered a lot of this ground.
You say conscious beings are obviously just finite state automata. That’s curious to me because it seems strange that I would essentially be a certain mathematical structure. I agree that my structure can in principle be explained as an automaton (except that my lack of a boundary means that I have to be described with a universe-sized map that can’t fit in the universe) but why is it like something to be an automaton?
Maybe you’re saying something like this. I have an illusion that there is some subjective realm of experience, exemplified by the visual field, a kind of mirror universe that is mysteriously connected to the “outer” world, and this illusion is what leads to mistakes like body-mind dualism. In fact there is no such subjective realm, and my perception is not different in kind from any other causal system’s different reactions, it’s just so complex and finely tuned that this “illusion” appears especially because of the illusion of continuity.
I can’t steelman the argument properly because I really don’t understand, and unfortunately I haven’t read Dennett.
It seems to me that why there is perception is as mysterious as why there is energy and these do seem like separate questions so far. Some kind of monism seems reasonable but I don’t see how experience can be assumed to be downstream from the mathematical laws of fundamental physics—that seems like an unproven assumption that’s philosophically tricky and extremely contentious.
Happy to hear any thoughts or pointers.
That's a complex topic, touching on metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of mathematics. To summarize, explaining the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics without simply adopting a Platonist-type ontology requires making more assumptions than simply accepting the existence of mathematical objects. At that point, it's also more parsimonious to then conclude that our world is simply one such object, rather than positing that both mathematical objects and matter exist.
> but why is it like something to be an automaton?
I think your steelman is pretty close, and you can see exactly this approach in mechanistic theories of subjective experience:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0050...
Since this is Hacker News, an apt analogy might be how single CPU computers simulate concurrency via task switching. Our brains undergo similar signal switching between perceptual signals coming from our internal model of the world, and our direct perceptions of the external world, and this creates the illusion.
> Some kind of monism seems reasonable but I don’t see how experience can be assumed to be downstream from the mathematical laws of fundamental physics—that seems like an unproven assumption that’s philosophically tricky and extremely contentious
Absolutely. That's why Dennett has spent 50 years researching and writing on the topic. It's a tangled web that requires what he calls perceptual inversions to make it intuitive. But of all philosophers, he's probably spent the most time with neuroscientists, physicists and other philosophers. A lot of people don't like what he says, but he's definitely worth reading if this a question that interests you.
- Why do we have subjective experience?
vs
- What causes us to have/creates subjective experience?
- For what reason/purpose do we have subjective experience?
- How is subjective experience implemented?
The last three seem to be reasonably well fleshed out in the literature. Do you interpret “why” to have an additional meaning?
Tractatus 5.6.3 presents the metaphysical problem quite clearly. The perceiving subject is a limit of science, kind of like the big bang which is also fundamentally and inescapably mysterious. You cannot prove or disprove the simulation hypothesis. Of course we exist within a deep and unfathomable mystery, no matter how accurately we can make predictions with the differential equations of physical science. It’s all fundamentally mysterious and not admitting that is ridiculous.
Math can prove things unprovable from a specific set of axioms, but in the physical sciences it's a matter of imagination. The question of what stars were made of was once unknowable; now it is a robust field of study. What happened before the Big Bang is unknowable... by current scientific understanding and techniques. Maybe once we unify physics or build colliders the size of solar systems it will become understandable; maybe not.
Humans have an instinct to make things mysterious and more meaningful than they are because it drives their curiosity and need to explain, which drives their ability to predict, which fulfills the mandate of life to win competition for resources and grow.
Introspecting and understanding the perceiver thus answers the question easily. Wittgenstein did not have fMRI machines.
For your consideration:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0050...
From the wikipedia article (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory): “AST is a theory of how a machine insists it is more than a machine, even though it is not.”
That would reflect a lot of the voices here! ;-)