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[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_your_brain_hallucinates_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained
Why couldnt a hypothetical human like robot simply reply "I dont know what you mean by did that hurt, I simply know it could have damaged me so I know to avoid such scenarios"
To believe we are all p zombies youd have to believe that a table you punched experienced the same thing as punching me. That, either a table has all the same experiences that I feel, or that I unlike yourself that I feel nothing at all.
I am of the first opinion, that everything does experience some form of consciousness, and that we are a conglomeration of many individual pieces of it.
Who claimed it wasn't necessary for functioning? The text boxes and links and windows on your screen are also illusions, they don't actually exist in the screen or inside the computer, but how useful would a computer be to you without these illusions?
> To believe we are all p zombies youd have to believe that a table you punched experienced the same thing as punching me
Eliminate materialism is the position that qualitative experience is not what it appears to be, and that our perceptions are not trustworthy. That doesn't mean there is no difference between you and a table.
By this reasoning, everything we perceive, including physical reality is an "illusion" (which I am totally onboard with).
There is still the question however, of when does this illusion arise? Is any system that understands its sensory input conscious? Is any system that has the ability to form thoughts in a feedback loop (i.e, the ability to process its own thoughts), consciously experiencing the world in a similar manner as I am? Or what's the criteria?
Yes and no. An illusion is technically a perception that does not correspond to reality. So it's not an illusion to say there's a table in front of you, but some of the table's apparent properties might turn out to be illusions of sorts, eg. its solidity might suggests that it's solid all the way through, but we know it's 99% empty space and the perception of solidity arises from the exchange of photons.
This is the kind of illusion that consciousness would end up being: some process that useful in evolutionary terms, but which reduces to something completely different and mechanical in terms of particle exchanges, and which at a high-level leaves us with the belief that we have subjective experience. For one possible model of how this would work, see:
Perhaps I misunderstand Dennet's ideas. Maybe he means something entirely different by "illusion" and "consciousness" than what I understand those terms to mean. But these theories certainly appear to me to be a clever semantic way to ignore the question rather than answer it.
Asking "who" begs the question that subjects are necessary, therefore "what" is the only question that matters. What "experiences the illusion" that experiences exist too.
But "what perceives the illusion" dissolves the hard problem entirely since it permits a mechanistic system, where an illusion is a perception that entails a false conclusion, all things that don't require admitting privileged subjects into your ontology.
My point is that qualia exist. You can call them an illusion, but we still "feel" them. Why are we able to feel anything, illusory or real?
My ontology does not require "privileged subjects". I make no claims about where qualia may or may not exist outside of human minds. I merely acknowledge that they do exist in the human mind, the one place where they can be observed and self-reported. And I think the question of what produces them is worth investigating. Unfortunately any discussion is drowned out by the thought-terminating cliche, "it's an illusion".
What exactly do you mean by an "illusion", anyway? Do you mean that I'm programmed by evolution to believe and behave as if I have internal experiences, but I actually don't? I would beg to differ, but I suppose by your reasoning, that's exactly what a befuddled meat robot such as myself would say.
It's not though, the existence of true subjectivity is the central point of the hard problem of consciousness. Science consists of third party objective facts, and so accepting the existence of first person subjective facts is incompatible with materialist science.
> And I think the question of what produces them is worth investigating.
I agree, I don't think anybody disputes that. Illusionism doesn't preclude investigation into how the illusion is produced, it's just a framework for interpreting the results of experiments in a way that's compatible with materialism.
> Do you mean that I'm programmed by evolution to believe and behave as if I have internal experiences, but I actually don't?
Your perceptions of subjective qualitative experience are incompatible with materialist science, as I said. You then have two choices: choose to privilege your perceptions and claim that you have some direct access to some aspect of reality, or accept that your perceptions of subjectivity are not a direct perception of reality and thus illusory.
I see now that we're using the word "illusion" in different ways and talking past each other.
I agree that qualia are not a direct or accurate experience of reality. Dreams consist of qualia, but most people would not argue that what happens in their dreams must actually be happening.
What is not illusory is the fact that subjective experience exists, and that's the sense in which I use the word. I and everyone else (I presume) experience qualia. The fact that the content of consciousness consists of illusions is undoubtedly correct and quite easy to demonstrate, but that is a different and unrelated matter. It is also unsurprising, since what we actually experience is presumably derived from the inner physical state of our brain, which is at best only a proxy for the reality of our surroundings.
I do not believe that Dennett himself actually makes this distinction. He seems to sometimes ignore and sometimes outright deny the existence of qualia, which is an absolutely baffling position for any introspective conscious being to take.
In regards to whether qualia are compatible with materialism, I will just point out that if a scientific theory denies the existence of a thing that obviously exists, then the problem is with the theory, not the thing. I can think of nothing more un-scientific than insisting on the theory just to spite reality for not conforming to our materialist ideals.
At its core, illusionism is the general position that our qualitative experience is not what it appears to be. That could mean it might just be something else that's incompatible with materialism, but most philosophers take the stricter position that materialism holds, and thus subjective experience doesn't really exist.
> I will just point out that if a scientific theory denies the existence of a thing that obviously exists
Life obviously exists, and people simply couldn't fathom how living matter could emerge from non-living matter, and so proposed vitalism. It died with progressive elaboration of the mechanics of living cells, thus vindicating materialism. I think exactly this same process is currently happening with consciousness, and neuroscience is currently exploring these kinds of models:
A conceptual framework for consciousness, https://pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119
Finally, I would be very hesitant to claim that something does or does not exist simply because you perceive it or don't perceive it. I could put an object in your blindspot and you'd swear up and down that nothing was there. Our perceptions are inherently flawed, but still useful in evolutionary terms, and the same would apply to our perceptions of qualitative experience. Dennett formed his position after studying neuroscience extensively, so I urge everyone to take it more seriously.
> Dennett formed his position after studying neuroscience extensively, so I urge everyone to take it more seriously.
I prefer reason over credentialism, personally. All the advanced degrees and study in the world can't make a logically incoherent position correct.
The other problem with arguments from authority is that one can always find people with equal or greater credentials who take the opposing view. One of Dennett's better known opponents, for example:
> [1] In 1993, Chalmers received his PhD in philosophy and cognitive science from Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter, writing a doctoral thesis entitled Toward a Theory of Consciousness. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program directed by Andy Clark at Washington University in St. Louis from 1993 to 1995.
I assume this means you will give equal weight to his point of view.
Otherwise we will be forced to acknowledge that you agree with Dennett not because he's well studied, but because he agrees with you.
As I said, there's nothing thought-terminating about eliminative materialism, and I provided a link demonstrating active work in neuroscience to account for consciousness based on that premise. If it were thought-terminating, why are people developing more thoughts based on it?
The only thoughts that are terminated are the attribution of mystical and non-scientific properties to consciousness, which is exactly what you'd expect from actual science.
> I assume this means you will give equal weight to his point of view.
I have but ultimately didn't find his position persuasive. What I wouldn't do is dismiss his entire position as a thought-terminating cliche though, or assume a deep thinker like Dennett didn't consider an objection as trivial as all of our knowledge being built from qualitative experience. You started this thread by stating that you've never understood the argument behind eliminative materialism, and with the way you've described it so far, I suggest it's because you haven't given it a serious effort.
I find it bizarre that so much energy is devoted to arguing that the content of consciousness is inaccurate, when I've never met a single person who thinks otherwise. Even children understand that their minds can conjure up things that don't exist, and can easily be made to understand that even their day-to-day perceptions are inaccurate. But the vigor with which this argument is pushed makes sense when you realize that the actual goal is to use the ambiguity of the claim "qualia aren't real" (which may refer to either content or existence) to appear to have proven that qualia do not exist while only having to do the work of proving that they are not accurate.
Frankly, I find these conversations immensely frustrating for this exact reason. I go back and forth with someone on the only real issue, which is the existence of qualia. They talk in circles and use this semantic sleight of hand to claim that qualia don't even exist and therefore require no explanation, even as they experience them at that exact moment. When I insist on the issue, they claim that I need to try harder to understand their position, even as they actively avoid honestly engaging with my own. Occasionally I am gullible enough to think "you know, maybe there really is something I just don't get" and I cave in and read their proposed literature, only to be met with the same linguistic trickery.
This is why I use the phrase "thought-terminating cliche". This entire line of argument doesn't even attempt to answer the real question. It makes a big show out of beating a different but similar-sounding question to death, then quickly dodges around the real one while you're dazzled and hopes you don't notice. And this "explanation" is always bookended with a smug "consciousness is just an illusion (you non-materialist simpleton)".
I expect no less going forward, so this conversation has outlived its productivity. Feel free to have the last word if you like.
Let's flip the script then: demonstrate that qualia are real if you think it's so obvious. Every thought experiment that purports to show something meaningful has been fatally flawed and ends up proving nothing. Do you not see how the position that qualia really exist is the one on shaky empirical ground and playing semantic games trying to claim that something non-demonstrable exists? It's Russell's teapot.
I literally have no reason to accept your claim that qualia are self-evident, and further, considering the remarkable success of materialist science and that the only "evidence" that qualia exist is a subjective perception from an apparatus that is known to have fatal perceptual flaws, how can you expect anyone who's given this serious thought to take you seriously?
I agree the link I gave is not the full story, I said it was the start. It establishes the foundation tackling subjective awareness first, and will be building to qualia in subsequent work. It will take a few decades to root out this mystical nonsense around consciousness, but it will happen just like elan vital before it.
Edit: to be clear, I don't think any eliminativist will seriously claim that qualia don't require any explanation. We still need to understand how the illusion works and so why we come to believe we have qualia, we just don't need to explain what qualia are because that's already done by classifying them as an illusion. It's like you're insisting that a psychologist explain what demonic possession is when we now know it's mental illness. We don't need to explain demonic possession, we need to explain mental illness. Similarly, we don't need to explain what qualia are, because they don't exist, but we do need to explain the mechanics of the brain that lead to perceptual illusions of various kinds, like the perception of subjective experience.
But, and this is the key, this will happen in the normal course of explaining how the brain works. Nothing special or extra needs to be done. The hard problem is reduced to the easy problem. The paper I linked is a starting point on that path.
I mean, forget the term "real" here for a second. Illusion or whatever you want to think of it, qualia in one form or another, exists within the mind. I am alive, I can see, hear, smell, and feel things. These things are as real to me as is seeing two objects hit eachother and deflect, or whatever other test of material reality you purpose. How do I, without already first believing in eliminativism, reject one but not the other? Or rather, on the basis that I sometimes feel pain but do not always feel pain, I assert definitely, that the subjective experience of pain exists. I am not making any claim as to what "pain" is, merely that subjective experiences (which we call qualia) exist within the mind.
How does this illusion come to be achieved when there is nothing remotely similar in any attribute of physical systems? How is it possible that one can explain all the physical properties of a system, but yet not explain the experience of "pain" or "seeing red"? That we can build a robot that physically registers, and reacts to pain as we do, but have no way of knowing whether that robot experienced some subjective experience of "pain" similar to how we do.
That is in essence why its called the hard problem of consciousness. If you have any interesting thoughts to share as to how this is possible, Im all ears, but so far all you've appeared to have said (and I apologize if Im missing something) is "everything has been explained materially, and I believe in material science and thus it is certainly material, end of discussion". I don't find this interesting at all.
Hell lets agree qualia is just physical. But how is it physically possible?
This isnt the eliminativism take though (or at least that of Dennett) its "there is no problem to solve at all because we reject subjective experiences exist at all". The only way I can imagine this of even being true is that I didn't actually feel pain at all, I just made up a thought that says that I did. But this is simply not my experience and simply saying "its in fact what happened" is not exactly convincing. By that same token I dont see why I ought to believe in material reality at all. Did I experience seeing the table in front of me? No I just believed I had. If you believe this fine Im not going to argue.
>how can you expect anyone who's given this serious thought to take you seriously?
Consciousness is an illusion isn't some agreed upon philosophical view, so I don't know why you're speaking as if this is a solved problem and that someones an idiot for considering otherwise.
Of all the surveyed philosophical positions, eliminativism has the highest rejection https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/correlation...
Even within physicalists, about 50% of those surveyed accept there is a hard problem of consciousness.
I'm not sure what you mean by "no one", but the central claim behind asserting the existence of qualia is the rejection of physicalism. Maybe you're not making that claim, but p-zombies and the Knowledge Argument were intended to but failed to show that qualia exist and physicalism is false.
> How do I, without already first believing in eliminativism, reject one but not the other?
I find this kind of question confusing because it's just so obvious. You've done this millions of times throughout your life, both consciously and unconsciously. This is knowledge synthesis at the level of perception. You're constantly taking your perceptions and comparing them to your internalized worldview, seeing if they fit, and if not, checking if your perception was faulty or your understanding of the world is faulty.
You're even trying to do it now, but you're prioritizing your personal perceptions which are known to be faulty rather than the far more robust, systematic scientific knowledge we've built.
Why is it so easy for you to perceive that water appears to magically break and reconstitute a pencil (https://etc.usf.edu/clippix/picture/refraction-of-pencil-in-...), and discount that perception as a fact, but you can't do so for qualia? Because you've already done the work to internalize a model of the world that can explain what you perceive without the magic, via optics and refraction.
I agree that a full accounting of this sort for our belief in qualia would be nice, but it's not strictly necessary to conclude that we should not prioritize our flawed perceptions over robust systematic knowledge, and further that, we have no evidence or argument that qualia actually exist besides these flawed perceptions. If you agree with these two claims, then I argue that you should take an eliminativist position until such evidence arises, ala Russell's teapot.
My argument is not just "durr, obviously materialism", it's the simple epistemic argument that you probably apply to literally everything else, but you for some reason can't bring yourself to apply to these specific perceptions. The illusion is just too compelling and "obvious", just like demonic possession was obvious to people before modern psychology.
> How does this illusion come to be achieved when there is nothing remotely similar in any attribute of physical systems? How is it possible that one can explain all the physical properties of a system, but yet not explain the experience of "pain" or "seeing red"?
No such thing has been proved, only asserted. This is why eliminativism can dismiss the hard problem: there is no proof that there is a problem to solve, therefore the premise is rejected.
> Hell lets agree qualia is just physical. But how is it physically possible?
I think the paper I linked already hinted at it: the process of integrating signals from our senses also routes through an internal representation which looks up associated context but throws away information about the original perception, thus making it seemingly disconnected from anything. This establishes a separation between our direct perception of "outside" and the labels and other context, like redness, and so we attribute them to "inside".
Depending on how signals are integrated or switched or whatever into our "conscious awareness", this yields a persistent inference of ephemeral internal properties separate from external perceived properties at the conscious level, similar to how a single CPU multitasking gives the impression of parallelism, but which is simply the product of it's fast switching speed compared to our conscious perceptual speed.
If you've ever done cannabis you might have experienced consistent deja vu, caused by subtle timing changes in the signals from our memory vs. direct perceptions. Direct perception appears to be processed into our memory before the direct perception appears in our conscious awareness, so then it seems to us as if we remembered it.
I agree this isn't a fully precise accounting, but as I said, it's a solid working theory that doesn't require any magic and could plausibly explain the weird properties people attribute to qualia. It doesn't mean we stop talking about "experiencing pain", it just means that what "experiencing pain" means changes to something non-magical.
> This isnt the eliminativism take though (or at least that of Dennett) its "there is no problem to solve at all because we reject subjective experiences exist at all".
The hard problem doesn't exist in this framework, so yes, there is no hard problem to solve, there is only the "easy" problem of explaining how the mechanics of the brain work, and the behaviours associated with the illusion will become clear.
This was exactly the same situation with vitalism: there was a hard problem of explaining how life could arise from inert matter that wasn't alive, and those who dismissed the problem and continued to elaborate the mechanics of the cell shrunk the god of the gaps until nothing remained. That's what I predict will happen here, again.
> Even within physicalists, about 50% of those surveyed accept there is a hard problem of consciousness.
I agree, there's still a lot of unfortunate mysticism around this topic. Some philosophers also took vitalism seriously.
My point was that there is no solid epistemic argument for accepting that qualia are real, which is why I asked you to prove they're real. You said you didn't like arguments from authority but then you reverted to one here, which I will take as an acknowledgement that there is no known proof.
Until some solid evidence or proof, I operate on the minimal assumptions needed to explain observations. This requires that I acknowledge the deeply flawed nature of our perceptions, and so I refuse to trust them, particularly since taking them at face value would mean they are directly perceiving some aspect of reality that cannot otherwise be detected or measured.
You're talking to someone else now. Read the usernames.
And they were quite obviously refuting yours by pointing out that the authority you're appealing to doesn't even exist. Another example of your twisting of words that caused me to stop participating in this conversation days ago.
And neither knowing or not knowing how it works, nor making up explanations has nothing to do with it. A robot as I said could easily just say "When you hit me hard, I dont know why but it gives me an instinct to scream and move out of the way" just as easily I could say "I dont know why but what you said made me never want to talk to you again".
Qualia is still something we cant describe, so I am not sure what you mean its like making up some gibberish like an LLM does. If you ask me what red is I cant tell you, I dont go "well its like the frequency of light that resembles autumn and golden leaves". Youve either experienced it yourself or you havent.
Nobody denies that you "feel the pain", eliminativism simply denies that "feeling the pain" necessarily has implications for what does and does not fundamentally exist, and therefore, whether your perception of pain necessarily reflects some fundamental reality. There is no "pain" in the standard model after all, so either your pain doesn't really exist, or you're suggesting we add something to fundamental physics literally because of feelings.
No it's not, just like it wasn't reasonable to posit something more was needed to explain the difference between living and non-living matter. See the history of vitalism. Making assumptions that aren't strictly necessary to explain evidence is almost never warranted.
And in the grand scheme of things, our quest for knowledge has had a very very short timespan. Insisting that the mode of thought that has worked for a few hundred years must persist to eternity is not wise.
Assuming the standard model of physics will explain consciousness without any fundamental alternations is just as big of an assumption as the assumption that there is more to the standard model of physics. No different than having assumed newtonian physics could have explained relativity.
As far as I can see, current understanding of physics has no conceivable way of explaining how a system suddenly becomes capable of experiencing feeling.
And neither is it scientific to deny what is so readily observable to every human being.
Lastly, it would seem that you agree that our model of physics is in itself an illusion, within the framework of our conscious experience. On one hand it would appear you say, our conscious experience of reality is the sole way to find truth, and the other, that our conscious experience is flawed and experience of qualia can be discarded entirely. If we are to say "it only appears that you feel pain", how is this different than to say "it only appears that objects move"?
The proposal here is that your flawed, conscious experience can produce a truth of an "external" reality, whose laws are capable of forming the vary thing which is producing this flawed perception.
That's not what this is about. Science consists only of third-person objective facts. There is no "mind" in particles, no notion of subjectivity, so if we just accept that our minds truly have subjective first-person facts, then this is fundamentally at odds with the very core of materialist science. Every time this has happened in history a materialist explanation has been found, as with vitalism. Maybe it won't happen this time, but odds aren't good.
> On one hand it would appear you say, our conscious experience of reality is the sole way to find truth, and the other, that our conscious experience is flawed and experience of qualia can be discarded entirely.
Your mistaken assumption is that true conscious experience of reality is necessary to this process. I'd argue that it's not, that perception is all that is needed. "Experience" and "perception" are different.
Second, what you consider to be "materialist" is entirely subjective which can and has been amended. We readily accept force/energy and now randomness as part of material science. Why are these things not seen as mystic and immaterial forces of life? No matter deep you go, you have to accept some fundamental, unknown truths. And if one cannot explain onserved phenomena, it is only logical to have to add onto a model. The important part of science is whether we have measureable, meaningful theories that can make accurate predictions, not whether or not our fundamental blocks are "material" or not.
Lastly, what distinction do you make between experience and perception exactly? Im not saying they are the same, but it would be helpful to know how you're meaning these terms. My take is that whatever you consider "true" reality is out of bounds. By all prgramatic approaches we can only discover what is true to our minds. Whatever test you conduct, we can only verify the results within the framework of our mind. The only "universal" (in quotes as one can imagine the existence of some other perceptron that works entirely differently) what we all agree to be verfiable.
We're not talking a few hundred years, we're talking a few thousand at least. Human specialness rarely survives serious inquiry. There are no divine kings or priests, humans are not created in God's image, we're just another animal, and other animals have similar cognitive functions as we do. All of these and more were believed at one time or another, but have no factual basis.
> Second, what you consider to be "materialist" is entirely subjective which can and has been amended. We readily accept force/energy and now randomness as part of material science.
Materialism hasn't really changed, it's always and continues to be the position that all that we perceive is made of some common, physical substance governed by natural laws. That our understanding of how this works evolves doesn't change anything.
> And if one cannot explain onserved phenomena, it is only logical to have to add onto a model.
The suggestion that we cannot explain observed phenomena is exactly the point in contention. Neuroscience has barely gotten started, and the cracks in mystical properties of consciousness are practically chasms already. There is simply no basis for claiming that we need to extend our ontology to account for the mind.
> Lastly, what distinction do you make between experience and perception exactly?
Machine perception is a thing, machine experience is not. We too are machines with some extra capabilities, and one of them must produce the belief of experience as a side-effect. The conclusion is based on an illusion though, it's only perception and information processing in the end.
Objects don't move, their wavefunctions evolve according to the Schrödinger equation, and in the classical limit where the objects are large enough and the fields they interact with are smooth enough, they appear to follow Newton's laws.
It doesnt matter if you call them illusions or hallucinations. It's intriguing that they exist at all. If they simply did not exist there would be no discussion about this in the first place.
I mean do you believe an LLM running is equivalent to you experiencing lucid dreams? Whats the difference? Do you think the difference is simply that I say it's different? That if I added some code for the LLM to say "Yes I really do experience lucid dreams", it would be equivalent to your experience of lucid dreams? Or is there something else, entirely unexplained happening from my experiences and a computer making rudimentary calculations to string words together?
Yes, it exists as a phenomenon in nature, reported by most, if not all humans. It requires an explanation, but it might not have much to do with consciousness/self-awareness/intelligence or whatever you want to call it.
This is where the argument falls down, for me. Why would this ever happen if your neighbour wasn't feeling things to begin with? Which, considering you're probably the same species as your neighbour, suggests you also feel things.
Nothing is explained. We just have a little story that makes us stop asking questions. A thought-terminating cliché.
But Im not sure that works here. Besides I still dont see how feeling is necessary to accomplish this goal. Youd have to merely teach a robot to emit some unique symbol which another robot interprets as "that hurt".
And pain/empathy is just one thing. Theres a lot more to conscious experience. Seeing/hearing/feeling good/bad, etc
If you only believe you have feelings, as eliminativists allege, then the outcome is the same. That's the whole point of p-zombies.
LLMs may be demonstrating that hallucination is indeed a necessary component of at least one kind of thinking.
2. LLMs hallucinate in the sense that they make up random, different ideas, which I agree is necessary for intelligence. In this case however, consciousness is something we all experience.
We call it an illusion of motion so maybe it is also an illusion of consciousness. It's difficult to say whether the resulting consciousness is in some sense more real than the motion.
Sleep?