The “hard problem of consciousness” is “why is there an experience of consciousness; why does information processing feel like anything at all?”
The “meta-problem of consciousness” is “why do people believe that there’s a hard problem of consciousness?”
From Eliezer’s post:
Your assignment is not to argue about whether people have free will, or not.
Your assignment is not to argue that free will is compatible with determinism, or not.
Your assignment is not to argue that the question is ill-posed, or that the concept is self-contradictory, or that it has no testable consequences.
You are not asked to invent an evolutionary explanation of how people who believed in free will would have reproduced; nor an account of how the concept of free will seems suspiciously congruent with bias X. Such are mere attempts to explain why people believe in “free will”, not explain how.
Your homework assignment is to write a stack trace of the internal algorithms of the human mind as they produce the intuitions that power the whole damn philosophical argument.
Is there anything else to the book you review beyond what Eliezer captured back 12 years ago?
When you are faced with an unanswerable question—a question to which it seems impossible to even imagine an answer—there is a simple trick which can turn the question solvable.
That approach doesn’t work in this case, however. It works great for free will, where uncovering the way in which we made decisions feels like “free will” from the inside. It is a problem that dissolves entirely upon answering the meta question.
But there are other problems which do not get dissolved by answering the meta question. “Why do I think reality exists?” for example. You could conceivably convince me that we are living inside the matrix and that what I think is immutable reality is actually manipulatable data in a running computer program. But what you can never convince me of is that there is NO reality, that I do not exist.
For the exact same reasons, you cannot convince me that I am “not conscious,” or expect that explaining why the mostly deterministic computational process which is my brain asks questions about consciousness is a suitable answer for why I, or anything, subjectively feel conscious. “I think therefore I am” is not dissolved by knowing the how thinking works.
Free will is an artifact of how a decision process feels from the inside. The hard problem of consciousness is why ANY process “feels” anything at all, which cannot be resolved in the same way.
I am really puzzled as to why people think the question of consciousness can be resolved in this way. The best I can come up with is that this is a form of belief in belief. People have seen the meta question resolve similar sounding problems before, so far without exception. Dennett goes to great lengths in his books to explain that asking “why” must ALWAYS be transformed into asking “how.” So they assume it must work the same for consciousness. But the hard problem of consciousness is one of the unique exceptions because it deals with subjective experience, specifically why we have subjective experience at all. (It is, in fact, a variant of the first-cause problem.)
Is already answerable. You can list a number of reasons why you hold this belief. You are not supposed to dissolve the new question, only reformulate the original one in a way that is becomes answerable.
why ANY process “feels” anything at all
Is harder because we do not have a good handle on what physical process creates feelings, or in Dennett’s approach, how do feelings form. But at least we know what kind of research needs to be conducted in order to make progress in that area. In that way the question is answerable, at least in principle, we are just lacking the good understanding of how human brain works. So the question is ultimately about the neuroscience and the algorithms.
But the hard problem of consciousness is one of the unique exceptions because it deals with subjective experience, specifically why we have subjective experience at all. (It is, in fact, a variant of the first-cause problem.)
That’s the “dangling unit” (my grade 8 self says “lol!” at the term) Eliezer was talking about. There are no “unique exceptions”, we are algorithms, and some of the artifacts of running our algorithms is to generate “feelings” or “qualia” or “subjective experiences”. If this leaves you saying “but… but… but...”, then the next quote from Eliezer already anticipates that:
This dangling unit feels like an unresolved question, even after every answerable query is answered. No matter how much anyone proves to you that no difference of anticipated experience depends on the question, you’re left wondering: “But does the falling tree really make a sound, or not?”
I agree with this post. However once you take this line of thinking to its conclusion, the result is panpsychism (which Tegmark professes) rather than the “explain away” belief of Dennett et al.
1. I exist. (Cogito, ergo sum). I’m a thinking, conscious entity that experiences existence at this specific point in time in the multiverse.
2. Our understanding of physics is that there is no fundamental thing that we can reduce conscious experience down to. We’re all just quarks and leptons interacting.
These appear to be in conflict. Taking (2) to its logical conclusion seems to imply that we live in a deterministic block universe, or at least we can frame our physical understanding as if we do. But if that’s true, and if the universe is big enough (it is a big place!), then somewhere out there in space or time is a computational process that resembles the me-of-right-now. Maybe a Boltzmann brain, or maybe a simulation of me in the future, or maybe just the split off Everett branches of alternate histories. Since there are multiple instances of me out there, how come I’m stuck in the “now”?
Any fundamental theory of physics must explain ALL the evidence we have available to us. This includes both highly precise quantum measurements, and the fact that I’m a thinking, conscious entity that experiences existence at this specific point in time in the multiverse. One of the chief problems here is that physics, so far as we can tell, is entirely local. We expect future physical laws to also be local. But our best guesses at understanding consciousness is that it is information processing, and is only really described at a much higher level than quarks and leptons. So our prior is that we need a physical theory that explains consciousness at the level of quarks and leptons, but that seems irreconcilable with our current understanding of biological consciousness. I’d accept an alternative theory if it led to testable predictions, but I’m not willing to bite the bullet of non-local physical theories of consciousness without experimental evidence. The prior for locality in fundamental physics is simply too high to realistically consider alternatives otherwise.
The jump to panpsychism is not an inference from evidence but rather a deduction from a reasonable prior: a local theory of consciousness would imply that (1) a single lepton interacting with a field (an electron emitting or absorbing a photon) has some epsilon experience of consciousness; and (2) conscious experience locally aggregates. So two electrons exchanging a photon is a single consciousness event of, say, 2*epsilon magnitude (although the relationship need not be linear). Higher order structure further aggregates this singular experience of consciousness, in a progression from quarks and leptons to atoms, to molecules, to organelles, to cell structures, to tissue, to organs, to entire organisms. However at some point the system interacts with a non-factorable stochastic boundary, the environment, which prevents further aggregation. The singularly conscious entity interacts with the environment, but each interaction is isolated and either peels off or adds epsilon consciousness stochastically, like the steady-state boundary between a liquid and a gas.
This so-far qualitatively descriptive theory explains why information-processing systems like our brains (or AI) have singular experiences of consciousness, without having to evoke theories like epiphenomenalism with questionable physical basis. My evidence for it is simply an Occam prior: it’s the simplest theory with local physics which explains the evidence. But as you expect of any local theory, what’s true of one part of the universe is true of another. If we have subjective experiences (and I’m not willing to bite the bullet of rejecting Descartes’ Cogito), then so does a rock. And the ocean. And every little thing in the universe. Indeed the universe itself is conscious, to whatever degree that makes sense in an inflationary universe with local physics, and we are just factorable complex interactions within that universal consciousness that experience our own subjective sense of self. When we “die”, our experience doesn’t stop.. but it does stop being interesting from a human standpoint, as we return to the stochastic random noise of the environment in which we live. [*]
This is the basis of a physical theory of consciousness I thought up almost two decades ago when I first encountered the quantum teleport thought experiment in a philosophy class, but it is also basically the same as Max Tegmark’s pansychic theory of consciousness, so I’ll just point you to his articles for more detail.
[*] Aside: if this is true, being cremated might be the worst possible outcome after death. Being worm food is better than being perfectly split up into the perfectly stochastic entities (gas molecules) and dispersed in the environment… It would also mean that cryonics works, however, but destructive mind uploading is a kill-and-copy operation.
Not surprisingly, I have a few issues with your chain of reasoning.
1. I exist. (Cogito, ergo sum). I’m a thinking, conscious entity that experiences existence at this specific point in time in the multiverse.
Cogito is an observation. I am not arguing with that one. Ergo sum is an assumption, a model. The “multiverse” thing is a speculation.
Our understanding of physics is that there is no fundamental thing that we can reduce conscious experience down to. We’re all just quarks and leptons interacting.
This is very much simplified. Sure, we can do reduction, but that doesn’t mean we can do synthesis. There is no guarantee that it is even possible to do synthesis. In fact, there are mathematical examples where synthesis might not be possible, simply because the relevant equations cannot be solved uniquely. I made a related point here. Here is an example. Consciousness can potentially be reduced to atoms, but it may also be reduced to bits, a rather different substrate. Maybe there are other reductions possible.
And it is also possible that constructing consciousness out of quarks and leptons is impossible because of “hard emergence”. Of the sorites kind. There is no atom of water. A handful of H2O molecules cannot be described as a solid, liquid or gas. A snowflake requires trillions of trillions of H2O molecules together. There is no “snowflakiness” in a single molecule. Just like there is no consciousness in an elementary particle. There is no evidence for panpsychism, and plenty against it.
Postulating hard emergence requires a non-local postulate. I’m not willing to accept that without testable predictions.
I don’t really see how “ergo sum” is an assumption. If any thing it is a direct inference, but not an assumption. Something exists that is perceiving. Any theory that says otherwise must be incorrect.
If consciousness only “emerges” when an information processing system is constructed at a higher level, then that implies that the whole is something different than the aggregate of its many individual interactions. This is unlike shminux’s description liquid water emerging from H2O interactions, which is confusing of map and territory. If a physical description stated that an interaction is conscious if and only if it is part of an information processing system, that is something that cannot be determined with local information at the exact time and place of the individual interactions.
I’m biting the bullet of QM (the standard model, or whatever quantum gravity formulation wins out) being all there is. If that is true, then explaining subjective experience requires a local postulate not an added rule, which results in panpsychism.
Taking (2) to its logical conclusion seems to imply that we live in a deterministic block universe,
That was not implied by (2) as stated, and isn’t implied by physics in general. Both the block universe and determinism are open questions (and not equivalent to each other).
One of the chief problems here is that physics, so far as we can tell, is entirely local.
[emph. added]
Nope. What is specifically ruled out by test’s of Bell’s inequalities is the conjunction of (local, deterministic). The one thing we know is that the two things you just asserted are not both true. What we don’t know is which is false.
What is specifically ruled out by test’s of Bell’s inequalities is the conjunction of (local, deterministic). The one thing we know is that the two things you just asserted are not both true. What we don’t know is which is false.
I think you’re nitpicking here. While we don’t know the fundamental laws of the universe with 100% confidence, I would suggest that based on what we do know, they are extremely likely to be local and non-deterministic (as opposed to nonlocal hidden variables). Quantum field theory (QFT) is in that category, and adding general relativity doesn’t change anything except in unusual extreme circumstances (e.g. microscopic black holes, or the Big Bang—where the two can’t be sensibly combined). String theory doesn’t really have a meaningful notion of locality at very small scales (Planck length, Planck time), but at larger scales in normal circumstances it approaches QFT + classical general relativity, which again is local and non-deterministic. (So yes, probably our everyday human interactions have nonlocality at a part-per-googolplex level or whatever, related to quantum fluctuations of the geometry of space itself, but it’s hard to imagine that this would matter for anything.)
(By non-deterministic I just mean that the Born rule involves true randomness. In Copenhagen interpretation you say that collapse is a random process. In many-worlds you would say that the laws of physics are deterministic but the quasi-anthropic question “what branch of the wavefunction will I happen to find myself in?” has a truly random answer. Either way is fine; it doesn’t matter for this comment.)
In many-worlds you would say that the laws of physics are deterministic
The only thing non-deterministic in QM is the Born rule, which isn’t part of a MWI block universe formulation. (You need a source of randomness to specify where “you” will end up in the future evolution of the universe, but not to specify all paths you might end up in.)
We also need (I would think) for the experience of consciousness to somehow cause your brain to instruct your hands to type “cogito ergo sum”. From what you wrote, I’m sorta imagining physical laws plus experience glued to it … and that physical laws without experience glued to it would still lead to the same nerve firing pattern, right? Or maybe you’ll say physical laws without experience is logically impossible? Or what?
I don’t find the question relevant. That’s a physicist’s application of Occam’s razor: extra postulates about consciousness don’t affect physical calculations, so we should ignore them—just like MWI vs CI doesn’t affect experimental predictions, so a physicist shouldn’t care what interpretation is used.
But my concern is the intersection of physics and philosophy: what moral weight should I give in my utilitarian assessment of possible futures outcomes? Whether a life form is conscious or not doesn’t matter much from a physicists perspective because it doesn’t affect the biochemical calculations, but it does matter to the question “should I protect this life?”
There is a division in the transhumanist community between whether one should identify with the instance of a computation, or the description of a computation. This has practical, real-world consequences: should I sign up for cryonics (with the possibility of revival, but you suffer some damage) or brain preservation (less damage, but only destructive uploading options)?
If the panpsychic consciousness-in-every-interaction postulate I stated is true, then morality and personal utility comes down instance of computation, not description of computation camp. This means cryonics (long sleep) is favored over brain preservation (kill-and-copy), and weird stuff like quantum suicide are also ruled out as options.
“Why do I think reality exists?”
Is already answerable. You can list a number of reasons why you hold this belief.
There are also reasons for believing in non-illusory forms of free will and consciousness. If that argument is sufficient to establish realism in some cases, it is sufficient in all cases.
You are not supposed to dissolve the new question, only reformulate the original one in a way that is becomes answerable.
Supposed by whom? EY gives some instructions in the imperative voice, but that’s not how logic works.
His argument is that if free will is possibly an illusion then it is an illusion. If valid, this argument would also show that consciousness and material reality are definitely illusions.
So it disproves too much.
But there is a valid form of the argument where you argue against the reality of X on addition to arguing for the possible illusory nature of X.
There are no “unique exceptions”, we are algorithms,
That’s much more conjectural than most of the claims made here.
Yep! I agree with you: Rethinking Consciousness and those two Eliezer posts are coming from a similar place.
(Just to be clear, the phrase “meta-problem of consciousness” comes from David Chalmers, not Graziano. More generally, I don’t know exactly which aspects of really anything here are original Graziano inventions, versus Graziano synthesizing ideas from the literature. I’m not familiar with the consciousness literature, and also I listened to the audio book which omits footnotes and references.)
Except that EY is not an illusionist about consciousness! When considering free will, he assumes right off the bat that it can’t possibly be real, and has to be explained away instead. But in the generalised anti zombie principle, he goes in the opposite direction, insisting that reports of consciousness are always caused by consciousness. [*]
So there is no unique candidate for being an illusion. Anything can be. Some people think consciousness is all, and matter is an illusion.
Leading to the anti-Aumann principle: two parties will never agree if they are allowed to dismiss each others evidence out of hand.
[*] Make no mistake, asserting illusionism about consciousness is asserting you yourself are a zombie.
If you say that free will and consciousness are by definition non-physical, then if course naturalist explanations explain them away. But you can also choose to define the terms to encompass what you think is really going on. This is called “compatibilism” for free will, and this is Graziano’s position on consciousness. I’m definitely signed up for compatibilism on free will and have been for many years, but I don’t yet feel 100% comfortable calling Graziano’s ideas “consciousness” (as he does), or if I do call it that, I’m not sure which of my intuitions and associations about “consciousness” are still applicable.
If you say that free will and consciousness are by definition non-physical, then if course naturalist explanations explain them away.
Object level reply: I don’t. Most contemporary philosophers don’t. If you see that sort of thing it is almost certainly a straw man.
meta level reply: And naturally idealists reject any notion of matter except as a bundle of sensation. Just because something is normal and natural, does not mean it is normatively correct. It is normal and natural to be tribal, biased and otherwise irrational. Immunity to evidence is a Bad Thing from the point of view of rationality.
But you can also choose to define the terms to encompass what you think is really going on
You can if you really know, but confusing assumptions and knowledge is another Bad Thing. We know that atoms can be split, so redefining an atom to be a divisible unit of matter.
I’m definitely signed up for compatibilism on free will and have been for many years
Explaining compatibilist free will is automatically explaining away libertarian free will.
So what is the case against libertarian free will? It isn’t false because of naturalism, since it isn’t supernatural by definition—and because naturalism needs to be defeasible to mean anything. EY dismisses libertarian free will out of hand. That is not knowledge.
but I don’t yet feel 100% comfortable calling Graziano’s ideas “consciousness” (as he does), or if I do call it that, I’m not sure which of my intuitions and associations about “consciousness” are still applicable.
What would it take for it to be false? If the answer is “nothing”, then you are looking at suppression of evidence.
Sorry for being sloppy, you can ignore what I said about “non-physical”, I really just meant the more general point that “consciousness doesn’t exist (if consciousness is defined as X)” is the same statement as “consciousness does not mean X, but rather Y”, and I shouldn’t have said “non-physical” at all. You sorta responded to that more general point, although I’m interested in whether you can say more about how exactly you define consciousness such that illusionism is not consciousness. (As I mentioned, I’m not sure I’ll disagree with your definition!)
What would it take for it to be false?
I think that if attention schema theory can explain every thought and feeling I have about consciousness (as in my silly example conversation in the “meta-problem of consciousness” section), then there’s nothing left to explain. I don’t see any way around that. I would be looking for (1) some observable thought / behavior that AST cannot explain, (2) some reason to think those explanations are wrong, or (3) a good argument that true philosophical zombies are sensible, i.e. that you can have two systems whose every observable thought / behavior is identical but exactly one of them is conscious, or (4) some broader framework of thinking that accepts the AST story as far as it goes, and offers a different way to think about it intuitively and contextualize it.
I really just meant the more general point that “consciousness doesn’t exist (if consciousness is defined as X)” is the same statement as “consciousness does not mean X, but rather Y”
If you stipulate that consciousness means Y consciousness, not X consciousness, you haven’t proven anything about X consciousness.
If I stipulate that when I say, “duck”, I mean mallards, I imply nothing about the existential status of muscovys or teals. In order to figure out what is, real you have to look, not juggle definitions.
If you have an infallible way of establishing what really exists, that in some way bypasses language, and a normative rule that every term must have a realworld referent, then you might be in a place where you you can say what a word really means.
Otherwise, language is just custom.
I’m interested in whether you can say more about how exactly you define consciousness such that illusionism is not consciousness. (As I mentioned, I’m not sure I’ll disagree with your definition!)
Illusionism is not consciousness because it is a theory of consciousness.
Illusionism explicitly does not explain consciousness as typically defined, but instead switches the topic to third person reports of consciousness.
Edit1:
I think that if attention schema theory can explain every thought and feeling I have about consciousness (as in my silly example conversation in the “meta-problem of consciousness” section), then there’s nothing left to explain
Explaining consciousness as part of the hard problem of consciousness is different to explaining-away consciousness (or explaining reports of consciousness) as part of the meta problem of consciousness.
Edit2:
There are two ways of not knowing the correct explanation of something:
the way where no one has any idea, and the way where everyone has an idea… but no one knows which explanation is right because they are explaining different things in different ways.
Having an explanation is only useful in the first situation. Otherwise, the whole problem is the difference between “an explanation” and “the explanation”.
Explaining consciousness as part of the hard problem of consciousness is different to explaining-away consciousness (or explaining reports of consciousness) as part of the meta problem of consciousness.
I commented here why I think that it shouldn’t be possible to fully explain reports of consciousness without also fully explaining the hard problem of consciousness in the process of doing so. I take it you disagree (correct?) but do you see where I’m coming from? Can you be more specific about how you think about that?
This reminds me of the Eliezer’s classic post Dissolving the Question.
From your post:
From Eliezer’s post:
Is there anything else to the book you review beyond what Eliezer captured back 12 years ago?
And even simpler summary in a follow-up post Righting a Wrong Question:
“Why do I have free will?”
“Why do I think I have free will?”
That approach doesn’t work in this case, however. It works great for free will, where uncovering the way in which we made decisions feels like “free will” from the inside. It is a problem that dissolves entirely upon answering the meta question.
But there are other problems which do not get dissolved by answering the meta question. “Why do I think reality exists?” for example. You could conceivably convince me that we are living inside the matrix and that what I think is immutable reality is actually manipulatable data in a running computer program. But what you can never convince me of is that there is NO reality, that I do not exist.
For the exact same reasons, you cannot convince me that I am “not conscious,” or expect that explaining why the mostly deterministic computational process which is my brain asks questions about consciousness is a suitable answer for why I, or anything, subjectively feel conscious. “I think therefore I am” is not dissolved by knowing the how thinking works.
Free will is an artifact of how a decision process feels from the inside. The hard problem of consciousness is why ANY process “feels” anything at all, which cannot be resolved in the same way.
I am really puzzled as to why people think the question of consciousness can be resolved in this way. The best I can come up with is that this is a form of belief in belief. People have seen the meta question resolve similar sounding problems before, so far without exception. Dennett goes to great lengths in his books to explain that asking “why” must ALWAYS be transformed into asking “how.” So they assume it must work the same for consciousness. But the hard problem of consciousness is one of the unique exceptions because it deals with subjective experience, specifically why we have subjective experience at all. (It is, in fact, a variant of the first-cause problem.)
Is already answerable. You can list a number of reasons why you hold this belief. You are not supposed to dissolve the new question, only reformulate the original one in a way that is becomes answerable.
Is harder because we do not have a good handle on what physical process creates feelings, or in Dennett’s approach, how do feelings form. But at least we know what kind of research needs to be conducted in order to make progress in that area. In that way the question is answerable, at least in principle, we are just lacking the good understanding of how human brain works. So the question is ultimately about the neuroscience and the algorithms.
That’s the “dangling unit” (my grade 8 self says “lol!” at the term) Eliezer was talking about. There are no “unique exceptions”, we are algorithms, and some of the artifacts of running our algorithms is to generate “feelings” or “qualia” or “subjective experiences”. If this leaves you saying “but… but… but...”, then the next quote from Eliezer already anticipates that:
I agree with this post. However once you take this line of thinking to its conclusion, the result is panpsychism (which Tegmark professes) rather than the “explain away” belief of Dennett et al.
I am not sure how this leads to panpsychism. What are the logical steps there?
1. I exist. (Cogito, ergo sum). I’m a thinking, conscious entity that experiences existence at this specific point in time in the multiverse.
2. Our understanding of physics is that there is no fundamental thing that we can reduce conscious experience down to. We’re all just quarks and leptons interacting.
These appear to be in conflict. Taking (2) to its logical conclusion seems to imply that we live in a deterministic block universe, or at least we can frame our physical understanding as if we do. But if that’s true, and if the universe is big enough (it is a big place!), then somewhere out there in space or time is a computational process that resembles the me-of-right-now. Maybe a Boltzmann brain, or maybe a simulation of me in the future, or maybe just the split off Everett branches of alternate histories. Since there are multiple instances of me out there, how come I’m stuck in the “now”?
Any fundamental theory of physics must explain ALL the evidence we have available to us. This includes both highly precise quantum measurements, and the fact that I’m a thinking, conscious entity that experiences existence at this specific point in time in the multiverse. One of the chief problems here is that physics, so far as we can tell, is entirely local. We expect future physical laws to also be local. But our best guesses at understanding consciousness is that it is information processing, and is only really described at a much higher level than quarks and leptons. So our prior is that we need a physical theory that explains consciousness at the level of quarks and leptons, but that seems irreconcilable with our current understanding of biological consciousness. I’d accept an alternative theory if it led to testable predictions, but I’m not willing to bite the bullet of non-local physical theories of consciousness without experimental evidence. The prior for locality in fundamental physics is simply too high to realistically consider alternatives otherwise.
The jump to panpsychism is not an inference from evidence but rather a deduction from a reasonable prior: a local theory of consciousness would imply that (1) a single lepton interacting with a field (an electron emitting or absorbing a photon) has some epsilon experience of consciousness; and (2) conscious experience locally aggregates. So two electrons exchanging a photon is a single consciousness event of, say, 2*epsilon magnitude (although the relationship need not be linear). Higher order structure further aggregates this singular experience of consciousness, in a progression from quarks and leptons to atoms, to molecules, to organelles, to cell structures, to tissue, to organs, to entire organisms. However at some point the system interacts with a non-factorable stochastic boundary, the environment, which prevents further aggregation. The singularly conscious entity interacts with the environment, but each interaction is isolated and either peels off or adds epsilon consciousness stochastically, like the steady-state boundary between a liquid and a gas.
This so-far qualitatively descriptive theory explains why information-processing systems like our brains (or AI) have singular experiences of consciousness, without having to evoke theories like epiphenomenalism with questionable physical basis. My evidence for it is simply an Occam prior: it’s the simplest theory with local physics which explains the evidence. But as you expect of any local theory, what’s true of one part of the universe is true of another. If we have subjective experiences (and I’m not willing to bite the bullet of rejecting Descartes’ Cogito), then so does a rock. And the ocean. And every little thing in the universe. Indeed the universe itself is conscious, to whatever degree that makes sense in an inflationary universe with local physics, and we are just factorable complex interactions within that universal consciousness that experience our own subjective sense of self. When we “die”, our experience doesn’t stop.. but it does stop being interesting from a human standpoint, as we return to the stochastic random noise of the environment in which we live. [*]
This is the basis of a physical theory of consciousness I thought up almost two decades ago when I first encountered the quantum teleport thought experiment in a philosophy class, but it is also basically the same as Max Tegmark’s pansychic theory of consciousness, so I’ll just point you to his articles for more detail.
[*] Aside: if this is true, being cremated might be the worst possible outcome after death. Being worm food is better than being perfectly split up into the perfectly stochastic entities (gas molecules) and dispersed in the environment… It would also mean that cryonics works, however, but destructive mind uploading is a kill-and-copy operation.
Not surprisingly, I have a few issues with your chain of reasoning.
Cogito is an observation. I am not arguing with that one. Ergo sum is an assumption, a model. The “multiverse” thing is a speculation.
This is very much simplified. Sure, we can do reduction, but that doesn’t mean we can do synthesis. There is no guarantee that it is even possible to do synthesis. In fact, there are mathematical examples where synthesis might not be possible, simply because the relevant equations cannot be solved uniquely. I made a related point here. Here is an example. Consciousness can potentially be reduced to atoms, but it may also be reduced to bits, a rather different substrate. Maybe there are other reductions possible.
And it is also possible that constructing consciousness out of quarks and leptons is impossible because of “hard emergence”. Of the sorites kind. There is no atom of water. A handful of H2O molecules cannot be described as a solid, liquid or gas. A snowflake requires trillions of trillions of H2O molecules together. There is no “snowflakiness” in a single molecule. Just like there is no consciousness in an elementary particle. There is no evidence for panpsychism, and plenty against it.
Postulating hard emergence requires a non-local postulate. I’m not willing to accept that without testable predictions.
I don’t really see how “ergo sum” is an assumption. If any thing it is a direct inference, but not an assumption. Something exists that is perceiving. Any theory that says otherwise must be incorrect.
That is not obvious.
If consciousness only “emerges” when an information processing system is constructed at a higher level, then that implies that the whole is something different than the aggregate of its many individual interactions. This is unlike shminux’s description liquid water emerging from H2O interactions, which is confusing of map and territory. If a physical description stated that an interaction is conscious if and only if it is part of an information processing system, that is something that cannot be determined with local information at the exact time and place of the individual interactions.
I’m biting the bullet of QM (the standard model, or whatever quantum gravity formulation wins out) being all there is. If that is true, then explaining subjective experience requires a local postulate not an added rule, which results in panpsychism.
That was not implied by (2) as stated, and isn’t implied by physics in general. Both the block universe and determinism are open questions (and not equivalent to each other).
[emph. added]
Nope. What is specifically ruled out by test’s of Bell’s inequalities is the conjunction of (local, deterministic). The one thing we know is that the two things you just asserted are not both true. What we don’t know is which is false.
Actually the superdeterminism models allow for both to be true. There is a different assumption that breaks.
I think you’re nitpicking here. While we don’t know the fundamental laws of the universe with 100% confidence, I would suggest that based on what we do know, they are extremely likely to be local and non-deterministic (as opposed to nonlocal hidden variables). Quantum field theory (QFT) is in that category, and adding general relativity doesn’t change anything except in unusual extreme circumstances (e.g. microscopic black holes, or the Big Bang—where the two can’t be sensibly combined). String theory doesn’t really have a meaningful notion of locality at very small scales (Planck length, Planck time), but at larger scales in normal circumstances it approaches QFT + classical general relativity, which again is local and non-deterministic. (So yes, probably our everyday human interactions have nonlocality at a part-per-googolplex level or whatever, related to quantum fluctuations of the geometry of space itself, but it’s hard to imagine that this would matter for anything.)
(By non-deterministic I just mean that the Born rule involves true randomness. In Copenhagen interpretation you say that collapse is a random process. In many-worlds you would say that the laws of physics are deterministic but the quasi-anthropic question “what branch of the wavefunction will I happen to find myself in?” has a truly random answer. Either way is fine; it doesn’t matter for this comment.)
Well, I wasn’t nitpicking you. Friedenbach was assserting locality+determinism. You are asserting locality+nondeterminism, which is OK.
FWIW I was asserting this:
The only thing non-deterministic in QM is the Born rule, which isn’t part of a MWI block universe formulation. (You need a source of randomness to specify where “you” will end up in the future evolution of the universe, but not to specify all paths you might end up in.)
Interesting!
We also need (I would think) for the experience of consciousness to somehow cause your brain to instruct your hands to type “cogito ergo sum”. From what you wrote, I’m sorta imagining physical laws plus experience glued to it … and that physical laws without experience glued to it would still lead to the same nerve firing pattern, right? Or maybe you’ll say physical laws without experience is logically impossible? Or what?
I don’t find the question relevant. That’s a physicist’s application of Occam’s razor: extra postulates about consciousness don’t affect physical calculations, so we should ignore them—just like MWI vs CI doesn’t affect experimental predictions, so a physicist shouldn’t care what interpretation is used.
But my concern is the intersection of physics and philosophy: what moral weight should I give in my utilitarian assessment of possible futures outcomes? Whether a life form is conscious or not doesn’t matter much from a physicists perspective because it doesn’t affect the biochemical calculations, but it does matter to the question “should I protect this life?”
There is a division in the transhumanist community between whether one should identify with the instance of a computation, or the description of a computation. This has practical, real-world consequences: should I sign up for cryonics (with the possibility of revival, but you suffer some damage) or brain preservation (less damage, but only destructive uploading options)?
If the panpsychic consciousness-in-every-interaction postulate I stated is true, then morality and personal utility comes down instance of computation, not description of computation camp. This means cryonics (long sleep) is favored over brain preservation (kill-and-copy), and weird stuff like quantum suicide are also ruled out as options.
There are also reasons for believing in non-illusory forms of free will and consciousness. If that argument is sufficient to establish realism in some cases, it is sufficient in all cases.
Supposed by whom? EY gives some instructions in the imperative voice, but that’s not how logic works.
His argument is that if free will is possibly an illusion then it is an illusion. If valid, this argument would also show that consciousness and material reality are definitely illusions.
So it disproves too much.
But there is a valid form of the argument where you argue against the reality of X on addition to arguing for the possible illusory nature of X.
That’s much more conjectural than most of the claims made here.
Yep! I agree with you: Rethinking Consciousness and those two Eliezer posts are coming from a similar place.
(Just to be clear, the phrase “meta-problem of consciousness” comes from David Chalmers, not Graziano. More generally, I don’t know exactly which aspects of really anything here are original Graziano inventions, versus Graziano synthesizing ideas from the literature. I’m not familiar with the consciousness literature, and also I listened to the audio book which omits footnotes and references.)
Except that EY is not an illusionist about consciousness! When considering free will, he assumes right off the bat that it can’t possibly be real, and has to be explained away instead. But in the generalised anti zombie principle, he goes in the opposite direction, insisting that reports of consciousness are always caused by consciousness. [*]
So there is no unique candidate for being an illusion. Anything can be. Some people think consciousness is all, and matter is an illusion.
Leading to the anti-Aumann principle: two parties will never agree if they are allowed to dismiss each others evidence out of hand.
[*] Make no mistake, asserting illusionism about consciousness is asserting you yourself are a zombie.
If you say that free will and consciousness are by definition non-physical, then if course naturalist explanations explain them away. But you can also choose to define the terms to encompass what you think is really going on. This is called “compatibilism” for free will, and this is Graziano’s position on consciousness. I’m definitely signed up for compatibilism on free will and have been for many years, but I don’t yet feel 100% comfortable calling Graziano’s ideas “consciousness” (as he does), or if I do call it that, I’m not sure which of my intuitions and associations about “consciousness” are still applicable.
You might find my reply to a similar post in this thread relevant:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/biKchmLrkatdBbiH8/book-review-rethinking-consciousness?commentId=gD88v4DaM9ExJFMeP
Object level reply: I don’t. Most contemporary philosophers don’t. If you see that sort of thing it is almost certainly a straw man.
meta level reply: And naturally idealists reject any notion of matter except as a bundle of sensation. Just because something is normal and natural, does not mean it is normatively correct. It is normal and natural to be tribal, biased and otherwise irrational. Immunity to evidence is a Bad Thing from the point of view of rationality.
You can if you really know, but confusing assumptions and knowledge is another Bad Thing. We know that atoms can be split, so redefining an atom to be a divisible unit of matter.
Explaining compatibilist free will is automatically explaining away libertarian free will. So what is the case against libertarian free will? It isn’t false because of naturalism, since it isn’t supernatural by definition—and because naturalism needs to be defeasible to mean anything. EY dismisses libertarian free will out of hand. That is not knowledge.
What would it take for it to be false? If the answer is “nothing”, then you are looking at suppression of evidence.
Sorry for being sloppy, you can ignore what I said about “non-physical”, I really just meant the more general point that “consciousness doesn’t exist (if consciousness is defined as X)” is the same statement as “consciousness does not mean X, but rather Y”, and I shouldn’t have said “non-physical” at all. You sorta responded to that more general point, although I’m interested in whether you can say more about how exactly you define consciousness such that illusionism is not consciousness. (As I mentioned, I’m not sure I’ll disagree with your definition!)
I think that if attention schema theory can explain every thought and feeling I have about consciousness (as in my silly example conversation in the “meta-problem of consciousness” section), then there’s nothing left to explain. I don’t see any way around that. I would be looking for (1) some observable thought / behavior that AST cannot explain, (2) some reason to think those explanations are wrong, or (3) a good argument that true philosophical zombies are sensible, i.e. that you can have two systems whose every observable thought / behavior is identical but exactly one of them is conscious, or (4) some broader framework of thinking that accepts the AST story as far as it goes, and offers a different way to think about it intuitively and contextualize it.
If you stipulate that consciousness means Y consciousness, not X consciousness, you haven’t proven anything about X consciousness.
If I stipulate that when I say, “duck”, I mean mallards, I imply nothing about the existential status of muscovys or teals. In order to figure out what is, real you have to look, not juggle definitions.
If you have an infallible way of establishing what really exists, that in some way bypasses language, and a normative rule that every term must have a realworld referent, then you might be in a place where you you can say what a word really means.
Otherwise, language is just custom.
Illusionism is not consciousness because it is a theory of consciousness.
Illusionism explicitly does not explain consciousness as typically defined, but instead switches the topic to third person reports of consciousness.
Edit1:
Explaining consciousness as part of the hard problem of consciousness is different to explaining-away consciousness (or explaining reports of consciousness) as part of the meta problem of consciousness.
Edit2:
There are two ways of not knowing the correct explanation of something: the way where no one has any idea, and the way where everyone has an idea… but no one knows which explanation is right because they are explaining different things in different ways.
Having an explanation is only useful in the first situation. Otherwise, the whole problem is the difference between “an explanation” and “the explanation”.
I commented here why I think that it shouldn’t be possible to fully explain reports of consciousness without also fully explaining the hard problem of consciousness in the process of doing so. I take it you disagree (correct?) but do you see where I’m coming from? Can you be more specific about how you think about that?