:-) But are you from Camp 1 or from Camp 2? :-) That should be the starting point of a discussion on this subject :-)
If you are from Camp 1, I don’t have much to say (how to have generally fruitful intercamp communications on this subject is an unsolved problem at the moment, and we don’t even know if the subjective realities of people from different camps are similar; in the comments to that post I referenced, Carl Feynman, who is a prominent representative of Camp 1, conjectures that subjective realities of different people differ more sharply than it is usually assumed; I don’t know to what extent his guess that intercamp differences are due to that is correct, but this is an interesting question to ponder).
But if you are a fellow Camp 2 member, then what could be a simple explanation of the structure of the variety of qualia I am observing?
We don’t even have a good description of qualia, and we don’t understand the nature of the space of my subjective colors, and so on. We might have some conjectures, some attempts to approach that, but I don’t see much progress.
I have some ideas on how we might be able to actually make some progress here, but that would be a longer text.
Now what consciousness is for is a different story. This indeed seems to have a decently simple explanation (roughly speaking, it seems to facilitate better “generalized introspection”, which improves predictive power, which improves survival and fitness; so functionally speaking, this does seem to be a plausible story).
So if one wants an evolutionary explanation of why it is selected for, this looks like a plausible story. And this part might be where the two camps more or less agree.
But, from a typical Camp 2 point of view, this does not solve the mystery of subjective phenomenology, that just explains why it might be evolutionary helpful to have something like that.
These days it’s good to be aware of the https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NyiFLzSrkfkDW4S7o/why-it-s-so-hard-to-talk-about-consciousness post by Rafael Harth describing division of people into Camp 1 and Camp 2 with regard to the issues of phenomenological consciousness and qualia and of the discussion in the comments to that post.
It often seems to me that the hard problem of consciousness is equivalent to “Why are people dissatisfied with easy explanations of consciousness?”
:-) But are you from Camp 1 or from Camp 2? :-) That should be the starting point of a discussion on this subject :-)
If you are from Camp 1, I don’t have much to say (how to have generally fruitful intercamp communications on this subject is an unsolved problem at the moment, and we don’t even know if the subjective realities of people from different camps are similar; in the comments to that post I referenced, Carl Feynman, who is a prominent representative of Camp 1, conjectures that subjective realities of different people differ more sharply than it is usually assumed; I don’t know to what extent his guess that intercamp differences are due to that is correct, but this is an interesting question to ponder).
But if you are a fellow Camp 2 member, then what could be a simple explanation of the structure of the variety of qualia I am observing?
We don’t even have a good description of qualia, and we don’t understand the nature of the space of my subjective colors, and so on. We might have some conjectures, some attempts to approach that, but I don’t see much progress.
I have some ideas on how we might be able to actually make some progress here, but that would be a longer text.
Now what consciousness is for is a different story. This indeed seems to have a decently simple explanation (roughly speaking, it seems to facilitate better “generalized introspection”, which improves predictive power, which improves survival and fitness; so functionally speaking, this does seem to be a plausible story).
So if one wants an evolutionary explanation of why it is selected for, this looks like a plausible story. And this part might be where the two camps more or less agree.
But, from a typical Camp 2 point of view, this does not solve the mystery of subjective phenomenology, that just explains why it might be evolutionary helpful to have something like that.
No, people will be dissatisfied with the answer to that too. The Easy Problem of Consciousness 2.
Thanks! This is really helpful!