The Consciousness Deniers

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/

by o_nate • 8 years ago

36 65 8 years ago

Xcelerate• 8 years ago

I like to make a distinction between what I consider "neurobiological consciousness" — that which can be studied in a lab using the scientific method — and "experiential consciousness" — that which cannot be studied, because it is only capable of being experienced by one person and thus fails the criteria for reproducibility.

I agree with the article's author that it is bizarre that there are people who outright reject the existence of experiential consciousness. If I were to make a list of everything in order of my subjective probability that each item actually exists, experiential consciousness would be at the top of the list. Everything else on the list could effectively be faked by an advanced simulation technology.

I'm not sure that there is actually a resolution to the dilemma, because resolving it would require an experiment that can be reproduced, and by definition, something that is capable of being experienced by only one person cannot be experienced by another person. So there's really no way out of the mess. The "believers" and "deniers" will be forced to remain at a stalemate.

Retra2• 8 years ago

and "experiential consciousness" — that which cannot be studied, because it is only capable of being experienced by one person and thus fails the criteria for reproducibility.

How do you even know it exists if it can't be studied? How is anybody supposed to know what you're even talking about if they can't recreate it in their own brains?

When you get down to it, even though the processes occurring in our brains are extremely complex, there is nothing that indicates that the behavior in one cannot be reproduced in another, within any given scale of accuracy.

So you only presume that it cannot be studied, and you assume that it is a different kind of process. With no reason for it to be either, when it could simply be something currently out of our reach.

goatlover6• 8 years ago

How do you even know it exists if it can't be studied?

Because you experience your own and therefore assume that other people (and probably many animals) have experiences do to the similarity in behavior and biology.

How is anybody supposed to know what you're even talking about if they can't recreate it in their own brains?

We do so by imagining other people feeling things like we do. This can be a problem when we come across people with experiences different enough from our own. I don't know whether I can imagine giving birth, since I'm male. I also can't imagine what it's like to see in more than three primary colors, but some animals can.

tmuir• 8 years ago

I often think in this specific realm. From looking back at previous points in my life before I learned the inner machinations of complex systems such as computers, I know that there are subjects which are incredibly far out of my reach of current understanding simply because of the mountains of fundamental concepts to learn and understand before getting anywhere near an understanding of the mechanisms by which the application of the complex system is actually achieved.

But now that I am on the other side of that gulf of knowledge, at least with respect to the general operation of computers, I can't help but notice a fundamental difference in people who truly understand a given subject deeply, and those who are generally aware of the subject, but are still somehow immersed in the subject. People that truly understand the subject can often times accidentally offend the other side with what is a completely uncontroversial statement in the company of those that truly understand. That is because oftentimes, the gaps of understanding are often filled in with emotionally charged, self centered rationalizations.

I guess where I usually get off this train of thought is that perhaps one day we will come to realize that every single solitary experience of any kind can be explained away with biochemistry, and pondering that against the thought of what it has previously meant throughout my life to find out that what I had thought of as so profound and meaningful was neither of those at all.

Koshkin9• 8 years ago

"experiential consciousness" — that which cannot be studied

There is no indication that it can't. Any act of consciousness is manifested as some physical effect in the brain, and as such it can be detected, measured, and interpreted.

vinceguidry2• 8 years ago

It's entirely possible that, like quantum effects, the mind's electrical functioning cannot be fully deducible using any practical method.

mannykannot9• 8 years ago

that which cannot be studied, because it is only capable of being experienced by one person and thus fails the criteria for reproducibility.

This "argument from Popper" [1] is about as valid as saying that we cannot study snow because every snowflake is unique.

There are reasonable grounds for believing that there is sufficient commonality between individuals' mental processes, and within individual's sequence of mental processes, for them to be scientifically studied. At the very least, there is absolutely no evidence at this point to refute this proposition.

If our minds were really this distinct, we couldn't even talk to one another about them.

[1] Not "Popper's argument", as I am pretty sure he would not have made it.

mannykannot9• 8 years ago

The author almost finds his way out of his impasse:

"Proponents of this view insist that their position does not eliminate consciousness, but instead reduces it to something else. They’re right, formally speaking... When you reduce chemical processes to physical processes, you don’t deny that chemical processes exist."

...but instead of following through, he returns to the truisms of his chosen tribe: "All true. And yet, to reduce consciousness to behavior and dispositions to behavior is to eliminate it. To say that consciousness is really nothing more than (dispositions to) behavior is to say that it doesn’t exist." The use of the phrase "really nothing more than..." is the response of someone who doesn't want to pursue the issue further.

bcjordan4• 8 years ago

"If he’s right, no one has ever really suffered, in spite of agonizing diseases, mental illness, murder, rape, famine, slavery, bereavement, torture, and genocide. And no one has ever caused anyone else pain."

This concluding "slam dunk" is such an appeal to spooky-special-ness it makes me suspect the author hasn't yet grokked even the prerequisites to giving Dennett's views a fair shake.

goatlover6• 8 years ago

And what would giving Dennett's view a fair shake ential? I've read and listened to what Dennett has to say on the matter, and the implication is exactly what the author states. It only seems like we are conscious, but we don't actually experience anything. We're all p-zombies, and Dennett has exactly stated that in at least one of his recent talks.

Dennett also tried to deny that we have dream experiences, calling it coming-to-seem-to-remember upon waking up. I don't know whether he still denies the experience of dreaming, but it would be totally consistent with experience being a cognitive illusion. Taking Dennett seriously entails denying any sort of internal experience, whether it being mental imagery, dreams, inner dialog, feel of pain, etc.)

goatlover6• 8 years ago

The use of the phrase "really nothing more than..." is the response of someone who doesn't want to pursue the issue further.

I don't see how consciousness can simply be predispositions to behavior, because I have conscious experiences without any behavior. It also doesn't make any definitional sense. My experience of seeing red isn't the same thing as whatever behavior I might have as result.

bcjordan4• 8 years ago

My experience of seeing red isn't the same thing as whatever behavior I might have as result.

The deeper you look at how the brain works, the more those two processes look like well-coordinated siblings.

mannykannot9• 8 years ago

The way I look at it, conscious experiences are behavior: the behavior of an information-processing organ that has, in some mysterious but not necessarily magical way, become aware, to some extent, that it is not only an actor in its own model of what its sensory inputs mean, but also that it is a special actor, the one that actually creates the model.

Seeing red may be less mysterious than that - is it anything more than recalling similar sensations, and things (including abstract things like information/language constructs and emotions) that were associated with it?

xaedes2• 8 years ago

It can be seen in this light: Your experience and your thoughts are internal behaviour.

empath75• 8 years ago

Ultimately any intelligent process needs to arise from non-intelligent processes. This is so obvious that it’s hard to believe it needs stating.

domevent• 8 years ago

I think that’s partly the motivation behind panpsychism, although I haven’t studied the subject well enough to be sure.

phkahler• 8 years ago

> Ultimately any intelligent process needs to arise from non-intelligent processes.

I rather enjoyed the authors brief mention of atoms having some type of intelligence or consciousness. Perhaps they do and it's such a small amount that we can't detect it. Some have pointed out that mathematics is strangely well suited to describing physics, but clearly it will not work do describe phenomena that don't follow those types of mathematical models.

I'm just playing devils advocate, I doubt what I just wrote but I can't refute it either. Some phenomena are actually defined as aggregate behavior - sound waves, coherent light, matter in the solid state - and cannot exist at the level of atoms or photons.

arbre6• 8 years ago

Disclaimer: I have some meditation, observation of the mind and advaita/Zen practice.

If you look at all your experience since you are born, it all happened in your mind, exclusively. The faces of your parents, your first girlfriend, your job, swimming, eating all sums up to senses which all appear in your mind/conciousness. So it is not only that conciousness exists, it is what everything you have ever known is made of. You can claim you experience something that is outside of you, but there is no proof for that. There will never be a proof. A proof would happen in your mind as well. The thoughts of 'outside of mind' will also happen in your mind. Based on experience conciousness is the only thing that really exists.

kovrik• 8 years ago

aka solipsism

Koshkin9• 8 years ago

... which is also a completely valid philosophical point of view! (And that is a problem with philosophy in general - unlike theories in the positive science, no philosophy is refutable.)

zombieprocesses4• 8 years ago

If you look at all your experience since you are born, it all happened in your mind, exclusively.

It happened in your brain. Whether it happened in your mind or even whether the mind exists is up for debate. As we learn more about the brain, the mind recedes and it may disappear altogether. Just like how our increased understanding of physiology ended any serious notion of the soul.

The issue of the mind suffers from the same problems that soul did. Can a soul get old? Of course not. Our bodies get old. Can the mind get drunk? Of course not, our brains get drunk. If you take psychotropic drugs, do these drugs target the mind or the brain? Obviously the brain.

arbre6• 8 years ago

Your concept of brain is happening in your mind right now. You think there is such a thing like a physical world and a brain but all that is really in your 'conciousness'. Can you feel electrical signals in your brain? Or can you feel senses in your conciousness?

sdfin2• 8 years ago

There's no understanding about how "it happens in the brain". Of course that supposition is the most reasonable one when we accept a materialistic paradigm. I don't discard any explanation, but I find it difficult to imagine how a material thing, the brain with its neurons and electric impulses and neurotransmiters, can be able to generate what philosophers of mind call qualia, which is something apparently non material.

I have an experience. How my brain/hardware causes the experience? Is the experience material? Perhaps. I wonder: how? e.g.: when I see a cup, where in my brain is the subjective experience of the cup? Is it coded as electric impulses? What decodes it and translates the impulses to qualia?

acomar• 8 years ago

You can't prove it deductively. But you can build inductive evidence for the existence of things outside of yourself.

arbre6• 8 years ago

All that evidence appears in the mind and assumes conciousness is located in the brain, when our actual experience is that conciousness is just the container of everything and does not have a location. You can locate your brain but can you locate your conciousness? Everything you see or feel is in your conciousness right now, even the concepts of time and space. How could you conciousness have a position in space?

Koshkin9• 8 years ago

Based on experience conciousness is the only thing that really exists.

I had to pay for my new car, though.

arbre6• 8 years ago

The thoughts to buy the car, the touch on your wallet, the images of your car, the sounds, all happened in consciousness.

0xcolton• 8 years ago

I'm happy to see this article posted here. Many people in technology seem so sure that AI is on some kind of path to singularity, and don't give respect to the deep controversy of that belief. Merely examining how the brain 'works' is missing the point. The nature of consciousness (qualia) that this author is talking about is not the same as the neurobiological machinery that sustains it.

Think about the limit at which the problem of consciousness is falsifyable or measurable. Qualia is whatever is beyond that. Its subjective experience.

From the author:

Perhaps it’s not surprising that most Deniers deny that they’re Deniers. “Of course, we agree that consciousness or experience exists,” they say—but when they say this they mean something that specifically excludes qualia.

thisrod• 8 years ago

At some point, your phone might tell you that it has subjective experiences. What will you do then?

Koshkin9• 8 years ago

One can do nothing about that: a simulation can be indistinguishable from the real thing.

lists• 8 years ago

As a software engineer whose original line of work was continental European philosophy, its striking to read things like this because it shows how little we've progressed in philosophical thinking since Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The radical idea in Kant is that subjective experience has an objective structure: that means we can grant the validity of scientific observation, the key insight being that what you feel and see empirically (what gets called qualia), doesn't exhaust the definition of subjective experience, but is derivative of its essential structure. Once you make these distinctions, talking about why scientific observation is valid is easy.

The fault is that this doesn't completely eliminate a certain nuanced form of solipsism, and this is where Hegel comes in, but does make strong guarantees that gravity won't stop working the same way tomorrow.

Aqueous• 8 years ago

I'm also a software engineer, and I never turned philosophy into a job - it was just a major for me in college. Nevertheless it's interesting that we are both drawn to Kant, as his seemed to be the only suitable reply to the radical skepticism you're left with near the end of Descartes' Meditations (Even Descartes' disproof of his own skepticism is inadequate compared to Kant.) To this date Kant's response to Cartesian and Humean skepticism is the only one I find remotely compelling. It also lines up with my intuition that the form of subjective experience has properties which make subjective experience itself not entirely discoverable by analyzing first principles - those conditions being space and time, concepts that cannot be derived analytically but must be known prior to experience. And in that sense space and time have objective reality in a sense, as conditions of our perception. Our experience must already conform to the conditions of space and time in order for us to have it at all - which means that some reality exists, even though it has no knowable character independently of our perception.

I don't know why Kant has not experienced a resurgence, as his philosophy seems more and more relevant the more scientific theories like quantum mechanics are developed - theories which intimately tie up experience and objective reality and which, like Kant, both declare the knowledge of things-in-themselves, independent of perception, impossible and at the same time affirm that things-in-themselves exist. This is something no philosophy, with the possible exception of Kant's, has ever been able to conclusively demonstrate.

whatshisface• 8 years ago

Quantum mechanics doesn't necessarily make any statement about experience. It only seems to after "leaving" an assumption in your explanations about what measurement means for you to find later. (Only one out of the many interpretations involves "the part where the scientist observes the system," and it takes the specialness of measurement as axiomatic for philosphical reasons.

pdonis3• 8 years ago

This author clearly does not understand the actual beliefs of the people he calls "Deniers". Here is the "smoking gun" paragraph:

One of the strangest things the Deniers say is that although it seems that there is conscious experience, there isn’t really any conscious experience: the seeming is, in fact, an illusion. The trouble with this is that any such illusion is already and necessarily an actual instance of the thing said to be an illusion. Suppose you’re hypnotized to feel intense pain. Someone may say that you’re not really in pain, that the pain is illusory, because you haven’t really suffered any bodily damage. But to seem to feel pain is to be in pain. It’s not possible here to open up a gap between appearance and reality, between what is and what seems.

And here is how a typical "Denier" would respond:

The move you are making here is not actually a statement of fact; it's a definition. You are defining "qualia" to be "those things for which seeming is identical to being". Which is fine as far as it goes; you can't argue with a definition. But then you must also admit that this thing you've defined, "qualia", does not have some other important properties: for example, your qualia do not infallibly tell you about your own internal state. You admit this, because you give the example of someone being hypnotized to feel intense pain even though they have not suffered any actual bodily damage.

In short, the problem is not that some people (the "Deniers") deny that consciousness exists. The problem is that other people (like the author of this article) claim that consciousness, real consciousness, has properties that it does not, and cannot, have.

The Consciousness Deniers

Related Stories