So we have one mysterious thing called “conscious experience” which corresponds to data. Yet we don’t know much about the former, not even if it has any effect on the world beyond the data it corresponds to. So wouldn’t it be simpler if we got rid of the distinction, and considered them one and the same?
No.
There is nothing in the data that we have any reason to believe to be experience. The simplicity is gained at the cost of throwing out the experience that we were trying to explain.
If a thing is mysterious — that is, it is a thing we have persistently failed to explain — then until we find an actual explanation, nothing is gained by seizing on some non-mysterious thing that is in some vague way associated with it and saying, that must be the experience. It is plainly not the experience.
I don’t personally think I’m making this mistake, since I do think that saying “the conscious experience is the data” actually does resolve my confusion about the hard problem of consciousness. (Though I am still left with many questions.)
And if we take reductionism as a strongly supported axiom (which I do), then necessarily any explanation of consciousness will have to be describable in terms of data and computation. So it seems to me that if we’re waiting for an explanation of experience that doesn’t boil down to saying “it’s a certain type of data and computation”, then we’ll be waiting forever.
And if we take reductionism as a strongly supported axiom (which I do), then necessarily any explanation of consciousness will have to be describable in terms of data and computation.
This is a tautology.
To me, the “axiom” is no more than a hypothesis. No-one has come up with an alternative that does not reduce to “magic”, but neither has anyone found a physical explanation that does not also reduce to “magic”. Every purported explanation has a step where magic has to happen to relate some physical phenomenon to subjective experience.
Compare “life”. At one time people thought that living things were distinguished from non-living things by possession of a “life force”. Clearly a magical explanation, no more than giving a name to a thing. But with modern methods of observation and experiment we are able to see that living things are machines all the way down to the level of molecules, and “life force” has fallen by the wayside. There is no longer any need of that hypothesis. The magic has been dissolved.
Explaining the existence of subjective experience has not reached that point. We are no nearer to it than mediaeval alchemists searching for the philosopher’s stone.
No.
There is nothing in the data that we have any reason to believe to be experience. The simplicity is gained at the cost of throwing out the experience that we were trying to explain.
If a thing is mysterious — that is, it is a thing we have persistently failed to explain — then until we find an actual explanation, nothing is gained by seizing on some non-mysterious thing that is in some vague way associated with it and saying, that must be the experience. It is plainly not the experience.
I don’t personally think I’m making this mistake, since I do think that saying “the conscious experience is the data” actually does resolve my confusion about the hard problem of consciousness. (Though I am still left with many questions.)
And if we take reductionism as a strongly supported axiom (which I do), then necessarily any explanation of consciousness will have to be describable in terms of data and computation. So it seems to me that if we’re waiting for an explanation of experience that doesn’t boil down to saying “it’s a certain type of data and computation”, then we’ll be waiting forever.
This is a tautology.
To me, the “axiom” is no more than a hypothesis. No-one has come up with an alternative that does not reduce to “magic”, but neither has anyone found a physical explanation that does not also reduce to “magic”. Every purported explanation has a step where magic has to happen to relate some physical phenomenon to subjective experience.
Compare “life”. At one time people thought that living things were distinguished from non-living things by possession of a “life force”. Clearly a magical explanation, no more than giving a name to a thing. But with modern methods of observation and experiment we are able to see that living things are machines all the way down to the level of molecules, and “life force” has fallen by the wayside. There is no longer any need of that hypothesis. The magic has been dissolved.
Explaining the existence of subjective experience has not reached that point. We are no nearer to it than mediaeval alchemists searching for the philosopher’s stone.