This is a cool position. Thanks for taking the time to explain it in so much detail.
I think I can see where we’re diverging. You want to place the metaphysical bridge between the 0P → 1P perspective and because there’s something metaphysically substantial happening in this bridge it’s a camp-2 position. But within the 1P side you’re treating 1P phenomenal states as a subset of the full 1P space and what links the phenomenal states to the other 1P states is some kind of structural relation. This idea is very camp 1-ish to me, the extra work done is being done by structural/relational links between phenomenal and non-phenomenal states in 1P.
By contrast, I want to place the metaphysical bridge between the physical and phenomenal states P → Q. This means I’m rejecting the claim that Q is related to P by purely structural relations or dispositional properties. This is also why I said the most parsimonious bridge was a null one unless you had access to Q. I agree the null bridge is incoherent if what you’re talking about is the 0P → 1P link that an instantiated agent needs to access is sensors. But that’s not the bridge the unconscious superintelligence needs. It needs a bridge to Q and since it doesn’t possess Q it could coherently postulate a null bridge between P and Q. From its perspective the null bridge would also be most parsimonious if it truly didn’t possess Q.
I’ve kind’ve sketched my reasons for thinking structural and dispositional properties don’t yield Q in the rest of the thread but I’ll throw in one more: from my perspective the structural/dispositional properties are inherently 0P there’s no 1P categorical/intrinsic properties which describe “what it’s like”
So when you say:
the phenomenal structure is perhaps foreign, but understandable within the 1P side the same way a cell is understandable to it on the 0P side
I reject the analogy. On my view, your link between the non-phenomenal 1P and phenomenal 1P is still structural/relational and these properties are always 0P in nature.
This might be a natural point to end the conversation as I think we’re at a point where our intuitions lie on opposite sides of a pretty large crux. But I’m happy to continue if you think there’s another angle I’m missing.
Thanks for pushing me to describe it better! This has been a lovely discussion.
I agree there is something very camp 1-ish about the idea (and just me as a person, frankly).
So your Q is not even a type of 1P thing, is that right? I’m not sure what sort of thing your Q is supposed to be, which I suppose is what my side of the crux looks like. (I kind of suspect that if you are right about Q, then I do not have access to it myself.)
I also (regardless of my other points and arguments) think you are wrong that structural/relational properties are always 0P! I think 0P can’t actually even have a proposition like “I always see blue right after I see red”, which still needs to use indexicals in order to refer. There’s a similar seeming “Environment X has a red-blue light sequence” on the 0P side which is not actually the same (e.g. what if I’m not actually in that environment?).
To me, “what it’s like” grounds to something like: an experience that there is something I observe which has its own 1P experiences (and a prediction of what those might be based on my observations). Phenomenal consciousness is then maybe something like: the observation that there is an observable entity ‘self’ such that ‘what-it’s-like_self(to see red)’ implies ‘to see red’. And this sort of fixed-point thing is inherently really weird and slippery just from a pure math point of view, e.g. Löb’s theorem (imagine ‘what-it’s-like’ as the box), which has the infamous Gödel’s 2nd Incompleteness theorem as a special case. And all of this is inherent to the 1P side; only on the 0P side can you just reduce things to neurons or atoms or whatever (though I claim a simple bridge would still reveal the 1P structure just from the 0P side). This formulation is speculative and off-the-cuff, and only intended to gesture at the sort of structure I think is possible here.
And happy to leave the discussion here if you’re done, but I am curious to know what you think of this idea.
Let me explain my view in a little more detail—it’s worth noting that I hold it pretty tentatively (around ~p(60%)) but I think you’ll find it appealing and hopefully see where it parts way with your view.
If you hold a blue image in your mind there’ll be something it’s like for you to experience blue. Call that Q. Now if you hold a red experience in your mind there’ll be a corresponding red experience that’s different to the blue one. Call it Q’. Hopefully you know what I’m talking about here! Some people with very strong camp 1 intuitions aren’t even willing to grant this, but I feel like if we’ve gotten this far in the thread we have some common ground here.
On my view, there is a fact of the matter about what blue and red look like for you and this is underdetermined by the physical/dispositional properties. The physical/dispositional properties could be held constant and these blue/red experiences could vary in principle. Granted, there’s a lot of structural constraints e.g. light cones in your retina, reflectance of surfaces, wiring of your brain etc.. But I claim that even if physics were fully fixed some aspect of your experience could vary in principle.
More precisely, a complete description of physics would tell you everything about the dispositional/relational properties of physical particles. Specifically, given a state P it will tell you how it evolves to P’. An example is an electron with charge q and mass m moving in an electric and gravitational field. The physics fully specifies the dispositional properties of the particles e.g. the electron will move in such-and-such a way. But this doesn’t tell you about any of their essential properties. If you switched the mass with something that played the same role but was intrinsically different (call is schmass) would that change anything? On standard physics, it wouldn’t matter what was playing the mass-role itself only that the structural form of the equations are intact.
On my view however, it does matter. The particles have an additional categorical/essential property that fixes something about the world. Importantly, these properties are physical in some sense (they’re all part of the same “stuff” that physicists talk about) but they’re not captured by the normal relational/dispositional properties of physics. This view is called Russellian Monism.
So with this formalism in place it actually connects up quite nicely with the other components of your view. The 0P/1P framework gives a nice overview of the difference between describing the disposition of the state (0P) and tokening the categorical essence of the state (1P). The hard problem intuitions just fall straight out of the difference between 0P/1P. Also on this view there are no zombies, since duplicating the physical particles necessarily duplicates their categorical properties — so there’s no gap between what I’ve been calling functional 1P and phenomenal 1P. As soon as experiences enter 1P they’re phenomenal.
Where this differs from your view is I think you need a categorical property to fix the phenomenal character of certain states. Whereas on your view it seems like you’re using the bridging law + structure to fix phenomenal character. In my previous comments I’m mostly pressing you about how much work structure is doing in your framework. If you’re happy for bridging laws to provide the jump then our views actually become really close.
Your point about Löb’s theorem is interesting and it seems like it could be a nice formalisation of the 0P/1P idea. I’d just emphasise that it’s still a structural argument for why 1P/phenomenal talk is really tricky—it doesn’t give you a metaphysical explanation for why 1P has a “what it’s likeness” in the first place. For this you need the bridging laws or the categorical properties.
This is a cool position. Thanks for taking the time to explain it in so much detail.
I think I can see where we’re diverging. You want to place the metaphysical bridge between the 0P → 1P perspective and because there’s something metaphysically substantial happening in this bridge it’s a camp-2 position. But within the 1P side you’re treating 1P phenomenal states as a subset of the full 1P space and what links the phenomenal states to the other 1P states is some kind of structural relation. This idea is very camp 1-ish to me, the extra work done is being done by structural/relational links between phenomenal and non-phenomenal states in 1P.
By contrast, I want to place the metaphysical bridge between the physical and phenomenal states P → Q. This means I’m rejecting the claim that Q is related to P by purely structural relations or dispositional properties. This is also why I said the most parsimonious bridge was a null one unless you had access to Q. I agree the null bridge is incoherent if what you’re talking about is the 0P → 1P link that an instantiated agent needs to access is sensors. But that’s not the bridge the unconscious superintelligence needs. It needs a bridge to Q and since it doesn’t possess Q it could coherently postulate a null bridge between P and Q. From its perspective the null bridge would also be most parsimonious if it truly didn’t possess Q.
I’ve kind’ve sketched my reasons for thinking structural and dispositional properties don’t yield Q in the rest of the thread but I’ll throw in one more: from my perspective the structural/dispositional properties are inherently 0P there’s no 1P categorical/intrinsic properties which describe “what it’s like”
So when you say:
I reject the analogy. On my view, your link between the non-phenomenal 1P and phenomenal 1P is still structural/relational and these properties are always 0P in nature.
This might be a natural point to end the conversation as I think we’re at a point where our intuitions lie on opposite sides of a pretty large crux. But I’m happy to continue if you think there’s another angle I’m missing.
Thanks for pushing me to describe it better! This has been a lovely discussion.
I agree there is something very camp 1-ish about the idea (and just me as a person, frankly).
So your Q is not even a type of 1P thing, is that right? I’m not sure what sort of thing your Q is supposed to be, which I suppose is what my side of the crux looks like. (I kind of suspect that if you are right about Q, then I do not have access to it myself.)
I also (regardless of my other points and arguments) think you are wrong that structural/relational properties are always 0P! I think 0P can’t actually even have a proposition like “I always see blue right after I see red”, which still needs to use indexicals in order to refer. There’s a similar seeming “Environment X has a red-blue light sequence” on the 0P side which is not actually the same (e.g. what if I’m not actually in that environment?).
To me, “what it’s like” grounds to something like: an experience that there is something I observe which has its own 1P experiences (and a prediction of what those might be based on my observations). Phenomenal consciousness is then maybe something like: the observation that there is an observable entity ‘self’ such that ‘what-it’s-like_self(to see red)’ implies ‘to see red’. And this sort of fixed-point thing is inherently really weird and slippery just from a pure math point of view, e.g. Löb’s theorem (imagine ‘what-it’s-like’ as the box), which has the infamous Gödel’s 2nd Incompleteness theorem as a special case. And all of this is inherent to the 1P side; only on the 0P side can you just reduce things to neurons or atoms or whatever (though I claim a simple bridge would still reveal the 1P structure just from the 0P side). This formulation is speculative and off-the-cuff, and only intended to gesture at the sort of structure I think is possible here.
And happy to leave the discussion here if you’re done, but I am curious to know what you think of this idea.
Let me explain my view in a little more detail—it’s worth noting that I hold it pretty tentatively (around ~p(60%)) but I think you’ll find it appealing and hopefully see where it parts way with your view.
If you hold a blue image in your mind there’ll be something it’s like for you to experience blue. Call that Q. Now if you hold a red experience in your mind there’ll be a corresponding red experience that’s different to the blue one. Call it Q’. Hopefully you know what I’m talking about here! Some people with very strong camp 1 intuitions aren’t even willing to grant this, but I feel like if we’ve gotten this far in the thread we have some common ground here.
On my view, there is a fact of the matter about what blue and red look like for you and this is underdetermined by the physical/dispositional properties. The physical/dispositional properties could be held constant and these blue/red experiences could vary in principle. Granted, there’s a lot of structural constraints e.g. light cones in your retina, reflectance of surfaces, wiring of your brain etc.. But I claim that even if physics were fully fixed some aspect of your experience could vary in principle.
More precisely, a complete description of physics would tell you everything about the dispositional/relational properties of physical particles. Specifically, given a state P it will tell you how it evolves to P’. An example is an electron with charge q and mass m moving in an electric and gravitational field. The physics fully specifies the dispositional properties of the particles e.g. the electron will move in such-and-such a way. But this doesn’t tell you about any of their essential properties. If you switched the mass with something that played the same role but was intrinsically different (call is schmass) would that change anything? On standard physics, it wouldn’t matter what was playing the mass-role itself only that the structural form of the equations are intact.
On my view however, it does matter. The particles have an additional categorical/essential property that fixes something about the world. Importantly, these properties are physical in some sense (they’re all part of the same “stuff” that physicists talk about) but they’re not captured by the normal relational/dispositional properties of physics. This view is called Russellian Monism.
So with this formalism in place it actually connects up quite nicely with the other components of your view. The 0P/1P framework gives a nice overview of the difference between describing the disposition of the state (0P) and tokening the categorical essence of the state (1P). The hard problem intuitions just fall straight out of the difference between 0P/1P. Also on this view there are no zombies, since duplicating the physical particles necessarily duplicates their categorical properties — so there’s no gap between what I’ve been calling functional 1P and phenomenal 1P. As soon as experiences enter 1P they’re phenomenal.
Where this differs from your view is I think you need a categorical property to fix the phenomenal character of certain states. Whereas on your view it seems like you’re using the bridging law + structure to fix phenomenal character. In my previous comments I’m mostly pressing you about how much work structure is doing in your framework. If you’re happy for bridging laws to provide the jump then our views actually become really close.
Your point about Löb’s theorem is interesting and it seems like it could be a nice formalisation of the 0P/1P idea. I’d just emphasise that it’s still a structural argument for why 1P/phenomenal talk is really tricky—it doesn’t give you a metaphysical explanation for why 1P has a “what it’s likeness” in the first place. For this you need the bridging laws or the categorical properties.