I’m afraid I’m sceptical that you methodology licenses the conclusions you draw.
Thanks for raising this. It’s one of the reasons I spelled out my methodology, to the extent that I had one. You’re right that, as I said, my methodology explicitly asks people to pay attention to the internal structure of what they were experiencing in themselves and calling consciousness, and to describe it on a process level. Personally I’m confident that whatever people are managing to refer to by “consciousness” is a process than runs on matter. If you’re not confident of that, then you shouldn’t be confident in my conclusion, because my methodology was premised on that assumption.
Of course people differ with respect to intuitions about the structure of consciousness.
Why do you say “of course” here? It could have turned out that people were all referring to the same structure, and their subjective sense of its presence would have aligned. That turned out not to be the case.
But the structure is not the typical referent of the word ‘conscious’,
I disagree with this claim. Consciousness is almost certainly a process that runs on matter, in the brain. Moreover, the belief that “consciousness exists” — whatever that means — is almost always derived from some first-person sense of awareness of that process, whatever it is. In my investigations, I asked people to attend to the process there were referring to, and describe it. As far as I can tell, they usually described pretty coherent things that were (almost certainly) actually happening inside their minds. This raises a question: why is the same word used to refer to these many different subject experiences of processes that are almost certainly physically real, and distinct, in the brain?
The standard explanation is that they’re all facets or failed descriptions of some other elusive “thing” called “consciousness”, which is somehow perpetually elusive and hard for scientists to discover. I’m rejecting that explanation, in favor of a simpler one: consciousness is a word that people use to refer to mental processes that they consider intrinsically valuable upon introspective observation, so they agree with each other when they say “consciousness is valuable” and disagree with each other when they say “the mental process I’m calling conscious consists of {details}”. The “hard problem of consciousness” is the problem of resolving a linguistic dispute disguised as an ontological one, where people agree on the normative properties of consciousness (it’s valuable) but not on its descriptive properties (its nature as a process/pattern.)
the first-person, phenomenal character of experience itself is.
I agree that the first-person experience of consciousness is how people are convinced that something they call consciousness exists. Usually when a person experiences something, like an image or a sound, they can describe the structure of the thing they’re experiencing. So I just asked them to describe the structure they were experiencing and calling “consciousness”, and got different — coherent — answers from different people. 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.
The “hard problem of consciousness” is the problem of resolving a linguistic dispute disguised as an ontological one, where people agree on the normative properties of consciousness (it’s valuable) but on its descriptive properties (its nature as a process/pattern.)
That’s just another conflation—of an easy and the hard problem—yes, there is disagreement about what mental processes are valuable, but there is also ontological problem and not everyone agree that ontological consciousness is intrinsically valuable.
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?
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 raising this. It’s one of the reasons I spelled out my methodology, to the extent that I had one. You’re right that, as I said, my methodology explicitly asks people to pay attention to the internal structure of what they were experiencing in themselves and calling consciousness, and to describe it on a process level. Personally I’m confident that whatever people are managing to refer to by “consciousness” is a process than runs on matter. If you’re not confident of that, then you shouldn’t be confident in my conclusion, because my methodology was premised on that assumption.
Why do you say “of course” here? It could have turned out that people were all referring to the same structure, and their subjective sense of its presence would have aligned. That turned out not to be the case.
I disagree with this claim. Consciousness is almost certainly a process that runs on matter, in the brain. Moreover, the belief that “consciousness exists” — whatever that means — is almost always derived from some first-person sense of awareness of that process, whatever it is. In my investigations, I asked people to attend to the process there were referring to, and describe it. As far as I can tell, they usually described pretty coherent things that were (almost certainly) actually happening inside their minds. This raises a question: why is the same word used to refer to these many different subject experiences of processes that are almost certainly physically real, and distinct, in the brain?
The standard explanation is that they’re all facets or failed descriptions of some other elusive “thing” called “consciousness”, which is somehow perpetually elusive and hard for scientists to discover. I’m rejecting that explanation, in favor of a simpler one: consciousness is a word that people use to refer to mental processes that they consider intrinsically valuable upon introspective observation, so they agree with each other when they say “consciousness is valuable” and disagree with each other when they say “the mental process I’m calling conscious consists of {details}”. The “hard problem of consciousness” is the problem of resolving a linguistic dispute disguised as an ontological one, where people agree on the normative properties of consciousness (it’s valuable) but not on its descriptive properties (its nature as a process/pattern.)
I agree that the first-person experience of consciousness is how people are convinced that something they call consciousness exists. Usually when a person experiences something, like an image or a sound, they can describe the structure of the thing they’re experiencing. So I just asked them to describe the structure they were experiencing and calling “consciousness”, and got different — coherent — answers from different people. 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.
That’s just another conflation—of an easy and the hard problem—yes, there is disagreement about what mental processes are valuable, but there is also ontological problem and not everyone agree that ontological consciousness is intrinsically valuable.
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?
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.