Some neat tidbits about our ability to recall our conscious experience and about how difficult it is to hold a passing thought in memory long enough to analyze it, but it is a total strawman of Hume’s (and many others’) position that “I cannot be wrong about my subjective experience.”
What you’ve done here is equivocate on the term “subjective experience,” using it in the introduction as if it were going mean your current, right-this-moment experience (e.g., “I am in pain now,” which imparts a huge wow factor for readers, so I can see why), then proceeded to give a bunch of examples where “subjective experience” means something you subjectively experienced in the past, or had trouble bringing fully into conscious awareness in the first place.
Then, at the very end, you equivocate back to the Humean sense of this-moment conscious experience and flounder into this whopper:
We can be wrong about our own subjective conscious experiences. Thus, they cannot serve as a bedrock for certainty and a priori truth.
Sure, past subjective conscious experience is something we can be wrong about. We can misremember things. Hume’s (and others’) point is that we cannot be wrong about things like, “I am seeing blue right now.” If you doubt things like that, you must apply at least that same level of doubt to everything else, such as whether you are really reading a LessWrong comment instead of being chased by hungry sharks right now.
I’ve been enjoying your recent posts, but I wish you would resist the urge to sensationalize and overgeneralize just to grab more eyeballs.
What you’ve done here is equivocate on the term “subjective experience,” using it in the introduction as if it were going mean your current, right-this-moment experience (e.g., “I am in pain now,” which imparts a huge wow factor for readers, so I can see why), then proceeded to give a bunch of examples where “subjective experience” means something you subjectively experienced in the past, or had trouble bringing fully into conscious awareness in the first place.
There is no such thing as “right-this-moment experience”, signals in the brain do not travel at infinite speed. What you think of as current conscious experience is just a combination of past unconscious experience and awareness/knowledge/something else? about that experience. No part of your mind can possibly know what any other part is doing right now (there is no equivalent of a processor clock with a global tick where right now means in this tick), and as much uncertainty as there is about how consciousness works it seems fairly clear that it’s not something one discrete part of your mind is doing all on its own.
Sure, past subjective conscious experience is something we can be wrong about. We can misremember things. Hume’s (and others’) point is that we cannot be wrong about things like, “I am seeing blue right now.” If you doubt things like that, you must apply at least that same level of doubt to everything else, such as whether you are really reading a LessWrong comment instead of being chased by hungry sharks right now.
If with “I am seeing blue right now” you mean something like “some part of my mind signaled recognition (erroneously or not) of a signal in my mind as representing blue and whatever would need to happen for such a signal of recognition to be rescinded did not happen early enough to fully influence this thought when it was formed” then yes, that’s about as certain as you can be about anything in absence of independent verification. Any potential sources of error in such a belief would seem to exist in analogous form for any other beliefs as well (though it’s imaginable that such sources of error affect different kinds of beliefs to different degrees, in that case some beliefs about the real word might be more trustworthy than some beliefs about your mental state of the sort described above).
“some part of my mind signaled recognition (erroneously or not) of a signal in my mind as representing blue...
Surely the cognitive processes which go into implementing your experience are not always elsewhere, that it would require receiving a signal from somewhere else in order to know what is going on with itself. There is no need for a signal from some other process to take time to travel to the processes implementing your experience if the process simply constitutes your conscious experience.
There is no Cartesian theater, with you in the seat of the mind, receiving sensory/mental inputs from everywhere else in your brain.
“some part of my mind signaled recognition (erroneously or not) of a signal in my mind as representing blue...
Surely the cognitive processes which go into implementing your experience are not always elsewhere, that it would require receiving a signal from somewhere else in order to know what is going on with itself.
Note that the passage you quoted doesn’t specify whether those parts are different parts, and that the signal from the optical nerve has to be identified as corresponding to the signal representing the concept “blue” at some stage should be fairly uncontroversial. This was fully intentional since I wanted to make the statement to rely on as few assumptions as possible (e. g. avoided using the words brain, nerve, neuron, visual cortex etc).
Nevertheless I would also mostly agree with the position you read me as expressing.
Unless you think a single neuron can have full self awareness other neurons have to be involved to represent knowledge about the state of a particular neuron. Knowledge about a signal and the signal itself have to use separate (though potentially overlapping) brainware up until the smallest entity that has knowledge about itself. I see no reason to assume that there is a hierarchy with multiple levels of such entities. It seems entirely plausible that the lowest level at which explicit knowledge about mental states exists is at a level where (a subset of) such knowledge is available to the conscious mind.
There is no need for a signal from some other process to take time to travel to the processes implementing your experience if the process simply constitutes your conscious experience.
Of course not, that’s just nonsense. But knowledge about experience and the experience itself are different things unless the experience is somehow self-referential, and I’m not convinced this is ever the case. Experience-> knowledge of experience → knowldge of the knowldege → detection of potential infinite loop
seems at least as plausible as experience-> knowledge of experience → localized self-referential knowledge.
Also the process that leads from a signal arriving in your visual cortex to forming a thought like “I am seeing blue right now” would be complicated and involve many different parts of the brain (representing the exact shade of the color, recognizing it as belonging to blue and associating it with the concept of blue, activating all the various immediate associations including the word “blue”, recognizing that this has happened, forming the sentence...) even if localized self-referential knowledge is the end result. All of the various stages seem to be part of what would be called experiencing seeing blue.
There is no Cartesian theater, with you in the seat of the mind, receiving sensory/mental inputs from everywhere else in your brain.
No, of course not. That would be the exact opposite of what I claimed! My point is exactly that such things are spread out over different parts of the brain. I think different parts of the mind form an “audience” for each other, though (with considerable overlap between the audience and the performers (perhaps the audience even being a strict subset) and each audience member only receiving a subset of the performance).
Edit: On review it seems the word experience is distinctly unhelpful, maybe it would be better to taboo it.
English doesn’t give us a good way of distinguishing sensory input from sensations themselves—there’s no easy way to distinguish “Light of a certain wavelength is entering my eye” from “I am seeing blue (in a dream or something).” So let me call the former seeing and the latter seezing (the purely subjective experience of seeing).
If you show me a standard American (red) stop sign and I seez this (blue), I may be in some sense wrong about what color the sign is, but not wrong about what I am seezing. In fact, it wouldn’t even make sense to be wrong (or right) about what I am seezing.
Hume’s (and others’) point is that we cannot be wrong about things like, “I am seeing blue right now.” If you doubt things like that, you must apply at least that same level of doubt to everything else, such as whether you are really reading a LessWrong comment instead of being chased by hungry sharks right now.
Utterly ridiculous comparison. Ever looked at the stars?
Some neat tidbits about our ability to recall our conscious experience and about how difficult it is to hold a passing thought in memory long enough to analyze it, but it is a total strawman of Hume’s (and many others’) position that “I cannot be wrong about my subjective experience.”
What you’ve done here is equivocate on the term “subjective experience,” using it in the introduction as if it were going mean your current, right-this-moment experience (e.g., “I am in pain now,” which imparts a huge wow factor for readers, so I can see why), then proceeded to give a bunch of examples where “subjective experience” means something you subjectively experienced in the past, or had trouble bringing fully into conscious awareness in the first place.
Then, at the very end, you equivocate back to the Humean sense of this-moment conscious experience and flounder into this whopper:
Sure, past subjective conscious experience is something we can be wrong about. We can misremember things. Hume’s (and others’) point is that we cannot be wrong about things like, “I am seeing blue right now.” If you doubt things like that, you must apply at least that same level of doubt to everything else, such as whether you are really reading a LessWrong comment instead of being chased by hungry sharks right now.
I’ve been enjoying your recent posts, but I wish you would resist the urge to sensationalize and overgeneralize just to grab more eyeballs.
There is no such thing as “right-this-moment experience”, signals in the brain do not travel at infinite speed. What you think of as current conscious experience is just a combination of past unconscious experience and awareness/knowledge/something else? about that experience. No part of your mind can possibly know what any other part is doing right now (there is no equivalent of a processor clock with a global tick where right now means in this tick), and as much uncertainty as there is about how consciousness works it seems fairly clear that it’s not something one discrete part of your mind is doing all on its own.
If with “I am seeing blue right now” you mean something like “some part of my mind signaled recognition (erroneously or not) of a signal in my mind as representing blue and whatever would need to happen for such a signal of recognition to be rescinded did not happen early enough to fully influence this thought when it was formed” then yes, that’s about as certain as you can be about anything in absence of independent verification. Any potential sources of error in such a belief would seem to exist in analogous form for any other beliefs as well (though it’s imaginable that such sources of error affect different kinds of beliefs to different degrees, in that case some beliefs about the real word might be more trustworthy than some beliefs about your mental state of the sort described above).
Surely the cognitive processes which go into implementing your experience are not always elsewhere, that it would require receiving a signal from somewhere else in order to know what is going on with itself. There is no need for a signal from some other process to take time to travel to the processes implementing your experience if the process simply constitutes your conscious experience.
There is no Cartesian theater, with you in the seat of the mind, receiving sensory/mental inputs from everywhere else in your brain.
Note that the passage you quoted doesn’t specify whether those parts are different parts, and that the signal from the optical nerve has to be identified as corresponding to the signal representing the concept “blue” at some stage should be fairly uncontroversial. This was fully intentional since I wanted to make the statement to rely on as few assumptions as possible (e. g. avoided using the words brain, nerve, neuron, visual cortex etc).
Nevertheless I would also mostly agree with the position you read me as expressing.
Unless you think a single neuron can have full self awareness other neurons have to be involved to represent knowledge about the state of a particular neuron. Knowledge about a signal and the signal itself have to use separate (though potentially overlapping) brainware up until the smallest entity that has knowledge about itself. I see no reason to assume that there is a hierarchy with multiple levels of such entities. It seems entirely plausible that the lowest level at which explicit knowledge about mental states exists is at a level where (a subset of) such knowledge is available to the conscious mind.
Of course not, that’s just nonsense. But knowledge about experience and the experience itself are different things unless the experience is somehow self-referential, and I’m not convinced this is ever the case. Experience-> knowledge of experience → knowldge of the knowldege → detection of potential infinite loop seems at least as plausible as experience-> knowledge of experience → localized self-referential knowledge.
Also the process that leads from a signal arriving in your visual cortex to forming a thought like “I am seeing blue right now” would be complicated and involve many different parts of the brain (representing the exact shade of the color, recognizing it as belonging to blue and associating it with the concept of blue, activating all the various immediate associations including the word “blue”, recognizing that this has happened, forming the sentence...) even if localized self-referential knowledge is the end result. All of the various stages seem to be part of what would be called experiencing seeing blue.
No, of course not. That would be the exact opposite of what I claimed! My point is exactly that such things are spread out over different parts of the brain. I think different parts of the mind form an “audience” for each other, though (with considerable overlap between the audience and the performers (perhaps the audience even being a strict subset) and each audience member only receiving a subset of the performance).
Edit: On review it seems the word experience is distinctly unhelpful, maybe it would be better to taboo it.
To add to FAWS’ comment above, there are all sorts of factors that influence your subjective experience, e.g. your expectations can color (pun intended) your experience of seeing blue. And sometimes your brain can outright override sensory input, as this comment by Eliezer illustrates.
English doesn’t give us a good way of distinguishing sensory input from sensations themselves—there’s no easy way to distinguish “Light of a certain wavelength is entering my eye” from “I am seeing blue (in a dream or something).” So let me call the former seeing and the latter seezing (the purely subjective experience of seeing).
If you show me a standard American (red) stop sign and I seez this (blue), I may be in some sense wrong about what color the sign is, but not wrong about what I am seezing. In fact, it wouldn’t even make sense to be wrong (or right) about what I am seezing.
Utterly ridiculous comparison. Ever looked at the stars?