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Comment by wk_end | Hacker News Reader

> For some people (including me), a sense of phenomenal consciousness feels like the bedrock of existence, the least deniable thing; the sheer redness of red is so mysterious as to seem almost impossible to ground. Other people have the opposite intuition: consciousness doesn’t bother them, red is just a color, obviously matter can do computation, what’s everyone so worked up about? Philosophers naturally interpret this as a philosophical dispute, but I’m increasingly convinced it’s an equivalent of aphantasia, where people’s minds work in very different ways and they can’t even agree on the raw facts to be explained.

Is Scott accusing people who don't grasp the hardness of the hard problem of consciousness of being p-zombies?

(TBH I've occasionally wondered this myself.)

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To me, the absurdity of the idea of p-zombies is why I'm convinced consciousness isn't special to humans and animals.

Can complex LLMs have subjective experience? I don't know. But I haven't heard an argument against it that's not self-referential. The hardness of the hard problem is precisely why I can't say whether or not LLMs have subjective experience..

How would you differentiate that argument from similar arguments about other observable phenomena? As in…

No one has ever seen or otherwise directly experienced the inside of a star, nor is likely to be able to do so in the foreseeable future. To be a star is to emit a certain spectrum of electromagnetic energy, interact gravitationally with the local space-time continuum according to Einstein’s laws, etc.

It’s impossible to conceive of an object that does these things that wouldn’t be a star, so even if it turns out (as we’ll never be able to know) that Gliese 65 is actually a hollow sphere inhabited by dwarven space wizards producing the same observable effects, it’s still categorically a star.

(Sorry, miss my philosophy classes dearly!)

The scientific method only makes predictions about what the inside of the star is using the other things we've learned via the scientific method. It's not purely self-referential, "science" makes useful and repeatable predictions that can be verified experimentally.

However, when it comes to consciousness, there are currently no experimentally verifiable predictions based on whether humans are "phenomenally conscious" or "p-zombies". At least none I'm aware of.

FWIW I have gone from not understanding the problem to understanding the problem in the past couple of years because it's not trivial to casually intuit if you don't actually think about it and don't find it innately interesting and the discourse doesn't have the language to adequately express the problem, so this is probably wrong.

I’ve sort-of gone the opposite way. The more I introspect, the more I realize there isn’t anything mysterious there.

It’s true that we are lacking good language to talk about it, as we already fail at successfully communicating levels of phantasia/aphantasia.

It’s not so much that there’s anything mysterious you can discover through intense introspection or meditation. There might be, but I haven’t found it.

It’s fundamentally that this capability exists at all.

Strip it all down to I think therefore I am. That is very bizarre because it doesn’t follow that such a thing would happen. It’s also not clear that this is even happening at all, and, as an outside observer, you would assess that it isn’t. However, from the inside, it is clear that it is.

I don’t have an explanation for anyone but I have basically given up and accepted that consciousness is epiphenomenal, like looking through a microscope.

The thing is that when you say “that capability”, I don’t quite know what you mean. The fact that we perceive inner processings of our mind isn’t any more surprising than that we perceive the outer world, or that a debugger is able to introspect its own program state. Continuous introspection has led me to realize that “qualia”, or “what it’s like to be X”, emotions and feelings, are just perceptions of inner phenomena, and that when you pay close attention, there is nothing more to that perception than its informational content.

I wouldn’t contend that it’s interesting or not that, or even if, “you” perceive the “inner processings of your own mind”.

Re: qualia. Let’s put it aside briefly. It isn’t inconceivable that a system could construct representations that don’t correspond to an “objective” reality, i.e. a sort of reality hologram, as a tool to guide system behavior.

The key question to ask is: “construct representations for whom?”, or, to put the challenge directly, “it’s not surprising that an observer can be fooled. It’s surprising that there is an observer to fool”.

The world, in the standard understanding of physics, should be completely devoid of observers, even in cases where it instantiates performers, i.e. the I/O philosophical zombie most people know well by now.

To circle back around on why this is difficult: you have in front of you a HUD of constant perceived experience (which is meaningful even if you’re being fooled, i.e. cogito ergo sum). This has, through acculturation, become very mundane to you. But, given how we understand the rules of the world, if you direct your rationality onto the very lens through which you constantly perceive, you will find a very dark void of understanding that seems to defy the systems that otherwise serve you exceptionally well. This void is the hard problem.

What do you mean "perceive"? Why are there these "inner feelings" at all? They are not physical, and we can easily imagine a being that does not have them -- thus the whole p-zombie thought experiment. You're saying "qualia ... are just perceptions", and yes, that's the whole point. Defining qualia as qualia does not explain away the problem.

And clearly there is more to perception than informational content, unless you think that a copper wire transmitting video footage "perceives" in the same way as a human does -- which seems gargantuanly unlikely, given that how we transmit video is correlated with how our eyes work, so a priori you would not expect it to map onto "universal video footage" even if all matter were actually perceiving in some way.

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