Submitted by Gmroo t3_zdfsu4 in philosophy
>This argument rests on consciousness as a phenomenon only being knowable through being itself – that it cannot be inferred through other means. That if a non-sentient robot, would observe and communicate with us, be able to hold all key facts about us and our behavior in its cognitive system, it would never in principle be able to guess the existence of consciousness.
I disagree with this premise.
>That when we scream in pain there are not just observable signals that travel from A to B in our body triggering behaviors, but that we feel something when this happens
These aren't separate things. They are just different ways to describe the same thing. Pain is neural activity.
Okay, but I am not sure I follow what your argument is. That we can in principle detect consciousness without invoking consciousness? As in, Chalmers' debunking argument in his meta-problem paper?
Since consciousness is simply brain signals, yes we can detect consciousness without being conscious. That is what medical brain scanners do.
The issue is that we don't yet know how to translate the language.
It's not about us detected neural correlates about consciousness.
I guess soo, in respect to how Chalmers defines the hard problem I’m an illusionist.
Okay. I find illusionism a useless position with zero explanatory value. It tries to claim phenomenal consciousness is an illusion and leaves us with the same stuff to explain, only now they're called illusions.
There is just the easy problem to solve. Now the easy problem is going to be really hard to solve, but is solvable.
Try thinking of illusion not as a True/False binary but as a multidimensional spectrum.
This simple approach (consciously overriding subconscious heuristics) has great utility with many ideas.
I do. What makes you think I don't? I was talking about the philosophical position illusionism. I have no issues with the idea that some of the thinks we believe introspectively are mistaken. But we don't need an -ism for that.
Maybe I don't understand the problem then, because to me if one fully and "properly" accepts that illusionism is in effect (which includes representing heuristics predictions as truths), I'd think a workflow could be worked out such that people would be better able to realize that the core proposition is simply unknown at this point in time, which perhaps could get more people on the same page for a change.
> But we don't need an -ism for that.
Memes can be an effective popular way to get knowledge into otherwise resistant minds, just look at how well "We have no free will!" has worked, despite the truth of the matter being unknown.
Illusionism as held by Dennett, Graziano, Frankish.. has akl the issues Chalmers lists in his meta-problem. It's barely coherent, doesn't provide explanatory value.. and if beliefs about consciousness can be debunked, that without experience we can't theorize about it (you need "access") then maybebthere is more to it.
You lost me a bit with the first paragraph. Illusionism wants to negate phenomenal consciousness. Don't think many people can get on that page.
> and if beliefs about consciousness can be debunked, that without experience we can't theorize about it (you need "access") then maybebthere is more to it.
This sounds like its right in the wheelhouse of what I'm interested in, but I can't tell what you're getting at exactly.
> You lost me a bit with the first paragraph. Illusionism wants to negate phenomenal consciousness. Don't think many people can get on that page.
I'm getting at how on specific topics, it seems as if the human mind is unable to distinguish between reality and perception, fact and opinion. Whether we have free will is simply not known, not is it known whether the entirety of the universe is deterministic. If it was otherwise someone could point to a proof (or something approaching it), but all anyone has is stories, most of which have obvious flaws in them. On this topic it's perhaps not such a big deal, but I find the phenomenon annoying and it seems rather dangerous.
I have worked on free will quite a bit and we have it, only in degrees. Kevin Mitchell is working on a great (goingnby his tweets andnpeevious work) book on it right now. Check also George Ellis out wrt top-down causation.
Only in degrees, sure, but degrees go from zero to infinity, where it is within that range that we sit is the tricky part!
>These aren't separate things. They are just different ways to describe the same thing. Pain is neural activity.
That doesn't have any bearing on my point, though. Neural activity doesn't inform the observer that it feels like anything at all.
I think it would.
>I think it would.
If you were the observer you would, but if you had a nervous system incapable of pain you wouldn't understand what pain felt like. That doesn't mean there is anything verbal to know about pain though, it just means that knowing what pain feels like requires having a nervous system capable of experiencing it.
Okay, the onus is on you how. Sounds like magic. If I had no taste at all, all my life. And you would tell me the stuff we put in your mouth "tastes liie something".. I wouldn't even be able to comprehend what this taste sense is you speak of.
So how you'd conclude from looking at a physical process "Oh, gee that must feel like someting from the inside" without knowing about what it's like sounds like magic to me.
There'd be a lot of interesting things to conclude if a non-sentient intelligent entity would observe biological life. Complex self-dissipating systems, negentropy...etc., but subjective experience? How? On what basis?
Ever read Bisson's "They're Made out of Meat"? That, only waaaay weirder it'd be for that entity to listen to this "inner feel" we have.
You are the one making the claims. You can’t lay the foundation of your argument on this point and then turn around asking me to be rove it wrong.
Anyway if I were, then I’d use a reductio ad absurdum style argument. If you do assume what is true then it leads you to the absurdities of the hard problem. You’ll end up with phenomenal experience being an epiphenomena, which is impossible. Or you end up claiming the brain doesn’t obey the laws of physics.
I am not making any claims. We don't know of any way, in principle, how to infer subjective experience. Don't think there are absurdities there either.
>Neural activity doesn't inform the observer that it feels like anything at all.
Why not? They know you feel pain because you are screaming right?
Or think about it like the Emma’s room thingy (?) Where a scientist (that only sees/knows black and white) knows everything there can be known about the color red, but has never seen it. Does she lack something?
OP would say she lacks the experience of red, what would you say?
> Does she lack something?
Does she lack everything?
>OP would say she lacks the experience of red, what would you say?
I don't dispute this. The question is can she detect or understand the experience of red in any way.
as I said before a deaf person can understand that another person can hear and can detect when another person hears.
An observer who doesn't know pain or subjective experience can just note you are making a lot of noise. You can tell them you're in pain - how could they ever understand what thst is?
>An observer who doesn't know pain or subjective experience can just note you are making a lot of noise.
In response to particular stimuli. Also other physiological reactions.
>You can tell them you're in pain - how could they ever understand what thst is?
Same way that you do. Your perception of pain is merely electrochemical reactions happening inside of your body. That being could measure these and conclude you are in pain.
A thermometer "knows" something is warm without needing to have consciousness to perceive temperature.
A computer that could read the pain signals in your brain would "know" you were in pain without needing consciousness.
> how could they ever understand what that is
Try thinking of "understand" not as a True/False binary but as a multi-dimensional spectrum.
>Neural activity doesn't inform the observer that it feels like anything at all.
Why would it? Language only conveys what speakers can understand. If a neurosurgeon was colorblind, they could still understand how color vision works without knowing how colors look in the first person, but that doesn't mean there should be a way to convey what those experiences are like even to certain speakers who can't experience them. Having a certain kind of nervous system is a necessary condition for apprehending certain experiences.
Yes, it wouldn't. There's the rub and the basis for my post and issue in our universe. And in your reply "conveying what they are like" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. If someone never had the sense of taste, you can ralk to them till your blue in the face, but they wouldn't know what it's like. And that's the way you know what it even is. To experience it.
So in total what-its-likeness cannot be inferred in principle from any description from the universe. If it can, I'd love to hear how.
>And that's the way you know what it even is. To experience it.
No, perception is one way you can know things, but it is prone to biases, faulty information, illusion, hallucination, etc.. That's why having objective means of measurement or studying things generally is necessary in science, and how e.g. neurology can describe how vision works. Just having vision might lead to false explanations of how vision works. Obviously before microscopes, X-ray imaging, etc., much less was known in biology. [Actually in this instance you probably mean "know what an experience is like", but my point is any knowledge based on that wouldn't be something you could learn verbally, so it's just an aspect of communication. It wouldn't mean someone couldn't know "coffee tastes chocolatey" if they don't know what chocolate tastes like. Facts like that could be known without first person apprehension just based on how the sense work, etc.. ]
Experience gives first person apprehension of some sensory system, but my point was that the inability to convey in language what some experiences are like to speakers who can't have the experience is not a problem of knowledge, at least not something solvable by philosophers like how certain problems are solved in physics to determine experimental results. It's just a brute fact that certain organisms like humans are limited in their senses, and can't perceive beyond them, at least not without some future biotechnology, like to allow humans to sense infrared like snakes or hear higher frequencies like dogs or so on.
No, I meant what isubjective experience even is. If you have zero first person access to any experience, then it's impossible to comprehend what it even is based on any description thereof. This is not a linguistic issue.
The whole conundrum is that concluding processing goes on doesn't give you an inkling of an idea subjective experience even exists or understand anything even if one were to tell you.
Without access to subjective experience all you have left is dry processes you can have a fully exhaustive account of without ever knowing what subjective experience even is.
Well, I would think one should conclude that the inability of human language to directly evoke some previously never sensed sensory experience is a linguistic issue, and isn't a problem to be solved with language, it's just a fact about how human language works.
Getting back to the blog post this was about, it says,
>I argue that if consciousness is only knowable through the unique metaphysical relation we bear to it, then it necessarily follows that other significant phenomena may exist in our universe we don’t know about without the necessary metaphysical relation(s).
Having consciousness is a necessary condition for all knowledge, but it is not a sufficient condition for knowing about a particular thing, even for knowing about consciousness. Before any understanding of how brains work people had consciousness but didn't know what it actually was, that the experience of tasting pistachios was the brain activity resulting from eating pistachios. Having an experience is not the same as knowing what it is. People experience plenty of things without knowing what the experience is.
With language, we can describe what some experiences are like in terms of experiences that a speaker would understand, like people describe various tastes as nutty, or chocolatey, and so on. That way people can sometimes imagine what experiences are like without ever having had them, by their similarity to whatever they have experienced. Hence having had some experience of X isn't always a necessary condition for knowing what X is like, because it could be understood by relation to Y or Z. Or it could be imagined in relation to objective facts. Some things could not be conveyed like that, like the experience of a bat at least largely could not without some kind of mutation scenario or highly advanced implantation or surgical goings on.
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