Personally I’m confident that whatever people are managing to refer to by “consciousness” is a process than runs on matter
I don’t disagree that consciousness is a process that runs on matter, but that is a separate question from whether the typical referent of consciousness is that process. If it turned out my consciousness was being implemented on a bunch of grapes it wouldn’t change what I am referring to when I speak of my own consciousness. The referents are the experiences themselves from a first-person perspective.
I asked people to attend to the process there were referring to, and describe it.
Right, let me try again. We are talking about the question of ‘what people mean by consciousness’. In my view, the obvious answer to what people mean by consciousness is the fact that it is like something to be them, i.e., they are subjective beings. Now, if I’m right, even if the people you spoke to believe that consciousness is a process that runs on physical matter and even if they have differing opinions on what the structure of that process might be, that doesn’t stop the basic referent of consciousness being shared by those people. That’s because that referent is (conceptually) independent of the process that realises it (note: one need not be dualist to think this way. Indeed, I am not a dualist.).
The fact that their answers were coherent, and seemed to correspond to processes that almost certainly actually exist in the human mind/brain, convinced me to just believe them that they were detecting something real and managing to refer to it through introspection, rather than assuming they were all somehow wrong and failing to describe some deeper more elusive thing that was beyond their experience.
First, I wonder if the use of the word ‘detect’ may help us locate the source of our disagreement. A minimal notion of what consciousness is does not require much detection. Consciousness captures the fact that we have first-person experience at all. When we are awake and aware, we are conscious. We can’t help but detect it.
Second, with regards to the ‘wrong and failing’ talk… as Descartes put it, the only thing I cannot doubt is that I exist. This could equally be phrased in terms of consciousness. As such, that consciousness is real is the thing I can doubt least (even illusionists like Keith Frankish don’t actually doubt minimal consciousness, they just refuse to ascribe certain properties to it). However, there are several further things you may be referring to here. One is the contents of people’s consciousness. Can we give faulty reports of what we experience? Undoubtedly yes, but like you I see no reason to doubt the veracity of the reports you elicited. Another is the structure of the neural system that implements consciousness (assuming that it is, indeed, a physical process). I don’t know what kind of truth conditions you have in mind here, but I think it very unlikely that your subjects’ descriptions accurately represent the physical processes occurring in their brains.
Third, consciousness, as I am speaking of it, is decidedly not some deeper elusive thing that is beyond our experience. It is our experience. The reason consciousness is still a philosophical problem is not because it is elusive in the sense of ‘hard to experience personally’, but because it is elusive in the sense of ‘resists satisfying analysis in a traditional scientific framework’.
Is any of this making sense to you? I get that you have a different viewpoint, but I’d be interested to know whether you think you understand this viewpoint, too, as opposed to it seeming crazy to you. In particular, do you get how I can simultaneously think consciousness is implemented physically without thinking that the referent of consciousness need contain any details about the implementational process?
I’m not Critch and I haven’t read much philosophy, but I am the kind of person who he would have interviewed in the OP. It’s clear to me that there are at least two senses of the word “conscious”.
There’s the mundane sense which is just a synonym for “awake and aware”, as opposed to “asleep” or “lifeless”. “Is the patient conscious yet?” (This is cluster 11 in the OP.)
There’s the sense(s) that get brought up in the late-night bull sessions Critch is talking about. “We are subjective beings.” “There is something it is like to be us.”
I confess sense 2 doesn’t make any sense to me, but I’m linguistically competent enough to understand it’s not the same as sense 1. I know these senses are different because the correct response to “Are you conscious?” in sense 1 is “Yes, I can hear you and I’m awake now”, and a correct response to “Are you conscious?” in sense 2 is to have an hour-long conversation about what it means.
So, this claim is at odds with my experience as an English speaker:
the obvious answer to what people mean by consciousness is the fact that it is like something to be them, i.e., they are subjective beings.
Sometimes terms are overloaded, because that’s how language works. It doesn’t imply that, given the right context, the intended meaning can’t be teased apart. Words are containers of meaning; the substance is what matters, not the form.
“Bull” can mean both a male cattle and a member of r/WSB who believes the stock market will continue to trend upwards. But when I’m in a car with someone else and we’re gazing out at the countryside and they start talking about all these big, beautiful bulls they’ve just seen, I must confess it doesn’t make me think of stock options and futures at all. Nor does it make me think “bull” is a conflationary alliance term between farmers and hedge fund managers.
The extent to which LW cares about consciousness is we’re trying to solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness and understand the fundamental nature of qualia, subjectivity, and personal identity, among other related ways of putting it. In this context, the meaning of “consciousness” we’re interested in differs tremendously from what an MD would use to describe whether a patient is out of a coma or not.
To the extent responses to Critch’s questionnaire talked about consciousness outside the context of what LW users care about discussing on this site, talking about that stuff here distracts from what’s most important, and from what this post should be interpreted as being about.
Yeah, you and I agree that people can clearly distinguish between my senses 1 and 2. I was responding to Paradiddle, who I read as conflating the two — he defines “conscious” as both “awake and aware” and as “there is something it [is] like to be us”. I could have been clearer about this.
I believe grad students and Less Wrong users in these conversations are usually working with sense 2, but in fact sense 2 is multiple things and different people mean different things, to the extent they mean anything at all.
Paradiddle claims to the contrary that practically everyone in these conversations is talking about the same thing and just has different intuitions about how it works. But you seem to disagree with Paradiddle? Are you saying that Critch’s subjects aren’t talking about what you mean by “conscious”?
Paradiddle, who I read as conflating the two — he defines “conscious” as both “awake and aware” and as “there is something it [is] like to be us”
Or it could be that believes, as a factual matter, that one necessarily implies the other. I won’t pretend to mind read him, though.
Are you saying that Critch’s subjects aren’t talking about what you mean by “conscious”?
I’m saying I suspect Critch was not careful enough in how he posed his questions to the people he was interviewing to ensure that they understood[1] the question was about “consciousness-LW” and not “consciousness-general,” which includes “consciousness-MD.”
This is somewhat of a drive-by comment, but this post mostly captures the totality about the extrinsics of “consciousness” AFAICT. From my own informal discussions, most of the crux of disagreement in seems to revolve around what’s going on in the moment when we perform the judgement “I’m obviously conscious” or “Of course I exist.”
At the very least, disentangling that performative action from the gut-level value judgement and feeling tends to clear up a lot of my own internal confusion. Indeed, the part 1 categorization lines up with a smorgasbord of internal processes I also personally identify, but I also honestly don’t know what to even look for when asked to observe or describe subjective consciousness.
I feel like a discussion of “life essence” would have mostly a similar structure if the cultural zeitgeist in analytical philosophy got us interested in that. Sure, I agree that I’m alive, which might come out like “I have life essence” under a different linguistic ontology, but attempting to operationalize “life essence” doesn’t seem like a fruitful exercise to me.
Thanks for the response.
I don’t disagree that consciousness is a process that runs on matter, but that is a separate question from whether the typical referent of consciousness is that process. If it turned out my consciousness was being implemented on a bunch of grapes it wouldn’t change what I am referring to when I speak of my own consciousness. The referents are the experiences themselves from a first-person perspective.
Right, let me try again. We are talking about the question of ‘what people mean by consciousness’. In my view, the obvious answer to what people mean by consciousness is the fact that it is like something to be them, i.e., they are subjective beings. Now, if I’m right, even if the people you spoke to believe that consciousness is a process that runs on physical matter and even if they have differing opinions on what the structure of that process might be, that doesn’t stop the basic referent of consciousness being shared by those people. That’s because that referent is (conceptually) independent of the process that realises it (note: one need not be dualist to think this way. Indeed, I am not a dualist.).
First, I wonder if the use of the word ‘detect’ may help us locate the source of our disagreement. A minimal notion of what consciousness is does not require much detection. Consciousness captures the fact that we have first-person experience at all. When we are awake and aware, we are conscious. We can’t help but detect it.
Second, with regards to the ‘wrong and failing’ talk… as Descartes put it, the only thing I cannot doubt is that I exist. This could equally be phrased in terms of consciousness. As such, that consciousness is real is the thing I can doubt least (even illusionists like Keith Frankish don’t actually doubt minimal consciousness, they just refuse to ascribe certain properties to it). However, there are several further things you may be referring to here. One is the contents of people’s consciousness. Can we give faulty reports of what we experience? Undoubtedly yes, but like you I see no reason to doubt the veracity of the reports you elicited. Another is the structure of the neural system that implements consciousness (assuming that it is, indeed, a physical process). I don’t know what kind of truth conditions you have in mind here, but I think it very unlikely that your subjects’ descriptions accurately represent the physical processes occurring in their brains.
Third, consciousness, as I am speaking of it, is decidedly not some deeper elusive thing that is beyond our experience. It is our experience. The reason consciousness is still a philosophical problem is not because it is elusive in the sense of ‘hard to experience personally’, but because it is elusive in the sense of ‘resists satisfying analysis in a traditional scientific framework’.
Is any of this making sense to you? I get that you have a different viewpoint, but I’d be interested to know whether you think you understand this viewpoint, too, as opposed to it seeming crazy to you. In particular, do you get how I can simultaneously think consciousness is implemented physically without thinking that the referent of consciousness need contain any details about the implementational process?
I’m not Critch and I haven’t read much philosophy, but I am the kind of person who he would have interviewed in the OP. It’s clear to me that there are at least two senses of the word “conscious”.
There’s the mundane sense which is just a synonym for “awake and aware”, as opposed to “asleep” or “lifeless”. “Is the patient conscious yet?” (This is cluster 11 in the OP.)
There’s the sense(s) that get brought up in the late-night bull sessions Critch is talking about. “We are subjective beings.” “There is something it is like to be us.”
I confess sense 2 doesn’t make any sense to me, but I’m linguistically competent enough to understand it’s not the same as sense 1. I know these senses are different because the correct response to “Are you conscious?” in sense 1 is “Yes, I can hear you and I’m awake now”, and a correct response to “Are you conscious?” in sense 2 is to have an hour-long conversation about what it means.
So, this claim is at odds with my experience as an English speaker:
Sometimes terms are overloaded, because that’s how language works. It doesn’t imply that, given the right context, the intended meaning can’t be teased apart. Words are containers of meaning; the substance is what matters, not the form.
“Bull” can mean both a male cattle and a member of r/WSB who believes the stock market will continue to trend upwards. But when I’m in a car with someone else and we’re gazing out at the countryside and they start talking about all these big, beautiful bulls they’ve just seen, I must confess it doesn’t make me think of stock options and futures at all. Nor does it make me think “bull” is a conflationary alliance term between farmers and hedge fund managers.
The extent to which LW cares about consciousness is we’re trying to solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness and understand the fundamental nature of qualia, subjectivity, and personal identity, among other related ways of putting it. In this context, the meaning of “consciousness” we’re interested in differs tremendously from what an MD would use to describe whether a patient is out of a coma or not.
To the extent responses to Critch’s questionnaire talked about consciousness outside the context of what LW users care about discussing on this site, talking about that stuff here distracts from what’s most important, and from what this post should be interpreted as being about.
Yeah, you and I agree that people can clearly distinguish between my senses 1 and 2. I was responding to Paradiddle, who I read as conflating the two — he defines “conscious” as both “awake and aware” and as “there is something it [is] like to be us”. I could have been clearer about this.
I believe grad students and Less Wrong users in these conversations are usually working with sense 2, but in fact sense 2 is multiple things and different people mean different things, to the extent they mean anything at all.
Paradiddle claims to the contrary that practically everyone in these conversations is talking about the same thing and just has different intuitions about how it works. But you seem to disagree with Paradiddle? Are you saying that Critch’s subjects aren’t talking about what you mean by “conscious”?
Or it could be that believes, as a factual matter, that one necessarily implies the other. I won’t pretend to mind read him, though.
I’m saying I suspect Critch was not careful enough in how he posed his questions to the people he was interviewing to ensure that they understood[1] the question was about “consciousness-LW” and not “consciousness-general,” which includes “consciousness-MD.”
Even though most (but not all) of them seem to have grasped the task regardless
This is somewhat of a drive-by comment, but this post mostly captures the totality about the extrinsics of “consciousness” AFAICT. From my own informal discussions, most of the crux of disagreement in seems to revolve around what’s going on in the moment when we perform the judgement “I’m obviously conscious” or “Of course I exist.”
At the very least, disentangling that performative action from the gut-level value judgement and feeling tends to clear up a lot of my own internal confusion. Indeed, the part 1 categorization lines up with a smorgasbord of internal processes I also personally identify, but I also honestly don’t know what to even look for when asked to observe or describe subjective consciousness.
I feel like a discussion of “life essence” would have mostly a similar structure if the cultural zeitgeist in analytical philosophy got us interested in that. Sure, I agree that I’m alive, which might come out like “I have life essence” under a different linguistic ontology, but attempting to operationalize “life essence” doesn’t seem like a fruitful exercise to me.