I suspect there is no good way to “short-circuit” the fact that the “hard problem of consciousness” and, in particular, its truly hard core, the “hard problem of qualia” is unsolved.
Disclaimer: there has been a LessWrong post Why it’s so hard to talk about Consciousness, and that post states that on this groups of issues people are mostly divided into 2 camps which don’t really understand each other:
The basic model I’m proposing is that core intuitions about consciousness tend to cluster into two camps, with most miscommunication being the result of someone failing to communicate with the other camp. For this post, we’ll call the camp of boldface author Camp #1 and the camp of quotation author Camp #2.
So, the epistemological disclaimer is that this comment (just like the original post) would probably make sense only to people belonging to Camp #2 (like myself), that is, people who think that it makes sense to talk about qualia.
When I ponder the problem of qualia, I usually think that it will eventually be solved by a two-pronged approach.
On the theoretical side, people will start to require that a viable candidate theory predicts some non-trivial subjectively observable novel effects, just like we require that a viable candidate theory for new physics predicts some non-trivial observable effects. For example, a requirement like that might be satisfied by predicting a novel, non-trivial way to induce “visual illusions” (with the condition that this way does not readily follow from the known science).
Basically, instead of engaging in purely philosophical speculations about the “nature of consciousness”, people (or collaborations of people and AIs) will start finding ways to ground the new theories in experiments, not just in explaining the existing experiments, but in novel non-trivial predictions of experimental phenomena.
On the experimental side, a natural starting point (which has tons of safety and ethical caveats) would be creation of hybrid systems between biological entities having qualia and electronic circuits of various nature (digital, analog, running verbally intelligent software, running clever fluid simulations, running audio-visual synthesizers, etc). For practical reasons, people would probably aim for technologies based on things like non-invasive BCI to create tight coupling between biological and electronic entities (only if that proves impossible, people would have to resort to drastic Neuralink-like steps, but the more can be done without surgery or other invasive methods the better). While tight coupling of this kind presents formidable ethical and safety issues even with non-invasive interfaces, this route should eventually enable qualia-possessing entities to “look subjectively from the inside at the dynamics of electronic circuits”, and that’s how we can try to start experimentally assessing which electronic circuits are or are not capable of supporting qualia.
Also, this would likely eventually enable coupling of different biological entities to each other via coupling each of them to an interconnected electronic circuit (ethical and safety issues are getting even more formidable, as we move along this route). If this coupling is tight enough, we might learn something about qualia (or lack thereof) in various biological entities as well.
I think technically this is likely to be eventually doable. Whether a way can be found to do this in an acceptably safe and sufficiently ethical manner is an open question. But if we want to actually figure out qualia, we probably have to do more on both the theoretical and the experimental sides.
I suspect there is no good way to “short-circuit” the fact that the “hard problem of consciousness” and, in particular, its truly hard core, the “hard problem of qualia” is unsolved.
Disclaimer: there has been a LessWrong post Why it’s so hard to talk about Consciousness, and that post states that on this groups of issues people are mostly divided into 2 camps which don’t really understand each other:
So, the epistemological disclaimer is that this comment (just like the original post) would probably make sense only to people belonging to Camp #2 (like myself), that is, people who think that it makes sense to talk about qualia.
When I ponder the problem of qualia, I usually think that it will eventually be solved by a two-pronged approach.
On the theoretical side, people will start to require that a viable candidate theory predicts some non-trivial subjectively observable novel effects, just like we require that a viable candidate theory for new physics predicts some non-trivial observable effects. For example, a requirement like that might be satisfied by predicting a novel, non-trivial way to induce “visual illusions” (with the condition that this way does not readily follow from the known science).
Basically, instead of engaging in purely philosophical speculations about the “nature of consciousness”, people (or collaborations of people and AIs) will start finding ways to ground the new theories in experiments, not just in explaining the existing experiments, but in novel non-trivial predictions of experimental phenomena.
On the experimental side, a natural starting point (which has tons of safety and ethical caveats) would be creation of hybrid systems between biological entities having qualia and electronic circuits of various nature (digital, analog, running verbally intelligent software, running clever fluid simulations, running audio-visual synthesizers, etc). For practical reasons, people would probably aim for technologies based on things like non-invasive BCI to create tight coupling between biological and electronic entities (only if that proves impossible, people would have to resort to drastic Neuralink-like steps, but the more can be done without surgery or other invasive methods the better). While tight coupling of this kind presents formidable ethical and safety issues even with non-invasive interfaces, this route should eventually enable qualia-possessing entities to “look subjectively from the inside at the dynamics of electronic circuits”, and that’s how we can try to start experimentally assessing which electronic circuits are or are not capable of supporting qualia.
Also, this would likely eventually enable coupling of different biological entities to each other via coupling each of them to an interconnected electronic circuit (ethical and safety issues are getting even more formidable, as we move along this route). If this coupling is tight enough, we might learn something about qualia (or lack thereof) in various biological entities as well.
I think technically this is likely to be eventually doable. Whether a way can be found to do this in an acceptably safe and sufficiently ethical manner is an open question. But if we want to actually figure out qualia, we probably have to do more on both the theoretical and the experimental sides.