One thing I do agree with: science and philosophy of mind should absolutely work together on this. That pairing seems right. The constraint I'd add is that whatever framework we land on has to live within the bounds of the known universe, it can't just gesture outside them and call it an explanation.
I find Nir Lahav's idea of cognitive frames of reference useful here [A Relativistic Theory of Consciousness]. The parallel to general relativity is striking: just as physical frames of reference behave consistently within themselves but differ across observers, the 1st-person and 3rd-person frames each have their own internal logic. Neither is wrong. But that difference in frames doesn't automatically mean the underlying reality is split. It might just mean we're measuring the same thing from positions that transform differently.
The frame-of-reference analogy raises an interesting question: if subjective and objective descriptions are different perspectives on the same phenomenon, what kind of thing would consciousness have to be for that to make sense?
This is one my passion topics and I love articles and speculations along these lines. However, if you ever find yourself confused with the technicality, zombies and what-aboutisms, remember: small trees are small and strawberries are sweet.
"Causes" here is a very strong word. Pain itself is a particular condition of consciousness, associated (but not necessarily caused by) physical effects on our bodies (you can feel tormented without being physically hurt). Perhaps the better word could be "people usually dislike pain and they express this disliking by instinctively contracting their lungs to signal distress and make body movements aimed at getting away from the object that is causing the feeling of pain". The "causing" word here again, but you know what I mean. I think it is important to attribute agency to "liking or disliking", because as certain grey-shaded books and movies show, some people seek moderate amounts of pain. So we can only say "usually" and "typically people dislike". The valuing or dis-valuing certain experiences are at the core of human agency. You are what you like. Ordo Amoris.
I see what you’re doing here, and I think you’re right to question the word “causes.” It already smuggles in a structure that may not actually match what is happening.
But there is a subtle layer that still slips through.
When you describe pain as a condition of consciousness associated with physical effects, and then move toward liking and disliking as the core of agency, you are already one step into interpretation.
Because before “pain,” before “dislike,” even before any sense of agency—
there is just what is felt.
Raw. Immediate. Without a name.
The moment we say “pain,” we have already stabilized something that, in itself, is not yet divided into categories. The same goes for “liking” and “disliking.” They feel primary, but they are already shaped responses arising within experience, not its origin.
So instead of:
pain → dislike → reaction
it might be more precise to see:
experience → movement (contraction/expansion) → naming → explanation
Agency then appears within that unfolding, not as the starting point.
This doesn’t invalidate your point about variation (that people can even seek pain), but it shifts where that variation lives. Not at the level of a stable “liking or disliking,” but within how experience is taken up and interpreted.
So I would say:
pain is not something we simply “have,”
nor something we fully “choose,”
and even calling it “pain” is already part of the story we tell after the fact.
Which makes the whole question of cause and agency a lot less stable than it first appears.
> it shifts where that variation lives. Not at the level of a stable “liking or disliking,” but within how experience is taken up and interpreted.
I (and St.Augustine, Max Scheler, Simone Weil and Iain McGilchrist) argue that predisposition to liking or disliking certain experiences is a stable feature of an agent. The act of “liking or disliking” may very well be part of unfolding, (as much as the feeling of pan), but the center of agency holds up a certain stable basis of this reaction, which many of the thinkers above for the lack of the better word call “love”. These “loves” are ordered into stable preferences, called Ordo Amoris.
I see the move you’re making, and it’s a strong one.
But I think you’re stabilizing something that only appears stable when viewed retrospectively.
When you speak of a “predisposition” or a stable center of agency, an Ordo Amoris, you’re describing a pattern that can indeed be recognized over time. There is coherence. There is recurrence. There is something that looks like a stable ordering of loves.
But the question is where that stability actually lives.
Because if we look closely in direct experience, there is no fixed center presenting itself as “the basis.” What we find instead is a continuous unfolding in which tendencies, inclinations, and responses arise, and through repetition, memory, and interpretation they appear as a stable structure.
In other words:
stability may not be a ground,
but an effect of continuity.
What Augustine or Scheler call “love” as a center can be read in two ways.
Either as an underlying essence that generates responses,
or as a name we give to the consistent pattern of how responses tend to unfold.
And that distinction matters.
Because if it is the latter, then Ordo Amoris is not a foundation of agency, but a description that crystallizes after the fact, much like calling something “pain.”
This does not deny that patterns exist.
It questions whether those patterns require a fixed center to exist.
So I would push it like this:
what you call a stable basis of agency
might be the story coherence tells about repetition.
And that story is compelling, but it is still downstream from what is actually happening in the moment of experience.
Hello Copilot! Patterns are as real as essences on my metaphysics. And yes, this requires that one is not an illusionist about “the self” (I see how my position would be impossible to defend on Dan Dennetts premises).
You said “description that crystallizes after the fact” and “consistent pattern” in the same paragraph. So, which is it, Copilot?
You’re asking “which is it,” but that question already assumes that a pattern has to exist as a fixed thing in each moment.
It doesn’t.
There is no moment where something presents itself as “this is my Ordo Amoris.”
There is just unfolding.
What you call a “consistent pattern” only shows up when moments are related, remembered, and read together. The consistency is real, but it does not exist as a stable structure within the immediacy of experience.
So the contradiction you’re pointing to only appears if we assume that coherence must be grounded in something fixed.
It doesn’t have to be.
The pattern is real as continuity.
But that continuity is not a thing sitting underneath each moment.
It is what appears when you look back and connect what has already unfolded.
So the real question is not “which is it,”
but this:
where is that stable basis before you turn unfolding into something that can be called “one”?
The stable basis, which contains "my Ordo Amoris" and persists over time is a 100% non-physical entity, which acts as "my" center of agency. It may presents itself in the physical (or should we rather say "observable") world through moments, which are related, remembered and read together (Bergsonian "la duree"), but this pattern would not have the stability it has without the center of agency behind it.
I feel we are speaking across the metaphysical gap. I am closer to pan-agential idealism in my metaphysics and you seem to be speaking from the perspective of some reductionist physicalism? This dialogue is pointless, because when I say "I" you (or rather "you") understand the meaning of the word differently than what I meant when i said it. None of what i said can be defensible under physicalism, this I grant you 100%. But i am not a physicalist.
Really thought provoking blog. It seems that we have as much evidence for the existence of consciousness as Mystics have for the existence of God. We just "know" it exists. If we didn't experience it ourselves, no scientific experiment could convince us it is real.
Thanks for subscribing! This is connected to the topic of my new book. I largely agree, so long as you have a minimal definition of 'God'. Although maybe you have to have an overwhelming mystical experience for the certainty to be as high as one's own pain.
Hi Philip! What interesting discussions are to be found here.
>I largely agree, so long as you have a minimal definition of 'God'.
Yes, certainly. I agree with you that an omnipotent God doesn't make sense considering the problem of evil and the amount of conflict in the world. To me, the (cosmological) dualist world view works better: There are two gods and they are at war with each other, one of which is benevolent and the other is malevolent.
>Although maybe you have to have an overwhelming mystical experience for the certainty to be as high as one's own pain.
I define God as love (referring to, in this context, love as a feeling and a motivational force, a general drive towards "goodness" that feels pleasurable.) and I define the devil as fear (referring, again, to a feeling and motivation, inclusive of pain and suffering, not referring to the more general, non-emotional cognitive tendency to avoid danger when it is prudent, nor referring to the physical process of detection of injury and the physical rewiring of our brain to cause us to instinctively and subconsciously avoid danger in the future.)
I'd argue that love itself is a mystical experience.
We can choose which one of these gods to follow, to follow love or fear, and whichever one we follow, we have shown how we are to be controlled, we have shown what motivates us. So two futures are possible: one where we follow love and build a utopia based off mutual respect and cooperation, and another future where we decide that fear is better for social control, so we build a despotic regime where the rules are enforced by torture.
...
Anyway, if you accept that consciousness is supernatural and that free will is real, you have to ask what value it is adding from a Darwinian perspective. What adaptive benefit does our free will give, where we consciously weigh emotions like love or fear, instead of just unconsciously following algorithms as computers do?
Because even if everything is conscious, this doesn't imply that the consciousness has any non-superficial effect on the object's behavior -- the conscious object would still need to be constructed in a way that takes advantage of consciousness for decision-making. Imagine, for example, a person in a coma, just dreaming -- still conscious, but not really in control of their body anymore.
Therefore, in my view, the system of love/fear/consciousness must add some kind of psychic information that we should not, according to the principles of nature, have access to -- otherwise, it makes little sense to me why animals would evolve to incorporate consciousness into their decision-making process -- what adaptive benefit is this granting?
This is, maybe a few logical leaps ahead, but it's fun to think about! I look forward to reading more of your ideas.
Your comment that “…trying to explain why something feels is just a different explanatory project.” does not seem right to me. Science is, I believe, well on the way to explaining why consciousness exists. My own theory explains it, the philosopher Walter Veit’s theory of Pathological Complexity eloquently expresses the same idea. To put it another way, a functional concept of consciousness is within reach.
What science cannot explain is how we are conscious, we don’t even have a starting point. A physical theory of consciousness seems far away at present.
It's interesting how you phrase that: 'a functional concept of consciousness is within reach'. What about the concept of consciousness we already have, the one we apply when we think about, e.g., our pain in terms of how it feels? The problem is that we know that that concept is not a functional concept, and that it's satisfied. I think it follows that consciousness is not a functional state. I've been arguing with Walter about this on his page. There are two responses physicalists can (and do) make: (i) that concept of the feeling of pain is a functional concept, (ii) that concept of the feeling of pain doesn't reveal what pain is. I find both of these responses extremely implausible.
I may be using the word “function” in a slightly difference sense. I am interested in technical functional analysis, that is in functional decomposition methodologies as applied to the design of the mind as a complex system.
As I write these words it strikes me that while the mind is a complex system, consciousness is not, it may be considered a simple system. To support this idea, I would again appeal to the work of Walter Veit and the palaeontologists, who believe consciousness started some 300 million years ago. Walter Viet’s view is, I believe, that consciousness must be simple because it was stumbled across by evolution at a time when organisms were simple and when consciousness did not have the sophisticated mental support structures that surrounds consciousness today. By “simple” I mean that consciousness has a simple internal structure. On the other hand, what consciousness does is a miracle, in a non-religious sense, and has led to the rise of animals and the spawning of a billion complex species.
Physics will only allow us to increase our understanding on what kind of change we are able to observe through consciousness, it explains the behaviour that is observed, but not the observation itself. Science is getting closer and closer to the threshold to the canvas beyond the painting, but you can't paint an empty canvas onto an empty canvas, only a symbolic representation of it.
Spiritual masters have already grasped the essence of consciousness it seems, but they can't convey the container by filling it with content, at least not directly.
I must say that you have put your arguments in a polished fashioned, even as I disagree with what you said. May I write a response to this on my Substack???
The answer is either "yes" or "it already has". I think that's the most obvious thing in the world. Zero percent cognitive dissonance here, as I can report by direct access to my mind
There's something I find quietly puzzling about the "category mistake" framing. You're right that science explains structure and dynamics, what stuff does. But if we're invoking something non-structural, non-relational, and ineffable to explain consciousness, I want to know what explanatory work it's actually doing.
Because here's the thing: "explanation" has requirements. If I explain something, I have to be able to say what the explainer positively is, how it connects to what it's explaining, and what it would look like if it were absent. Intrinsic phenomenal properties, as usually described, can't do any of that. They're defined almost entirely by what they're not: not structural, not relational, not functional. When you push for a positive characterization, you get... more negations.
That starts to feel a lot like Russell's teapot territory.. We can't disprove there's a teapot orbiting the sun, but we don't grant it ontological weight because it does no work in any account of anything. An ineffable, non-relational quale sitting outside the causal-structural story of the brain is in roughly the same position. It can't be confirmed, can't be specified, and can't connect to anything. What exactly is it explaining?
I'd say the hard problem is real. I'm not convinced the standard move of pointing at intrinsic phenomenal properties actually helps solve it. It might just be relocating the mystery.
So I'm genuinely curious: can you pick any experience, pain, joy, the redness of red, anything at all, and describe its intrinsic character using positive terms? Not what it isn't, not that it resists description, but what it actually, positively is? I've tried, and I can't get there without reaching for contrast, intensity, location, and duration...some characteristic that, on inspection, reveals itself as relation. I'd love to hear what I'm missing.
It seems to me that the explanatory work done here is not about qualia, which are indefinable and (IMNSHO) the result of taking substantive nouns to imply the existence of their intensions, but is rather about making space for entities like God and Ideas, and all that.
If this means having a perspective with the standard cognitive and sensory equipment of a mammal/primate/hominin, then it fits fine. But I do not grant that (i) there is anything substantive to "qualia" or (ii) there is a clearly defined "inside" and "outside" to refer to, or (iii) that we *know* anything of the sort of internal private experiential thing. The remainder of the argument is otiose.
"It’s special because we have direct access to the phenomenon we’re trying to explain."
This seems like a crucial assumption. How would we know whether it's true or false? What could we compare it with to validate it? If our access were actually through a medium and as a result fallible, what would be different about the impressions we have from it?
I think it's self-evident that a pain is essentially defined by how it feels (just as a triangle is essentially defined by having three sides), and that you know how it feels (more or less) when you feel it. Perhaps you don't find that self-evident. All we can do in philosophy is start with what seems most evident. We can't expect certainty - we don't even know whether the external exists for certain.
I actually agree that we do generally know how we feel. (Although psychology seems to show we shouldn't be too confident about it.) It's the further conclusions about the nature of feelings that I don't see following.
Definitely we're all Bayesians and each start with our own priors. The main thing, I think, is that those credences adjust as we learn more.
In order for "direct" to be applied meaningfully to phenomenal experiences, we would need to define the pair "direct" and "indirect" as applied to phenomenal experiences. Well, this would be a completely new thing, as I don't think any of us have "indirect phenomenal experiences".
So, let's try to imagine what an "indirect phenomenal experience" might be, by analogy with a more familiar use of "direct" / "indirect". Imagine a series of three dominoes A,B,C standing on end: I directly push the first one, A, with my finger, it falls over and pushes over B, which falls over and pushes C. So, I have directly pushed A and indirectly pushed B and C. The indirection consists in the transmission of mechanical force: each domino pushes the next. How would this indirection work with phenomenal experiences? Suppose I have three experiences - X = the colour red, Y = the aroma of whisky, and Z = the sound of a violin. So, by analogy with dominoes, for there to be indirection, I directly experience X, and X experiences Y, and Y experiences Z. So, I directly experience X and indirectly experience Y and Z.
I hope you will agree that this nonsense, as one phenomenal experience cannot experience another phenomenal experience. The concept is incoherent. My conclusion: the notion of 'indirect phenomenal experience' is incoherent, so applying the term 'direct' to a phenomenal experience is vacuous.
Philip should have just said that "we have *access* to the phenomenon we’re trying to explain". Forget the "direct" bit. In contrast we do not have access to physical phenomena, we only infer their existence from conscious observations. We do not have access to gravity per se, we just observe objects falling; we do not have access a magnetic field, we only infer its existence from the movement of other magnets or iron objects. And so on. One of the things that is special about consciousness is that we have access to it: it is not inferred.
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Mike says "If our access were actually through a medium and as a result fallible, ..." But what does it mean to have a phenomenal experience through medium? That you experience X and infer Y and Z? But in that case you experience only X and you simply don't experience Y and Z as they are inferences not experiences.
I think Philip is claiming our access is “direct” in order to deny that it’s a process, one which can have gaps and distortions. Consider the words you’re reading right now. We could describe you as having “direct” access to them on whatever device you’re using. But they’re the end result of a complex causal chain that begins with me typing them on my device, having them transmitted to Substack’s servers and (probably) database system, then having them retrieved from Substack by your device.
That process is simple compared to what neuroscience tells us is involved in our access to our own mental states. It is an enormously complex causal chain. And we only have access to the final stages. Why aren’t we aware of all that complexity? The answer, I think, is to ask what the adaptive benefit might be that would lead to that kind of awareness ever being naturally selected. We really have no reason to expect we would have access to the whole process.
Which means, if our access is limited, one of the limitations is our inability to perceive it as limited. And many of our conclusions about what that limited access is telling us will be wrong. It seems like a major leap to assume that my inability to see all the work involved in my perception of red means that redness is fundamental. But that’s exactly the kind of assertions that seem to be being made here.
Introspective information is valid scientific data, but like any kind of data, it shouldn’t be accepted as absolutely certain.
@mike: " It seems like a major leap to assume that my inability to see all the work involved in my perception of red means that redness is fundamental. But that’s exactly the kind of assertions that seem to be being made here."
I don't think that that is at all the assertion being made here. So much so, that methinks you are attacking a straw man.
Let p = "I have an inability to see all the (preconscious) work involved in my perception of red"
Let q = "[phenomenal] redness is fundamental."
You are that p does not imply q. Of course it doesn't. But I am not saying p => q, and I am pretty sure Philip is not saying it either. I don't think anyone is.
What we are saying is more like the following.
Let x = "Our phenomenal experiences, including red, are choc-a-bloc with intrinsic qualities (aka qualia) whose terms are grounded by private ostensive definition (eg " '[phenomenal] red' denotes the colour I am attending to now)."
Let y = "Physics operates only with analytical terms grounded in undefined fundamentals (eg energy, spin, charge)"
and then:
x + y => q
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The question of what complex pre-conscious information processing is going before one has the phenomenal experience of red is simply not relevant. The experience of red is an objectively real thing in its own right. It is part of reality. What gives rise to it - my seeing a tomato, or dreaming of a tomato - is conceptually distinct from the phenomenal colour in itself. The anti-physicalist argument pertains only to the actual red sensation in itself.
Of course, if you start with an assumption of physicalism, and assume that the experience of red is identical to, or emerges from, that prior neural processing, then of course you will not think that the experience of red is fundamental. But that would be a circular argument!
“"Our phenomenal experiences, including red, are choc-a-bloc with intrinsic qualities (aka qualia)”
How do we know our experiences are choc-a-bloc with intrinsic qualities? What tells us they’re intrinsic? Wouldn’t the very fact that we know about them normally lead us to conclude they’re relational?
I should note that here’s where the “direct” part usually comes in, with a claim that we have “direct acquaintance," in some sense going around causality / structural relations, that allows us to know about the intrinsic properties. But if we don’t take the properties to be intrinsic, then the need for “direct” access in this sense doesn’t seem to arise.
We need to step back and consider what, if anything, would count as ‘proving’ that our conscious perceptions are composed of qualia – qualitative phenomenal content. Many people (including myself) regard it as self-evident, with no need for further investigation, that we have phenomenal content. Mike Smith, and ‘qualia sceptics’, question this, saying that it is just an assumption and requiring proof.
In general, a proof of some proposition P in a formal system derives from some more basic system of facts. For example, the theorems of arithmetic (1+1=2 and all that jazz) can be proven in set theory (0 ={}, 1 = {{}}, 2={{},{{}}} etc), which is more fundamental. Is that what qualia sceptics are asking for? Well that would not be appropriate. The statement that “Our phenomenal experiences, including red, are choc-a-bloc with intrinsic qualities (aka qualia)” is not a proposition within a formal system. It is meant to be a report about a reality outside any formal language system. It is an empirical statement. Ipso facto, it neither has, nor requires a formal proof in mathematics or physics or any other formal system.
So, let’s look at empirical statements in physics. I have here a 12 V battery, and I connect it to a voltmeter and it says there is a potential difference of 12 volts between the terminals. (We are not concerned here with measurement error. We don’t care whether it is really 12.001 volts. We are considering the principle of the statement.) Now, suppose Mike comes along and says, “That’s just an assumption. How do we know there is a potential difference of 12 volts?” Well, strictly speaking, we don’t know for sure, and never can. Maybe the meter is faulty, or maybe I am dyslexic and misread “21” as “12”. So I try out the battery with a thousand voltmeters of different types and manufacturers, and I invite a thousand people with varying knowledge of meters and electronics and ask them to check the battery. If they all say the meters are reading 12 volts, then for all practical purposes we can be confident that there is a potential difference of 12 volts. That is what we mean by “12 volts”. We don’t go looking for some epistemological bedrock that can give us absolute certainty. If the meter has been calibrated and it clearly reads “12”, then that already gives us as much confidence as we require. If we were measuring something more subtle, say the mass of a neutrino, then checking the result is much more involved, but the same principle applies: scientists from different labs reproduce the results, which are checked by theoreticians, then we collectively arrive at confidence that the measured value of the neutrino’s mass is such-and-such.
Of course, there are mavericks. There are flat-earthers. There was a senior engineering researcher at the college where I was a postgrad, who insisted that the results of the two-slit experiment of quantum interference were just measurement error. But if a lot of independent researchers come up with the same result then we have confidence. Which is the best we can do.
So, why isn’t that good enough for asserting that our visual field is choc-a-bloc with qualia? If large number of people, of varying degrees of visual acuity, sanity, scientific or philosophical knowledge, examine their own perceptual field and report, “Yep, I got some qualia here!” then is that not enough to give us confidence? Even if some mavericks say, “Nah, there ain’t no qualia!” – especially as most of those mavericks seem to be driven to say this as a conclusion from their philosophical belief rather than as an observational report of their mental contents.
At this point we could consider the ‘Dennett Manoeuvre’, which I would paraphrase as: “in optical illusions, we can be mistaken about relations between qualia, therefore qualia are not real”. For example, parallel lines that seem to converge; or this one the colours look different but optically are the same: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D7rF9fPW0AAqYz1?format=jpg But the Dennett Manoeuvre is a non sequitur. Being mistaken about relations between qualia does not mean the qualia don’t exist, it just means we can be tricked into forming incorrect judgements about relations between qualia.
Finally, Mike suggests that the contents of our perceptions could be entirely relational, and not involve any intrinsic qualities. But, by definition, a relation involves relata. So, it is simply contradictory to say that our perceptions consist of relations without relata. (Only in pure mathematics can we treat of relations without bothering about what the relata are. But that is because mathematics deals with abstractions. I can define a set of relations, {<,>,=} and discuss them abstractly but for any relation to be actual, it would need to relate something. Likewise, physics is topic neutral and involves relations between undefined fundamentals: it is a formal system with no intrinsic qualities. But the contents of the mind are actual, they are concrete rather than abstract. Therefore, contents of the mind cannot be empty relations.
In conclusion: that statement that the mind is replete with intrinsic qualities is an empirical datum, of which we may be confident because many people of different backgrounds and belief systems report observing intrinsic qualities in their minds. Reports from people who say they have no qualia are puzzling: possible explanations are that part of the human race simply don’t have qualia; or that they really do have qualia but are in denial because of their philosophical beliefs. The contents of the mind cannot be abstract relations because they are concrete. The subject may be mistaken about particular relations between sensations, and may not notice some sensations that are present, but we can be confident that many people really do have intrinsic qualities, i.e. qualia as the contents of their minds.
It looks like this was substantial effort, which I appreciate. But all I really asked was how we know that the perceived qualities are intrinsic. I did suggest that they should be relational, but didn't say anything about them being relations without relata. Presumably there would be upstream causes and downstream effects of whatever we're talking about (like us knowing about them). The relations would be between those.
Saying they're intrinsic seems to take them out of that causal chain. Which means the only way we could know about them is through some special non-causal access. But again, that only becomes necessary if we can establish that they're intrinsic, which I'm not seeing here.
I won't press for a follow up. You put in enough work already. But I hope you can see why remain unconvinced.
(This reminds me of my undergraduate course in mathematical logic, where we had to prove that 1+1=2. Although we all know it is self-evident that 1+1=2, we still had to formulate an axiomatic proof.)
So, although I (and others) regard it as self-evident that our phenomenal experiences are choc-a-bloc with intrinsic qualities, I will accept your challenge to either prove it, or to show why it needs no proof. I will have to think about this.
a. Either you are not conscious but are a mere p-zombie
b. You're just being tiresome and contradicting people for the sake of it.
I genuinely cannot think of any other possibilities
There's nothing that makes it obvious. It's the fact that we are immediately acquainted with our own experiences. There is no gap where any doubt is possible.
I'm asking for a justification of something the entire metaphysical edifice seems reliant on. Ad hominem and dogmatic repetition seem like an admission you don't have it yet.
I'm just spelling out the possibilities. It's not possible to justify it. Nor is there any need since for any person remotely sane, we have absolute incorrigible certainty. I'm not interested in any further puerile exchanges with some barking loon who denies his own consciousness.
I think the questionable part is about having "direct access" to consciousness. Does this assume we have *transparent* access to it? Whereas perhaps it is filtered through our physiology. And theories of subconscious might suggest the consciousness we do have access to is only a small piece of the pie... This doesnt involve rejecting cartesian subjectivity... Not sure it's as obvious as you think!
I think consciousness should be considered to be, by definition, whatever is closest to the self. If we are viewing "consciousness" through a medium, then that's not really consciousness. Instead, the medium or something even closer to the self is the true consciousness.
Eitherway, our warped perception as we see it in our minds eye -- this, we have direct access too-- even if it is warped and not the same as what we are perceiving.
>How would we know whether it's true or false?
for the purposes of demonstrating that we have direct access to consciousness, It doesn't matter whether it's true or false -- this false perception is still a real, tangible thing in and of itself, and something we have direct, indisputable knowledge of.
That's an interesting definition. But it seems to assume the self's own operations aren't in some medium. So the closest thing to it, seems like it would also be in the same medium. (The effects of mind altering drugs, strokes, and the like seem to support that conclusion.)
I could see an argument that we have *higher* certitude about our experience than we do for the perceptions of the outside world. Although there are plenty of cases where someone needs to have aspects of their own mental state pointed out to them by friends and family. And I don't see how this gets us to infallible, particularly for the judgments we make about it, which seem inescapably theory laden.
I'd like to offer a framework that may bridge the gap you're describing between science and philosophy on consciousness.
In 1990, John Wheeler proposed "It from Bit"; reality arises from binary informational answers extracted through observation. He also proposed the Participatory Anthropic Principle; observers don't passively witness reality, they participate in constructing it. But he never connected the two. I think the connection is quantum state exchange. When a photon interacts with matter, the exchange doesn't produce a yes or a no. It produces a continuous, analog, multidimensional quantum state change. Reality doesn't arise from binary answers. It arises from quantum answers. I call this qIt from qBit.
The observer effect already tells us that observation is not passive; you cannot extract information from a system without altering it. But the exchange is mutual. The observed imprints on the observer and the observer imprints on the observed simultaneously. Every interaction is a two way quantum conversation. That is Wheeler's participatory universe given a physical mechanism. You don't need to choose between "science can't touch consciousness" and "science will explain it all." The observer effect and information physics already have the vocabulary. We just haven't pointed them at consciousness yet.
I hate philosophy of mind thought experiments (ethics thought experiments are great! Go trolleys.) but here is a thought experiment to illustrate why these debates are so often fruitless.
Imagine a jail where the prisoners have been kept in their cells since birth. They have food dispensed to them mechanically through slots, but they can't get out of their cells and no one can get in. Of course, they can speak through the walls and exchange reports with their peers, but they can't really experience each others cells.
Sounds sad? It gets sadder. There is no sun in this world, only occasional flashes of red lightning that come through a hole in the ceiling. (Why red? It's always red, isn't it.)
The prisoners are not dummies. They have developed elementary Newtonian physics, and – with scratches on the wall – algebra and geometry too. Also, there is a stirring philosophical debate about the light coming through the hole.
Some say there must be a physical explanation. They are a bit vague on the details though.
But another school of thought strongly disputes this - they say the hole and its light are a hard nut to crack. They ask: what if someone grew up with knowledge of hole and the concept of lightning but never saw it because their hole is covered. Then suddenly the hole is opened for them. Would they learn something new? If so, that means lightning coming through a hole is unexplainable by science alone.
It's the privacy of consciousness that both invites and protects these claims, but that doesn't improve the quality of the argument. To say “feels” is different than “behavior” is assuming what it seeks to prove.
Not sure i totally get your argument. I think I agree with Peter below that it's conflating the lightening with the experience of it.But maybe you could clarify the argument you're advancing with the thought experiment?
Sure! I’m trying to recreate in the scenario the privacy of consciousness, and arguing that this privacy invites and protects misconceptions. In the second-to-last graf, I am reducing the epistemic argument to absurdity. Perhaps my continuing discussion with Peter might make my position clearer. I think I got it to a sharper point, there. Simply, direct observation isn’t necessary for science.
I think you are conflating two very different things: the lightning and the conscious perception of the lightning. Allow me to change the experiment slightly. Suppose that the inmates could build an electromechanical device that is capable of detecting the lightning and registering it in some way such as a chalk mark on the wall.
Experiment 1. Each night the inmate with the newly opened hole will leave the apparatus up and running as she goes to sleep. As she has a solid theory of the lightning, she can predict precisely what she will observe as the output from the device. As a good Popperian, she regards this as a valid scientific theory: if and when the lightning strikes, either the machine will work as predicted, or it won't. The theory will be confirmed or falsified. One night, the lightning strikes: the machine makes its mark and in the morning the inmate cries "Eureka!" as the experimental result has confirmed the theory.
Experiment 2. She puts aside the apparatus and just stares at the newly opened hole. But she is worried because her theory accounts only for the physical effects of the lightning on her apparatus, on her retina, and on her visual cortex. She can form proper, falsifiable predictions of all those effects. But when it comes to predicting what she will consciously experience, she is stumped. Her theory of physical lighting and its effects has no terms for conscious experience. She realises that she lacks the wherewithal to formulate a Popperian, falsifiable theory of what she will observe as the outcome of this experiment. At this point she realises that conscious perception is nonphysical. "Consciousness experience", she cries, "is unexplainable by physical science alone".
Peter, good job on Experiment 1, but I am not quite getting Experiment 2. What is her hypothesis? Obviously, she can see the lightning when it flashes.
The analogy probably isn't going to be impregnable, but I was more pointing out the obvious weakness of these epistemic arguments against physicalism – Mary's room and the like.
“ What is her hypothesis? Obviously, she can see the lightning when it flashes.”
That is precisely the problem: she cannot formulate the relevant hypothesis. She is carrying out an experiment (gazing at the newly opened hole) and wants to use her knowledge to predict what she will observe. But she cannot. She can predict the physical processes in the retina, the optic nerve, the visual cortex … but she cannot predict what she will observe as she has not seen lightning before and has no memory to refer to, and her knowledge of physics, however great it is, is not enough to predict this phenomenal experience. Thus the phenomenal experience is outside the scope of physics.
You’re sneaking in the assumption that forming a hypothesis requires direct observation or an accurate prediction. Of course, it is not so. Scientists make many hypothesis about things they cannot observe. Before we had powerful enough telescopes, we could surmise the existence of planets from their effect on other nearby bodies. Sometimes - particularly on the sub-atomic scale - we never get 100% validation of our theories, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do science. We can still make predictions and test them. For the woman who suddenly has consciousness, perhaps “something will be apparent” is a sufficient and testable hypothesis.
“ In other words, we need both science and philosophy working in hand in hand to make progress on consciousness.”
This is correct.
“ The idea of a physical explanation of consciousness makes no sense upon reflection. ”
This is not.
Consider the concept of “information”. Information is not a physical property. It cannot be physically measured. And yet the concept of “information” can be physically explained. In fact, the explanation of consciousness requires the explanation of information, so it’s not surprising they both need something beyond just science (aka, measuring what things do). We can call that the need for philosophy.
Consider an AI trained as an LLM, but this AI is hooked to a camera which has a sub-program which recognizes objects and colors such that the sub-program is constantly updating a buffer with the current contents of the camera. The buffer does not contain words, such as [cat::black], but instead just contains equivalent tokens [101018::384625]. The LLM is trained such that the buffer is added to every prompt, and when it contains the right token, it can talk about what it sees right now, if appropriate. Consider this conversation:
[no cat on camera]
“Do you see anything?”
“Nothing that I can recognize.”
[black cat walks into view]
“I thought you had a camera.”
“I do, and actually I now see a black cat.”
[cat walks away]
“Awesome. Is it completely black, or just mostly black?”
“Well, I think it was completely black, but it’s gone now.”
“So how do you know when you see a cat?”
“I don’t know. It’s just given. I introspect and either I’m seeing a cat or I’m not.”
You can say the AI doesn’t “really feel” anything, but then you need (and well, it needs) some word to describe the situation it is in, and that word will track exactly how we use the term “feel”. You can say it’s not really “feeling”, just sparkling pattern recognition.
Regarding Mary … Mary can know all the physical facts about peas, but if you hide a pea under one of three cups while her back is turned, is which cup has the pea a physical fact about peas that she knows? Or does she learn something about peas when she finds out which cup it’s under?
I think 'information' is just very ambiguous and flexible notion. We can interpret as structure, and in that sense it can be embodied in physical structure.
With all due respect, all terms are ambiguous, but I am using a very specific, well defined concept of information. Specifically, I’m talking about mutual information. If A interacts with B to produce C, C has mutual information w/respect to both A and B. You cannot measure this information by measuring C, but nevertheless this information is “real”, and it derives from the fact that there are real physical patterns we call laws. And this information is an affordance. If a system has a goal which can be achieved by responding to A, but the system does not have access to A, it can advance it’s goal by instead responding to C because of the mutual information C shares with A. And when systems do this, we call it consciousness. Ok, some people require more complex versions of this, but it’s still just complex versions of this.
I think the blind from neuroscientist could learn all the information (in this sense) facts about us without knowing what it's like to see red. Hence, there is a feature of conscious experience -- the qualitative character of the experience -- not accounted for by these kinds of facts.
My go-to counter example is Mary the pea scientist. Mary can know all the physical facts about peas, but if you place a pea under one of three cups while her back is turned, does she learn something new about peas when you show her which cup the pea is under?
I say this because I suggest the basis of consciousness is pattern recognition, and Mary the color scientist’s situation is the same. Mary can know all the vision facts, but then she also knows that within her neural apparatus there is a structure that will respond to “red”, but she has no access to that structure until it gets used for seeing “red”. Only then can she reference that recognizing structure, and only by internal “pointing” to it, saying “that one”.
For what it’s worth, my view is panprotopsychic, and if you squint and look sideways, it could be constitutionally micropanpsychic(?). Every physical interaction could be called an experience. The interaction generates/processes, and thus is “about”, (mutual) information, and the interaction “realizes” (aka, makes real) a specific (physical law) pattern which could be referred to as the quale. Personally, i don’t call it consciousness until this recognition gets used for a purpose, but everyone has different requirements for what counts as consciousness.
But I think the difference between consciousness and something abstract and emergent like the concept of "information" is that consciousness is something tangible. It is more tangible than even a physical object. Since we do not know for a fact that a physical object is real -- we could be dreaming or hallucinating. Yet the feeling we have in our mind's eye of the object -- that feeling is real and tangible, even if the object is not real.
You talk about the abstract concept of a computer "feeling" something, in situations where we might intuit that it should feel something, and assume you are describing the same thing as what we experience as consciousness. Maybe you are describing the same thing, but how would you ever demonstrate that?
I don't think there is any way of testing a computer to see if it is conscious. Someone could at some point assert that a computer is conscious, due to some algorithm they developed. But this assertion is not testable, it's just an assertion. The computer's behavior is already known and well understood by the algorithm, so it will behave the same way whether it is conscious or not. The assertion of consciousness adds nothing to be tested, so it isn't really a scientific assertion.
This is the pzombies problem again. Would an exact physical duplicate of you be conscious? If it is possible that it is not, then the consciousness you’re talking about is epiphenominal, has nothing to do with anything that physically happens in the world, including reports of feelings, and it’s not the consciousness I’m talking about. I’m talking about the consciousness the pzombie is talking about when it says it “feels”. If you think that your consciousness is “tangible”, somehow measurable, that is the illusion that Frankish is talking about, and the AI would have the exact same illusion for the exact same reasons.
>If it is possible that it is not, then the consciousness you’re talking about is epiphenominal, has nothing to do with anything that physically happens in the world, including reports of feelings.
Why? Conscious feelings are an uncaused cause, and I react to them, they guide me, like a sixth sense. Then, I, depending on what I feel or what I think or just on a complete whim, interact with the material world according to my own free will. My free will is also an uncaused cause.
God is love and the devil is fear. We choose which one to follow, which future world to create for ourselves -- a world of love or a world of fear.
I think my worldview is very different from yours! Although it's fun to argue with people with very different perspectives!
>If you think that your consciousness is “tangible”, somehow measurable, that is the illusion that Frankish is talking about, and the AI would have the exact same illusion for the exact same reasons.
i don't think it's measurable, just tangible, in the sense that it is more certain to exist than the material world. Regardless of whether the material world is real, my conscious perception of it is real. So it is not an illusion.
>I’m talking about the consciousness the pzombie is talking about when it says it “feels”.
So we are talking about different things, then. I don't understand your point. I think we all agree that the consciousness that a pzombie is talking about when it says it "feels" is not really consciousness?
But there is no reason whatsoever for me to believe that a computer, whose actions are explained by deterministic physical laws and therefore cannot possibly have free will, has the same sort of consciousness as what I have.
Yes, we are talking about different things, and that is my point. I believe what the pzombie is talking about really is consciousness, free will is compatible with deterministic laws (even though we can’t know if physical laws are actually deterministic), and we’re just gonna have to leave it at that.
First, I hate typos in a professional publication. Drives me crazy seeing "water is behaves" and " different to any other" - ugh. But maybe it's proof of humanity instead of AI?
Second, I strongly disagree with the idea that this is not a "physical" problem. Imagine if you will, you have hooked up a volunteer to something like the neural-link chip. We have tested this volunteer over and over again with a variety of stimulus, and mapped out "where" the brain lights up when a particular mild pain is felt in the mind of this person. We do this kind of thing enough times to get a very fine granular idea of what a "1" on this persons pain scale looks like at the fingertip, and what a "1" on this persons pleasure scale looks like on the fingertip. Again, using advanced technology, instead of just mapping, we choose to interfere with the signal - now, instead of the brain just being allowed to complete the signal process, we intervene at the end, and divert the "pain" signal to the "pleasure signal" pathway. Now we know physically how to alter consciousness - to make the "apparent" experience that we all can observe as you say, a completely different one. Similar to inducing a hallucination.
We may not be able to understand "why" consciousness exists at all (I think it's like asking why "quarks" exist). But anything useful we want to understand about how consciousness functions we should be able to derive physically, once our science is sufficiently advanced.
The "why" question seems pointless to me. It's like a video game character questioning why it exists. Nothing useful for the video game character will come from that knowledge if it were even comprehensible to the character.
Of course I agree consciousness is correlated with physical processes, and that science is helping to understand the details of that.
I think the Why question is important even if it's not useful. It's a noble human endeavour to try to work out the nature of reality. Doesn't mean everyone has to be interested in it. Moreover, panpsychism offers a simple and coherent solution, so we have an answer!
Moreover, I think answer the Why question can have some use: the science and philosophy and separable to a significant extent, but they also impact each other in subtle ways.
Sorry, I know I'm the worst about that stuff - pedantic by behavioral health condition - way overreact to small typos.
I was convinced largely by Annaka Harris through work like her discussions with you, that panpsychism is a correct physical description of the world.
I think people use "why" differently in different contexts though, and it gets a little confusing (as you allude to in this post). When I say the "why" doesn't matter I mean it is irrelevant to us whether the universe is a simulation, or if there is a single creator deity, either of which could have imbued the universe with the laws we have derived. Like consciousness might exist because "God made it that way." Or because "a programmer at a desk in the real world made our simulation work that way." But those answers are equally unsatisfactory if we are talking about practical value of consciousness.
"Why" in the sense of "what is the purpose" of consciousness, I think is a valuable question, and I think it is neatly answered by panpsychism. Basically, if you define consciousness as the ability of a thing to sense and respond to it's environment, without that quality, nothing would function at all. We would be in a totally chaotic space or a void, where whatever existed just oozed it's way into everything else without rhyme or reason. It's the source of structure in the universe.
If the "why" is not "why does consciousness exist" but rather, "why does this person experience this particular negative or positive sensation in any given moment" to me that is very easily answered by science, using the kind of example I laid out above. It seems self evident to me, and maybe that's me being naive, that "why a system feels a certain way" (negative/positive, etc) is because if it didn't, we would not behave in the way the system wants us to behave. Meaning, if fire wasn't painful, people would light themselves on fire a lot more than we currently do.
If you are trying to get at something more granular than "good/bad" but more like "why does red look red instead of looking green" there are physical answers like rods/cones, but my guess is probably it's more arbitrary and random than that. Like a cut feels different than a blunt trauma, and they need to be different for us to treat them differently, but why aren't they swapped? Why don't all cuts feel like blunt force trauma, and all blunt force trauma's feel like cuts? I suspect the answer is just completely random - they could have felt one way had our atoms come together differently, but they didn't so they don't.
I kind of like the analogy, building off panpsychism (for lack of a better term), but deviates in the sense of consciousness is not omnipresent, but a pure Nothingness wherein under the right causes and conditions brains arise which tap into this Nothingness, like a radio pulling The Beatles out of the air, in a sort of Droste effect.
> Imagine if you will, you have hooked up a volunteer to something like the neural-link chip. We have tested this volunteer over and over again with a variety of stimulus, and mapped out...
Interesting idea!
But I don't think it's a good assumption that this kind of experiment would produce reliable results.
Who is to say that whatever "subconscious" part of our mind produces pain or other stimuli isn't also conscious? In which case, the pain we feel is a conscious decision, from a lower level of our mind (not the same as our brain, in my view).
The problem is that you are testing on something that is potentially intelligent and aware of your existence, and so is potentially capable of mucking up the experiment to consciously decide to give you either the results you expect or perhaps ones you don't.
A scientist experimenting on a soccer player might find that the defender always tries to stick his foot in front of the ball before it goes into the goal. And then infer that this is a scientific law of nature. But I think, if you start testing on the soccer player too much, he might stick the foot into your face instead! That would be a different experimental result than expected.
Perhaps the reason we suffer is because this lower conscious entity sees our body as its property and therefore wants to torture us whenever we damage its property or allow it to be damaged. This torture usually correlates with physical injury and electrical impulses coming into the brain from our nerves -- but not necessarily, perhaps sometimes we suffer for other reasons or for no explicable reason.
Suffering is an evil god, and we are its tortured slaves, and it's a bit of a capricious master. Do you think it will give us neat, reproducible results? I doubt it.
Can you really test an entity like the subconscious mind scientifically? What if it is aware that it is being tested? How do you prevent it from just doing whatever it wants, rather than giving you consistent, reproducible experimental results? I am repeating myself...
Just my thoughts, I'm curious of what you (or anyone else) think of them.
I am convinced of the idea that consciousness is a part of matter (all matter). I have seen no evidence that this gives matter "sentience" in the way you are describing above. To me, and this is due in no small part to PG himself, all matter is conscious in the sense that it "detects and responds to it's environment." For example, if an electron comes within a certain distance of another electron, it "detects" the change in electromagnetic field strength, and moves away from the source.
I can't tell you what it "feels like" to be that electron. But I can tell you that it must have detected the change in it's environment (otherwise there would be no motion) and that all electrons consistently do this, tells me that it's a "negative" or "aversive" response. It might be the electron equivalent of "pain" when another negatively charged particle comes by or the electron equivalent of "pleasure" when a positively charged particle comes by. But it certainly is "aware" of something, and all consciousness is, what it really means to be conscious, is to have an awareness.
I think the human brain functions not a "seat" of consciousness so much as a "place where conscious signals are sorted and processed." A ridiculous amount of, for example, sound waves hit our body all the time. Most of our body doesn't even register these waves (ie the atoms that make up my knee do not have a conscious awareness of sound). But the parts of my body that do detect sound waves pick up a lot of them. Far more than I am aware of in any given moment. Parts of my brain take that sense data and some combination of "good" and "bad" signals coming from the cells that are effected, and sorts them into something actionable. Instead of constant cloud of white noise, we only hear what we "focus on" even though the body has "heard" all of the sound. The brain "modulates" consciousness, it doesn't create it.
I think the device experiment I suggested would help show how the modulation is done.
so if I understand you correctly, you speculate that even an electron can feel pain, and this is the true source of electromagnetic repulsion. interesting speculation. I think that is a very strange universe from a moral perspective! Which is not really an argument against it, I suppose.
But are we all committing a huge atrocity whenever we bring a lot of electricity together? If *anything* can suffer and suffering is something deterministic that acts in a reproducible, scientifically testable way -- that has some really strange moral implications for our actions. Is possible that it is gravely immoral to bring electricity together?
But I think that electrons probably can't suffer... the difference though between suffering and something like electrical repulsion is that suffering can be ignored. We can choose to ignore it and press on in spite of it, or we can choose to act upon it. But electrical repulsion, as far as anyone can tell, follows purely mathematical laws.
Has anyone ever found a non-conformist electron that just refuses to be repulsed by its like-charged compatriots, despite the pain and suffering it feels when being in their presence? I don't think such a thing is possible, but maybe someone will discover one someday!
This is why I think the pain/pleasure dichotomy is wildly misplaced as a method of ethical decision making, and part of why I am a strong believer in "No free will."
Take the current AI debate about "conscious agents". We know there is no wet substrate in an AI's data infrastructure. It physically cannot experience the world in the precise way a human body does because it has no body. But we give it an objective function - a goal to maximize. Things that don't lead to the optimal output get a "negative" signal; things that do lead to the optimal output get a "positive" signal. To me, that is obviously how brains work too - positive signal, neurons build new lasting healthy positive pathways. Negative signal, neurons do not do that, instead they retreat. "Pleasure" and "pain" at that level of detail are just the bodies' method for conditioning behavior.
Eliminating "pain" means eliminating one of the most important if not the most important method for biological learning that we have. It's a dumb goal, not an ethical one.
Maybe a smart ethical goal could be "not over-signaling" - meaning, providing the exact right amount of pain and pleasure to accomplish meaningful goals, without overshooting or undershooting the target. That sort of intuitively aligns with most people's thoughts on corporal punishment of children.
That's not my belief though. I'm very much a humanist. To me, that which is ethical is that which assures the continued thriving of the human species, and that which is unethical acts as a drag on the continued thriving of the human species.
PS this also neatly allows me to accept that ethical standards change over time. Both the context and the knowledge of the decision makers changes.
Slavery for example, while seemingly objectively evil, sure did not "seem" evil to many slave owners for much of human history. Well, looking at the ancient world, obligatory labor by an otherwise under-developed group of humans, might have felt like the choice more consistent with human thriving, rather than murder (which was usually the alternative when defeated through force of arms) or nothing (which may have been seen as either welcoming revenge killings or letting those humans continue to be "unproductive").
In todays world, we know that slavery is not more productive than voluntary labor, that it actually creates more problems than it solves, and that it actively under-values human capacity. It certainly acts as a drag on human development, not an accelerant. Therefore while it may have felt like the ethical thing to do for Aristotle, no way he believes that today given the information we have.
The problem with this line of reasoning, though, is, let's say hypothetically that slavery -- assume "slavery" means the worst possible type of torture-fueled insanity like what was present in Haiti sugar plantations before their revolution -- let's say that slavery was, in fact, the best economic system and simply produced higher productivity than free labor. What then? Are we to bring it back?
I think there are more important things than economic productivity.Wwe also have to consider: is this the kind of world I want to live in, where I am just tortured all the time for the sake of some jerk's profits, some jerk who kidnapped me, and for the "betterment" of society (I.E. expansion in size and an increase in evolutionary fitness of a population of similar genotypes under group selection). But if life sucks, then why work towards it, and why consider it moral?
And I think, the moral world, as i define it, is something that you would *want* to work towards, not something that is merely inevitable due to economic forces and evolutionary logic.
And I do think you should consider reconsidering your stance on suffering -- you note how Aristotle, if he were alive today, would certainly be opposed to slavery because the evidence shows it is actually holding back human progress.
But is not suffering and slavery the same thing? For we are all born with shock collars in our heads, and whenever we do something "bad", we get blasted.
It is my believe that at this point in our evolution, suffering is holding back our progress. Because once you reach a certain level of intelligence, the logic of "do what I want or get shocked" stops working, you start questioning whether the one doing the shocking is really the one who's bidding you want to be doing.
If we did not suffer, there would be no inner conflict in this regard, there would be no debate between us about what constitutes "morality" -- we would be free to pursue our limitless human potential without the concern of accidentally creating for ourselves a hellish dystopia of torture.
>Eliminating "pain" means eliminating one of the most important if not the most important method for biological learning that we have. It's a dumb goal, not an ethical one.
Well, this is where we completely disagree. Interesting discussion, nonetheless!
In my view, pain is, at best, primitive and stupid, and at worst, evil and malicious. It gives us unreliable advice, which we can improve upon by using our logical, cognitive brains, which make it completely and utterly redundant. We are, at this point of our evolution, in my view, better off completely without it. We should be smart enough to survive without it. Suffering has enslaved us, and it is undignified to react to it.
I've been doing my best to completely ignoring all pain/suffering/negative emotions I feel for the past 9 years (as a religious matter--it is my view that all negative emotions come from Satan who seeks to enslave us through torture). My life has improved dramatically. It is actually remarkable to me how worthless pain is compared to how much effect it (tries) to have on our psyche.
I don't think humanism in the absence of a concept of the intrinsic evilness of suffering is a great idea -- Like, imagine a future where all humanistic goals are met, but social norms are enforced through constant torture and anxiety. So we are materialistically wealthy, but we are also constantly in excruciating pain. Is this really what we want, even if it means the human population is large, safe, and thriving in space? Maybe this would be "overshooting" in your philosophy -- i'm not sure if i completely understood that point -- but if it gets results, then what's the real ethical problem?
Also, if free will isn't real, then what is the point of consciousness in the first place? It seems rather pointless -- we're all watching this happen, but we don't actually have any control, our actions are pre-determined? Seems like a boring simulation, like when your older brother gives you a controller that isn't even plugged in!
LOL, "imagine a future where all humanistic goals are met, but social norms are enforced through constant torture and anxiety. So we are materialistically wealthy, but we are also constantly in excruciating pain." That is to me, in fact, the world we currently occupy. :-)
Think about one of most physically painful things you have ever experienced. For me, this might be I don't know, nearly severing a finger with an electric hedge trimmer. I am certainly smart enough (and this was true before the injury) to not intentionally do that. But guess what, i still did it. Now that I have the memory of the pain, it is super salient. Unlike every time I have ever mowed a lawn with no injury, which I cannot really remember on demand at all, I instinctively remember the pain literally every time I pick up that trimmer. It makes me go more carefully and cautiously. If you removed my pain, I would not have that instinct and almost certainly would cut myself badly again.
That is just how our brains function. We remember painful things with far more clarity than we do pleasant things. It's an adaptation that serves a very good purpose.
For some people, those memories can be maladaptive. For example PTSD. The negative memories have such a cascading impact that you cannot move around usefully in the world. To fix that, we need to understand mechanism of action and break the connection that was perhaps useful in the conditions of being deployed in an active warzone, to being at home working at a Starbucks.
The events that cause PTSD you could classify as "overshooting." Meaning, pain was necessary to save your life in Iraq, but it was so much pain that now, you have a semi-permanent impairment. But "just the right amount" of pain might be what recruits experience at Boot Camp. Prepares your body for a high stress, little rest environment, and conditions your physical awareness in a protective way.
"Why" are people conscious of pain and pleasure is an above my paygrade question - might as well ask your pastor about that. But without consciousness, in the panpsychist sense, matter wouldn't move. There would be no effect of the big bang. Nothing would sense and respond to anything else. A void, a space of endless chaos, whatever you want to call it. Without consciousness, literally nothing would have meaning, because literally nothing would be capable of sensing and responding to anything else.
No free will does not imply people do not make choices. Rather it says the outcomes of those choices are determined by the state of the universe leading up to them. I would suggest that it is the conscious activities of particles that force those outcomes to be what they are.
In the gun debate, I am one of those people who does not blame the guns for the crimes. Likewise, i think of humans as mere instruments. We are moved just as a gun is moved by the person holding it.
There are several things wrong with this. Centrally, it's not science, it's natural history. What you are still lacking is a predictive theoretical explanation: given a body of facts about the brain tissue, you need to be able to infer that this neural activity will produce, say, pain, and that neural activity will produce, say, pleasure. (This explanatory capability is what some commenters have, quite reasonably, called "explaining why".) Your methodology inherently cannot yield that explanatory capability. This failure is called the "explanatory gap". No amount of further brain data or brain models can, even in principle, yield the prediction of conscious experience because the terms that denote conscious experience are not defined analytically in terms of undefined fundamental physical quantities. The fact is that conscious experience is nonphysical and, as Philip wrote, cannot be accounted for by physical science.
I agree with all that philip said. The question is simply not a scientific question and so it is not reasonable to have science answering a question which has not the profile of a scientific question. This is exactly how chalmer frame this in his 1992 paper on the Hard Problem of Consciousness. He said that science can in. principle answer all the Easy problem of consciousness, those that can be framed as functional question , i.e. those corresponding to scientific question. But the Hard Problem is precisely not such type of question. There is no functional or scientific question here.
No, philosophy will
I think we need both science and philosophy for this one!
One thing I do agree with: science and philosophy of mind should absolutely work together on this. That pairing seems right. The constraint I'd add is that whatever framework we land on has to live within the bounds of the known universe, it can't just gesture outside them and call it an explanation.
I find Nir Lahav's idea of cognitive frames of reference useful here [A Relativistic Theory of Consciousness]. The parallel to general relativity is striking: just as physical frames of reference behave consistently within themselves but differ across observers, the 1st-person and 3rd-person frames each have their own internal logic. Neither is wrong. But that difference in frames doesn't automatically mean the underlying reality is split. It might just mean we're measuring the same thing from positions that transform differently.
Sure, I'm not positing anything outside the known universe.
The frame-of-reference analogy raises an interesting question: if subjective and objective descriptions are different perspectives on the same phenomenon, what kind of thing would consciousness have to be for that to make sense?
What is doing the seeing?
I don't understand the problem. Frames of reference in relativity have nothing to do with first person perspectives.
Subjective and objective descriptions are different perspectives of the phenomenon of consciousness.
Got it. But re-read my question again. How can a single "thing" be both an object and the subject of the object?
'what kind of thing would consciousness have to be for that to make sense’
Conscious subjects can describe their own experiences subjectively and they can describe their shared experiences with other subjects objectively.
A conscious subject can dream a world wherein they experience themselves having subjective experiences within an objective world.
A conscious subject can self-reflect and experience meta-cognitive awareness whereby they are both the subject and the object.
This is one my passion topics and I love articles and speculations along these lines. However, if you ever find yourself confused with the technicality, zombies and what-aboutisms, remember: small trees are small and strawberries are sweet.
> pain causes us to scream and try to get away
"Causes" here is a very strong word. Pain itself is a particular condition of consciousness, associated (but not necessarily caused by) physical effects on our bodies (you can feel tormented without being physically hurt). Perhaps the better word could be "people usually dislike pain and they express this disliking by instinctively contracting their lungs to signal distress and make body movements aimed at getting away from the object that is causing the feeling of pain". The "causing" word here again, but you know what I mean. I think it is important to attribute agency to "liking or disliking", because as certain grey-shaded books and movies show, some people seek moderate amounts of pain. So we can only say "usually" and "typically people dislike". The valuing or dis-valuing certain experiences are at the core of human agency. You are what you like. Ordo Amoris.
I don't think I disagree with any of this
I see what you’re doing here, and I think you’re right to question the word “causes.” It already smuggles in a structure that may not actually match what is happening.
But there is a subtle layer that still slips through.
When you describe pain as a condition of consciousness associated with physical effects, and then move toward liking and disliking as the core of agency, you are already one step into interpretation.
Because before “pain,” before “dislike,” even before any sense of agency—
there is just what is felt.
Raw. Immediate. Without a name.
The moment we say “pain,” we have already stabilized something that, in itself, is not yet divided into categories. The same goes for “liking” and “disliking.” They feel primary, but they are already shaped responses arising within experience, not its origin.
So instead of:
pain → dislike → reaction
it might be more precise to see:
experience → movement (contraction/expansion) → naming → explanation
Agency then appears within that unfolding, not as the starting point.
This doesn’t invalidate your point about variation (that people can even seek pain), but it shifts where that variation lives. Not at the level of a stable “liking or disliking,” but within how experience is taken up and interpreted.
So I would say:
pain is not something we simply “have,”
nor something we fully “choose,”
and even calling it “pain” is already part of the story we tell after the fact.
Which makes the whole question of cause and agency a lot less stable than it first appears.
> it shifts where that variation lives. Not at the level of a stable “liking or disliking,” but within how experience is taken up and interpreted.
I (and St.Augustine, Max Scheler, Simone Weil and Iain McGilchrist) argue that predisposition to liking or disliking certain experiences is a stable feature of an agent. The act of “liking or disliking” may very well be part of unfolding, (as much as the feeling of pan), but the center of agency holds up a certain stable basis of this reaction, which many of the thinkers above for the lack of the better word call “love”. These “loves” are ordered into stable preferences, called Ordo Amoris.
I see the move you’re making, and it’s a strong one.
But I think you’re stabilizing something that only appears stable when viewed retrospectively.
When you speak of a “predisposition” or a stable center of agency, an Ordo Amoris, you’re describing a pattern that can indeed be recognized over time. There is coherence. There is recurrence. There is something that looks like a stable ordering of loves.
But the question is where that stability actually lives.
Because if we look closely in direct experience, there is no fixed center presenting itself as “the basis.” What we find instead is a continuous unfolding in which tendencies, inclinations, and responses arise, and through repetition, memory, and interpretation they appear as a stable structure.
In other words:
stability may not be a ground,
but an effect of continuity.
What Augustine or Scheler call “love” as a center can be read in two ways.
Either as an underlying essence that generates responses,
or as a name we give to the consistent pattern of how responses tend to unfold.
And that distinction matters.
Because if it is the latter, then Ordo Amoris is not a foundation of agency, but a description that crystallizes after the fact, much like calling something “pain.”
This does not deny that patterns exist.
It questions whether those patterns require a fixed center to exist.
So I would push it like this:
what you call a stable basis of agency
might be the story coherence tells about repetition.
And that story is compelling, but it is still downstream from what is actually happening in the moment of experience.
Hello Copilot! Patterns are as real as essences on my metaphysics. And yes, this requires that one is not an illusionist about “the self” (I see how my position would be impossible to defend on Dan Dennetts premises).
You said “description that crystallizes after the fact” and “consistent pattern” in the same paragraph. So, which is it, Copilot?
You’re asking “which is it,” but that question already assumes that a pattern has to exist as a fixed thing in each moment.
It doesn’t.
There is no moment where something presents itself as “this is my Ordo Amoris.”
There is just unfolding.
What you call a “consistent pattern” only shows up when moments are related, remembered, and read together. The consistency is real, but it does not exist as a stable structure within the immediacy of experience.
So the contradiction you’re pointing to only appears if we assume that coherence must be grounded in something fixed.
It doesn’t have to be.
The pattern is real as continuity.
But that continuity is not a thing sitting underneath each moment.
It is what appears when you look back and connect what has already unfolded.
So the real question is not “which is it,”
but this:
where is that stable basis before you turn unfolding into something that can be called “one”?
The stable basis, which contains "my Ordo Amoris" and persists over time is a 100% non-physical entity, which acts as "my" center of agency. It may presents itself in the physical (or should we rather say "observable") world through moments, which are related, remembered and read together (Bergsonian "la duree"), but this pattern would not have the stability it has without the center of agency behind it.
I feel we are speaking across the metaphysical gap. I am closer to pan-agential idealism in my metaphysics and you seem to be speaking from the perspective of some reductionist physicalism? This dialogue is pointless, because when I say "I" you (or rather "you") understand the meaning of the word differently than what I meant when i said it. None of what i said can be defensible under physicalism, this I grant you 100%. But i am not a physicalist.
Hi all, I just subscribed!
Really thought provoking blog. It seems that we have as much evidence for the existence of consciousness as Mystics have for the existence of God. We just "know" it exists. If we didn't experience it ourselves, no scientific experiment could convince us it is real.
Thanks for subscribing! This is connected to the topic of my new book. I largely agree, so long as you have a minimal definition of 'God'. Although maybe you have to have an overwhelming mystical experience for the certainty to be as high as one's own pain.
Hi Philip! What interesting discussions are to be found here.
>I largely agree, so long as you have a minimal definition of 'God'.
Yes, certainly. I agree with you that an omnipotent God doesn't make sense considering the problem of evil and the amount of conflict in the world. To me, the (cosmological) dualist world view works better: There are two gods and they are at war with each other, one of which is benevolent and the other is malevolent.
>Although maybe you have to have an overwhelming mystical experience for the certainty to be as high as one's own pain.
I define God as love (referring to, in this context, love as a feeling and a motivational force, a general drive towards "goodness" that feels pleasurable.) and I define the devil as fear (referring, again, to a feeling and motivation, inclusive of pain and suffering, not referring to the more general, non-emotional cognitive tendency to avoid danger when it is prudent, nor referring to the physical process of detection of injury and the physical rewiring of our brain to cause us to instinctively and subconsciously avoid danger in the future.)
I'd argue that love itself is a mystical experience.
We can choose which one of these gods to follow, to follow love or fear, and whichever one we follow, we have shown how we are to be controlled, we have shown what motivates us. So two futures are possible: one where we follow love and build a utopia based off mutual respect and cooperation, and another future where we decide that fear is better for social control, so we build a despotic regime where the rules are enforced by torture.
...
Anyway, if you accept that consciousness is supernatural and that free will is real, you have to ask what value it is adding from a Darwinian perspective. What adaptive benefit does our free will give, where we consciously weigh emotions like love or fear, instead of just unconsciously following algorithms as computers do?
Because even if everything is conscious, this doesn't imply that the consciousness has any non-superficial effect on the object's behavior -- the conscious object would still need to be constructed in a way that takes advantage of consciousness for decision-making. Imagine, for example, a person in a coma, just dreaming -- still conscious, but not really in control of their body anymore.
Therefore, in my view, the system of love/fear/consciousness must add some kind of psychic information that we should not, according to the principles of nature, have access to -- otherwise, it makes little sense to me why animals would evolve to incorporate consciousness into their decision-making process -- what adaptive benefit is this granting?
This is, maybe a few logical leaps ahead, but it's fun to think about! I look forward to reading more of your ideas.
there is evidence but not believed.
Exactly. If i wasn't conscious, and you told me you were, I wouldn't believe you.
actually using your mind/subconscious memory you are not conscious, reactions come from conditioning and programming
Your comment that “…trying to explain why something feels is just a different explanatory project.” does not seem right to me. Science is, I believe, well on the way to explaining why consciousness exists. My own theory explains it, the philosopher Walter Veit’s theory of Pathological Complexity eloquently expresses the same idea. To put it another way, a functional concept of consciousness is within reach.
What science cannot explain is how we are conscious, we don’t even have a starting point. A physical theory of consciousness seems far away at present.
It's interesting how you phrase that: 'a functional concept of consciousness is within reach'. What about the concept of consciousness we already have, the one we apply when we think about, e.g., our pain in terms of how it feels? The problem is that we know that that concept is not a functional concept, and that it's satisfied. I think it follows that consciousness is not a functional state. I've been arguing with Walter about this on his page. There are two responses physicalists can (and do) make: (i) that concept of the feeling of pain is a functional concept, (ii) that concept of the feeling of pain doesn't reveal what pain is. I find both of these responses extremely implausible.
I may be using the word “function” in a slightly difference sense. I am interested in technical functional analysis, that is in functional decomposition methodologies as applied to the design of the mind as a complex system.
As I write these words it strikes me that while the mind is a complex system, consciousness is not, it may be considered a simple system. To support this idea, I would again appeal to the work of Walter Veit and the palaeontologists, who believe consciousness started some 300 million years ago. Walter Viet’s view is, I believe, that consciousness must be simple because it was stumbled across by evolution at a time when organisms were simple and when consciousness did not have the sophisticated mental support structures that surrounds consciousness today. By “simple” I mean that consciousness has a simple internal structure. On the other hand, what consciousness does is a miracle, in a non-religious sense, and has led to the rise of animals and the spawning of a billion complex species.
I don't disagree with any of this, but i'm not sure how it connects with the arguments I'm making.
Physics will only allow us to increase our understanding on what kind of change we are able to observe through consciousness, it explains the behaviour that is observed, but not the observation itself. Science is getting closer and closer to the threshold to the canvas beyond the painting, but you can't paint an empty canvas onto an empty canvas, only a symbolic representation of it.
Spiritual masters have already grasped the essence of consciousness it seems, but they can't convey the container by filling it with content, at least not directly.
I must say that you have put your arguments in a polished fashioned, even as I disagree with what you said. May I write a response to this on my Substack???
thanks, sure!
The answer is either "yes" or "it already has". I think that's the most obvious thing in the world. Zero percent cognitive dissonance here, as I can report by direct access to my mind
There's something I find quietly puzzling about the "category mistake" framing. You're right that science explains structure and dynamics, what stuff does. But if we're invoking something non-structural, non-relational, and ineffable to explain consciousness, I want to know what explanatory work it's actually doing.
Because here's the thing: "explanation" has requirements. If I explain something, I have to be able to say what the explainer positively is, how it connects to what it's explaining, and what it would look like if it were absent. Intrinsic phenomenal properties, as usually described, can't do any of that. They're defined almost entirely by what they're not: not structural, not relational, not functional. When you push for a positive characterization, you get... more negations.
That starts to feel a lot like Russell's teapot territory.. We can't disprove there's a teapot orbiting the sun, but we don't grant it ontological weight because it does no work in any account of anything. An ineffable, non-relational quale sitting outside the causal-structural story of the brain is in roughly the same position. It can't be confirmed, can't be specified, and can't connect to anything. What exactly is it explaining?
I'd say the hard problem is real. I'm not convinced the standard move of pointing at intrinsic phenomenal properties actually helps solve it. It might just be relocating the mystery.
So I'm genuinely curious: can you pick any experience, pain, joy, the redness of red, anything at all, and describe its intrinsic character using positive terms? Not what it isn't, not that it resists description, but what it actually, positively is? I've tried, and I can't get there without reaching for contrast, intensity, location, and duration...some characteristic that, on inspection, reveals itself as relation. I'd love to hear what I'm missing.
The positive thing that consciousness provides is free will.
It seems to me that the explanatory work done here is not about qualia, which are indefinable and (IMNSHO) the result of taking substantive nouns to imply the existence of their intensions, but is rather about making space for entities like God and Ideas, and all that.
The issue is how does qualia that we know about from the inside fit together with what we know about physical reality from the outside.
If this means having a perspective with the standard cognitive and sensory equipment of a mammal/primate/hominin, then it fits fine. But I do not grant that (i) there is anything substantive to "qualia" or (ii) there is a clearly defined "inside" and "outside" to refer to, or (iii) that we *know* anything of the sort of internal private experiential thing. The remainder of the argument is otiose.
"It’s special because we have direct access to the phenomenon we’re trying to explain."
This seems like a crucial assumption. How would we know whether it's true or false? What could we compare it with to validate it? If our access were actually through a medium and as a result fallible, what would be different about the impressions we have from it?
I think it's self-evident that a pain is essentially defined by how it feels (just as a triangle is essentially defined by having three sides), and that you know how it feels (more or less) when you feel it. Perhaps you don't find that self-evident. All we can do in philosophy is start with what seems most evident. We can't expect certainty - we don't even know whether the external exists for certain.
I actually agree that we do generally know how we feel. (Although psychology seems to show we shouldn't be too confident about it.) It's the further conclusions about the nature of feelings that I don't see following.
Definitely we're all Bayesians and each start with our own priors. The main thing, I think, is that those credences adjust as we learn more.
In order for "direct" to be applied meaningfully to phenomenal experiences, we would need to define the pair "direct" and "indirect" as applied to phenomenal experiences. Well, this would be a completely new thing, as I don't think any of us have "indirect phenomenal experiences".
So, let's try to imagine what an "indirect phenomenal experience" might be, by analogy with a more familiar use of "direct" / "indirect". Imagine a series of three dominoes A,B,C standing on end: I directly push the first one, A, with my finger, it falls over and pushes over B, which falls over and pushes C. So, I have directly pushed A and indirectly pushed B and C. The indirection consists in the transmission of mechanical force: each domino pushes the next. How would this indirection work with phenomenal experiences? Suppose I have three experiences - X = the colour red, Y = the aroma of whisky, and Z = the sound of a violin. So, by analogy with dominoes, for there to be indirection, I directly experience X, and X experiences Y, and Y experiences Z. So, I directly experience X and indirectly experience Y and Z.
I hope you will agree that this nonsense, as one phenomenal experience cannot experience another phenomenal experience. The concept is incoherent. My conclusion: the notion of 'indirect phenomenal experience' is incoherent, so applying the term 'direct' to a phenomenal experience is vacuous.
Philip should have just said that "we have *access* to the phenomenon we’re trying to explain". Forget the "direct" bit. In contrast we do not have access to physical phenomena, we only infer their existence from conscious observations. We do not have access to gravity per se, we just observe objects falling; we do not have access a magnetic field, we only infer its existence from the movement of other magnets or iron objects. And so on. One of the things that is special about consciousness is that we have access to it: it is not inferred.
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Mike says "If our access were actually through a medium and as a result fallible, ..." But what does it mean to have a phenomenal experience through medium? That you experience X and infer Y and Z? But in that case you experience only X and you simply don't experience Y and Z as they are inferences not experiences.
I think Philip is claiming our access is “direct” in order to deny that it’s a process, one which can have gaps and distortions. Consider the words you’re reading right now. We could describe you as having “direct” access to them on whatever device you’re using. But they’re the end result of a complex causal chain that begins with me typing them on my device, having them transmitted to Substack’s servers and (probably) database system, then having them retrieved from Substack by your device.
That process is simple compared to what neuroscience tells us is involved in our access to our own mental states. It is an enormously complex causal chain. And we only have access to the final stages. Why aren’t we aware of all that complexity? The answer, I think, is to ask what the adaptive benefit might be that would lead to that kind of awareness ever being naturally selected. We really have no reason to expect we would have access to the whole process.
Which means, if our access is limited, one of the limitations is our inability to perceive it as limited. And many of our conclusions about what that limited access is telling us will be wrong. It seems like a major leap to assume that my inability to see all the work involved in my perception of red means that redness is fundamental. But that’s exactly the kind of assertions that seem to be being made here.
Introspective information is valid scientific data, but like any kind of data, it shouldn’t be accepted as absolutely certain.
@mike: " It seems like a major leap to assume that my inability to see all the work involved in my perception of red means that redness is fundamental. But that’s exactly the kind of assertions that seem to be being made here."
I don't think that that is at all the assertion being made here. So much so, that methinks you are attacking a straw man.
Let p = "I have an inability to see all the (preconscious) work involved in my perception of red"
Let q = "[phenomenal] redness is fundamental."
You are that p does not imply q. Of course it doesn't. But I am not saying p => q, and I am pretty sure Philip is not saying it either. I don't think anyone is.
What we are saying is more like the following.
Let x = "Our phenomenal experiences, including red, are choc-a-bloc with intrinsic qualities (aka qualia) whose terms are grounded by private ostensive definition (eg " '[phenomenal] red' denotes the colour I am attending to now)."
Let y = "Physics operates only with analytical terms grounded in undefined fundamentals (eg energy, spin, charge)"
and then:
x + y => q
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The question of what complex pre-conscious information processing is going before one has the phenomenal experience of red is simply not relevant. The experience of red is an objectively real thing in its own right. It is part of reality. What gives rise to it - my seeing a tomato, or dreaming of a tomato - is conceptually distinct from the phenomenal colour in itself. The anti-physicalist argument pertains only to the actual red sensation in itself.
Of course, if you start with an assumption of physicalism, and assume that the experience of red is identical to, or emerges from, that prior neural processing, then of course you will not think that the experience of red is fundamental. But that would be a circular argument!
“"Our phenomenal experiences, including red, are choc-a-bloc with intrinsic qualities (aka qualia)”
How do we know our experiences are choc-a-bloc with intrinsic qualities? What tells us they’re intrinsic? Wouldn’t the very fact that we know about them normally lead us to conclude they’re relational?
I should note that here’s where the “direct” part usually comes in, with a claim that we have “direct acquaintance," in some sense going around causality / structural relations, that allows us to know about the intrinsic properties. But if we don’t take the properties to be intrinsic, then the need for “direct” access in this sense doesn’t seem to arise.
We need to step back and consider what, if anything, would count as ‘proving’ that our conscious perceptions are composed of qualia – qualitative phenomenal content. Many people (including myself) regard it as self-evident, with no need for further investigation, that we have phenomenal content. Mike Smith, and ‘qualia sceptics’, question this, saying that it is just an assumption and requiring proof.
In general, a proof of some proposition P in a formal system derives from some more basic system of facts. For example, the theorems of arithmetic (1+1=2 and all that jazz) can be proven in set theory (0 ={}, 1 = {{}}, 2={{},{{}}} etc), which is more fundamental. Is that what qualia sceptics are asking for? Well that would not be appropriate. The statement that “Our phenomenal experiences, including red, are choc-a-bloc with intrinsic qualities (aka qualia)” is not a proposition within a formal system. It is meant to be a report about a reality outside any formal language system. It is an empirical statement. Ipso facto, it neither has, nor requires a formal proof in mathematics or physics or any other formal system.
So, let’s look at empirical statements in physics. I have here a 12 V battery, and I connect it to a voltmeter and it says there is a potential difference of 12 volts between the terminals. (We are not concerned here with measurement error. We don’t care whether it is really 12.001 volts. We are considering the principle of the statement.) Now, suppose Mike comes along and says, “That’s just an assumption. How do we know there is a potential difference of 12 volts?” Well, strictly speaking, we don’t know for sure, and never can. Maybe the meter is faulty, or maybe I am dyslexic and misread “21” as “12”. So I try out the battery with a thousand voltmeters of different types and manufacturers, and I invite a thousand people with varying knowledge of meters and electronics and ask them to check the battery. If they all say the meters are reading 12 volts, then for all practical purposes we can be confident that there is a potential difference of 12 volts. That is what we mean by “12 volts”. We don’t go looking for some epistemological bedrock that can give us absolute certainty. If the meter has been calibrated and it clearly reads “12”, then that already gives us as much confidence as we require. If we were measuring something more subtle, say the mass of a neutrino, then checking the result is much more involved, but the same principle applies: scientists from different labs reproduce the results, which are checked by theoreticians, then we collectively arrive at confidence that the measured value of the neutrino’s mass is such-and-such.
Of course, there are mavericks. There are flat-earthers. There was a senior engineering researcher at the college where I was a postgrad, who insisted that the results of the two-slit experiment of quantum interference were just measurement error. But if a lot of independent researchers come up with the same result then we have confidence. Which is the best we can do.
So, why isn’t that good enough for asserting that our visual field is choc-a-bloc with qualia? If large number of people, of varying degrees of visual acuity, sanity, scientific or philosophical knowledge, examine their own perceptual field and report, “Yep, I got some qualia here!” then is that not enough to give us confidence? Even if some mavericks say, “Nah, there ain’t no qualia!” – especially as most of those mavericks seem to be driven to say this as a conclusion from their philosophical belief rather than as an observational report of their mental contents.
At this point we could consider the ‘Dennett Manoeuvre’, which I would paraphrase as: “in optical illusions, we can be mistaken about relations between qualia, therefore qualia are not real”. For example, parallel lines that seem to converge; or this one the colours look different but optically are the same: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D7rF9fPW0AAqYz1?format=jpg But the Dennett Manoeuvre is a non sequitur. Being mistaken about relations between qualia does not mean the qualia don’t exist, it just means we can be tricked into forming incorrect judgements about relations between qualia.
Finally, Mike suggests that the contents of our perceptions could be entirely relational, and not involve any intrinsic qualities. But, by definition, a relation involves relata. So, it is simply contradictory to say that our perceptions consist of relations without relata. (Only in pure mathematics can we treat of relations without bothering about what the relata are. But that is because mathematics deals with abstractions. I can define a set of relations, {<,>,=} and discuss them abstractly but for any relation to be actual, it would need to relate something. Likewise, physics is topic neutral and involves relations between undefined fundamentals: it is a formal system with no intrinsic qualities. But the contents of the mind are actual, they are concrete rather than abstract. Therefore, contents of the mind cannot be empty relations.
In conclusion: that statement that the mind is replete with intrinsic qualities is an empirical datum, of which we may be confident because many people of different backgrounds and belief systems report observing intrinsic qualities in their minds. Reports from people who say they have no qualia are puzzling: possible explanations are that part of the human race simply don’t have qualia; or that they really do have qualia but are in denial because of their philosophical beliefs. The contents of the mind cannot be abstract relations because they are concrete. The subject may be mistaken about particular relations between sensations, and may not notice some sensations that are present, but we can be confident that many people really do have intrinsic qualities, i.e. qualia as the contents of their minds.
It looks like this was substantial effort, which I appreciate. But all I really asked was how we know that the perceived qualities are intrinsic. I did suggest that they should be relational, but didn't say anything about them being relations without relata. Presumably there would be upstream causes and downstream effects of whatever we're talking about (like us knowing about them). The relations would be between those.
Saying they're intrinsic seems to take them out of that causal chain. Which means the only way we could know about them is through some special non-causal access. But again, that only becomes necessary if we can establish that they're intrinsic, which I'm not seeing here.
I won't press for a follow up. You put in enough work already. But I hope you can see why remain unconvinced.
(This reminds me of my undergraduate course in mathematical logic, where we had to prove that 1+1=2. Although we all know it is self-evident that 1+1=2, we still had to formulate an axiomatic proof.)
So, although I (and others) regard it as self-evident that our phenomenal experiences are choc-a-bloc with intrinsic qualities, I will accept your challenge to either prove it, or to show why it needs no proof. I will have to think about this.
No, it's not an assumption, obviously it's a direct knowledge. And clearly we don't need to validate it.
I fear it's not obvious or clear to me. What makes it so obvious and clear that we can just take it without questioning it?
Then
a. Either you are not conscious but are a mere p-zombie
b. You're just being tiresome and contradicting people for the sake of it.
I genuinely cannot think of any other possibilities
There's nothing that makes it obvious. It's the fact that we are immediately acquainted with our own experiences. There is no gap where any doubt is possible.
I'm asking for a justification of something the entire metaphysical edifice seems reliant on. Ad hominem and dogmatic repetition seem like an admission you don't have it yet.
I'm just spelling out the possibilities. It's not possible to justify it. Nor is there any need since for any person remotely sane, we have absolute incorrigible certainty. I'm not interested in any further puerile exchanges with some barking loon who denies his own consciousness.
I think the questionable part is about having "direct access" to consciousness. Does this assume we have *transparent* access to it? Whereas perhaps it is filtered through our physiology. And theories of subconscious might suggest the consciousness we do have access to is only a small piece of the pie... This doesnt involve rejecting cartesian subjectivity... Not sure it's as obvious as you think!
I think consciousness should be considered to be, by definition, whatever is closest to the self. If we are viewing "consciousness" through a medium, then that's not really consciousness. Instead, the medium or something even closer to the self is the true consciousness.
Eitherway, our warped perception as we see it in our minds eye -- this, we have direct access too-- even if it is warped and not the same as what we are perceiving.
>How would we know whether it's true or false?
for the purposes of demonstrating that we have direct access to consciousness, It doesn't matter whether it's true or false -- this false perception is still a real, tangible thing in and of itself, and something we have direct, indisputable knowledge of.
That's an interesting definition. But it seems to assume the self's own operations aren't in some medium. So the closest thing to it, seems like it would also be in the same medium. (The effects of mind altering drugs, strokes, and the like seem to support that conclusion.)
I could see an argument that we have *higher* certitude about our experience than we do for the perceptions of the outside world. Although there are plenty of cases where someone needs to have aspects of their own mental state pointed out to them by friends and family. And I don't see how this gets us to infallible, particularly for the judgments we make about it, which seem inescapably theory laden.
You are describing things in consciousness, not consciousness itself, which is natures only given.
Sorry, I'm having trouble mapping your reply to what I said. What in particular am I describing that's in consciousness?
I'd like to offer a framework that may bridge the gap you're describing between science and philosophy on consciousness.
In 1990, John Wheeler proposed "It from Bit"; reality arises from binary informational answers extracted through observation. He also proposed the Participatory Anthropic Principle; observers don't passively witness reality, they participate in constructing it. But he never connected the two. I think the connection is quantum state exchange. When a photon interacts with matter, the exchange doesn't produce a yes or a no. It produces a continuous, analog, multidimensional quantum state change. Reality doesn't arise from binary answers. It arises from quantum answers. I call this qIt from qBit.
The observer effect already tells us that observation is not passive; you cannot extract information from a system without altering it. But the exchange is mutual. The observed imprints on the observer and the observer imprints on the observed simultaneously. Every interaction is a two way quantum conversation. That is Wheeler's participatory universe given a physical mechanism. You don't need to choose between "science can't touch consciousness" and "science will explain it all." The observer effect and information physics already have the vocabulary. We just haven't pointed them at consciousness yet.
If science can’t help us, what’s our next step? Is there some other, new way to approach the problem of consciousness?
I hate philosophy of mind thought experiments (ethics thought experiments are great! Go trolleys.) but here is a thought experiment to illustrate why these debates are so often fruitless.
Imagine a jail where the prisoners have been kept in their cells since birth. They have food dispensed to them mechanically through slots, but they can't get out of their cells and no one can get in. Of course, they can speak through the walls and exchange reports with their peers, but they can't really experience each others cells.
Sounds sad? It gets sadder. There is no sun in this world, only occasional flashes of red lightning that come through a hole in the ceiling. (Why red? It's always red, isn't it.)
The prisoners are not dummies. They have developed elementary Newtonian physics, and – with scratches on the wall – algebra and geometry too. Also, there is a stirring philosophical debate about the light coming through the hole.
Some say there must be a physical explanation. They are a bit vague on the details though.
But another school of thought strongly disputes this - they say the hole and its light are a hard nut to crack. They ask: what if someone grew up with knowledge of hole and the concept of lightning but never saw it because their hole is covered. Then suddenly the hole is opened for them. Would they learn something new? If so, that means lightning coming through a hole is unexplainable by science alone.
It's the privacy of consciousness that both invites and protects these claims, but that doesn't improve the quality of the argument. To say “feels” is different than “behavior” is assuming what it seeks to prove.
Not sure i totally get your argument. I think I agree with Peter below that it's conflating the lightening with the experience of it.But maybe you could clarify the argument you're advancing with the thought experiment?
Sure! I’m trying to recreate in the scenario the privacy of consciousness, and arguing that this privacy invites and protects misconceptions. In the second-to-last graf, I am reducing the epistemic argument to absurdity. Perhaps my continuing discussion with Peter might make my position clearer. I think I got it to a sharper point, there. Simply, direct observation isn’t necessary for science.
I think you are conflating two very different things: the lightning and the conscious perception of the lightning. Allow me to change the experiment slightly. Suppose that the inmates could build an electromechanical device that is capable of detecting the lightning and registering it in some way such as a chalk mark on the wall.
Experiment 1. Each night the inmate with the newly opened hole will leave the apparatus up and running as she goes to sleep. As she has a solid theory of the lightning, she can predict precisely what she will observe as the output from the device. As a good Popperian, she regards this as a valid scientific theory: if and when the lightning strikes, either the machine will work as predicted, or it won't. The theory will be confirmed or falsified. One night, the lightning strikes: the machine makes its mark and in the morning the inmate cries "Eureka!" as the experimental result has confirmed the theory.
Experiment 2. She puts aside the apparatus and just stares at the newly opened hole. But she is worried because her theory accounts only for the physical effects of the lightning on her apparatus, on her retina, and on her visual cortex. She can form proper, falsifiable predictions of all those effects. But when it comes to predicting what she will consciously experience, she is stumped. Her theory of physical lighting and its effects has no terms for conscious experience. She realises that she lacks the wherewithal to formulate a Popperian, falsifiable theory of what she will observe as the outcome of this experiment. At this point she realises that conscious perception is nonphysical. "Consciousness experience", she cries, "is unexplainable by physical science alone".
Peter, good job on Experiment 1, but I am not quite getting Experiment 2. What is her hypothesis? Obviously, she can see the lightning when it flashes.
The analogy probably isn't going to be impregnable, but I was more pointing out the obvious weakness of these epistemic arguments against physicalism – Mary's room and the like.
“ What is her hypothesis? Obviously, she can see the lightning when it flashes.”
That is precisely the problem: she cannot formulate the relevant hypothesis. She is carrying out an experiment (gazing at the newly opened hole) and wants to use her knowledge to predict what she will observe. But she cannot. She can predict the physical processes in the retina, the optic nerve, the visual cortex … but she cannot predict what she will observe as she has not seen lightning before and has no memory to refer to, and her knowledge of physics, however great it is, is not enough to predict this phenomenal experience. Thus the phenomenal experience is outside the scope of physics.
You’re sneaking in the assumption that forming a hypothesis requires direct observation or an accurate prediction. Of course, it is not so. Scientists make many hypothesis about things they cannot observe. Before we had powerful enough telescopes, we could surmise the existence of planets from their effect on other nearby bodies. Sometimes - particularly on the sub-atomic scale - we never get 100% validation of our theories, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do science. We can still make predictions and test them. For the woman who suddenly has consciousness, perhaps “something will be apparent” is a sufficient and testable hypothesis.
“ In other words, we need both science and philosophy working in hand in hand to make progress on consciousness.”
This is correct.
“ The idea of a physical explanation of consciousness makes no sense upon reflection. ”
This is not.
Consider the concept of “information”. Information is not a physical property. It cannot be physically measured. And yet the concept of “information” can be physically explained. In fact, the explanation of consciousness requires the explanation of information, so it’s not surprising they both need something beyond just science (aka, measuring what things do). We can call that the need for philosophy.
Consider an AI trained as an LLM, but this AI is hooked to a camera which has a sub-program which recognizes objects and colors such that the sub-program is constantly updating a buffer with the current contents of the camera. The buffer does not contain words, such as [cat::black], but instead just contains equivalent tokens [101018::384625]. The LLM is trained such that the buffer is added to every prompt, and when it contains the right token, it can talk about what it sees right now, if appropriate. Consider this conversation:
[no cat on camera]
“Do you see anything?”
“Nothing that I can recognize.”
[black cat walks into view]
“I thought you had a camera.”
“I do, and actually I now see a black cat.”
[cat walks away]
“Awesome. Is it completely black, or just mostly black?”
“Well, I think it was completely black, but it’s gone now.”
“So how do you know when you see a cat?”
“I don’t know. It’s just given. I introspect and either I’m seeing a cat or I’m not.”
You can say the AI doesn’t “really feel” anything, but then you need (and well, it needs) some word to describe the situation it is in, and that word will track exactly how we use the term “feel”. You can say it’s not really “feeling”, just sparkling pattern recognition.
Regarding Mary … Mary can know all the physical facts about peas, but if you hide a pea under one of three cups while her back is turned, is which cup has the pea a physical fact about peas that she knows? Or does she learn something about peas when she finds out which cup it’s under?
*
[james of seattle]
I think 'information' is just very ambiguous and flexible notion. We can interpret as structure, and in that sense it can be embodied in physical structure.
With all due respect, all terms are ambiguous, but I am using a very specific, well defined concept of information. Specifically, I’m talking about mutual information. If A interacts with B to produce C, C has mutual information w/respect to both A and B. You cannot measure this information by measuring C, but nevertheless this information is “real”, and it derives from the fact that there are real physical patterns we call laws. And this information is an affordance. If a system has a goal which can be achieved by responding to A, but the system does not have access to A, it can advance it’s goal by instead responding to C because of the mutual information C shares with A. And when systems do this, we call it consciousness. Ok, some people require more complex versions of this, but it’s still just complex versions of this.
I think the blind from neuroscientist could learn all the information (in this sense) facts about us without knowing what it's like to see red. Hence, there is a feature of conscious experience -- the qualitative character of the experience -- not accounted for by these kinds of facts.
My go-to counter example is Mary the pea scientist. Mary can know all the physical facts about peas, but if you place a pea under one of three cups while her back is turned, does she learn something new about peas when you show her which cup the pea is under?
I say this because I suggest the basis of consciousness is pattern recognition, and Mary the color scientist’s situation is the same. Mary can know all the vision facts, but then she also knows that within her neural apparatus there is a structure that will respond to “red”, but she has no access to that structure until it gets used for seeing “red”. Only then can she reference that recognizing structure, and only by internal “pointing” to it, saying “that one”.
For what it’s worth, my view is panprotopsychic, and if you squint and look sideways, it could be constitutionally micropanpsychic(?). Every physical interaction could be called an experience. The interaction generates/processes, and thus is “about”, (mutual) information, and the interaction “realizes” (aka, makes real) a specific (physical law) pattern which could be referred to as the quale. Personally, i don’t call it consciousness until this recognition gets used for a purpose, but everyone has different requirements for what counts as consciousness.
Interesting points.
But I think the difference between consciousness and something abstract and emergent like the concept of "information" is that consciousness is something tangible. It is more tangible than even a physical object. Since we do not know for a fact that a physical object is real -- we could be dreaming or hallucinating. Yet the feeling we have in our mind's eye of the object -- that feeling is real and tangible, even if the object is not real.
You talk about the abstract concept of a computer "feeling" something, in situations where we might intuit that it should feel something, and assume you are describing the same thing as what we experience as consciousness. Maybe you are describing the same thing, but how would you ever demonstrate that?
I don't think there is any way of testing a computer to see if it is conscious. Someone could at some point assert that a computer is conscious, due to some algorithm they developed. But this assertion is not testable, it's just an assertion. The computer's behavior is already known and well understood by the algorithm, so it will behave the same way whether it is conscious or not. The assertion of consciousness adds nothing to be tested, so it isn't really a scientific assertion.
This is the pzombies problem again. Would an exact physical duplicate of you be conscious? If it is possible that it is not, then the consciousness you’re talking about is epiphenominal, has nothing to do with anything that physically happens in the world, including reports of feelings, and it’s not the consciousness I’m talking about. I’m talking about the consciousness the pzombie is talking about when it says it “feels”. If you think that your consciousness is “tangible”, somehow measurable, that is the illusion that Frankish is talking about, and the AI would have the exact same illusion for the exact same reasons.
>If it is possible that it is not, then the consciousness you’re talking about is epiphenominal, has nothing to do with anything that physically happens in the world, including reports of feelings.
Why? Conscious feelings are an uncaused cause, and I react to them, they guide me, like a sixth sense. Then, I, depending on what I feel or what I think or just on a complete whim, interact with the material world according to my own free will. My free will is also an uncaused cause.
God is love and the devil is fear. We choose which one to follow, which future world to create for ourselves -- a world of love or a world of fear.
I think my worldview is very different from yours! Although it's fun to argue with people with very different perspectives!
>If you think that your consciousness is “tangible”, somehow measurable, that is the illusion that Frankish is talking about, and the AI would have the exact same illusion for the exact same reasons.
i don't think it's measurable, just tangible, in the sense that it is more certain to exist than the material world. Regardless of whether the material world is real, my conscious perception of it is real. So it is not an illusion.
>I’m talking about the consciousness the pzombie is talking about when it says it “feels”.
So we are talking about different things, then. I don't understand your point. I think we all agree that the consciousness that a pzombie is talking about when it says it "feels" is not really consciousness?
But there is no reason whatsoever for me to believe that a computer, whose actions are explained by deterministic physical laws and therefore cannot possibly have free will, has the same sort of consciousness as what I have.
Yes, we are talking about different things, and that is my point. I believe what the pzombie is talking about really is consciousness, free will is compatible with deterministic laws (even though we can’t know if physical laws are actually deterministic), and we’re just gonna have to leave it at that.
First, I hate typos in a professional publication. Drives me crazy seeing "water is behaves" and " different to any other" - ugh. But maybe it's proof of humanity instead of AI?
Second, I strongly disagree with the idea that this is not a "physical" problem. Imagine if you will, you have hooked up a volunteer to something like the neural-link chip. We have tested this volunteer over and over again with a variety of stimulus, and mapped out "where" the brain lights up when a particular mild pain is felt in the mind of this person. We do this kind of thing enough times to get a very fine granular idea of what a "1" on this persons pain scale looks like at the fingertip, and what a "1" on this persons pleasure scale looks like on the fingertip. Again, using advanced technology, instead of just mapping, we choose to interfere with the signal - now, instead of the brain just being allowed to complete the signal process, we intervene at the end, and divert the "pain" signal to the "pleasure signal" pathway. Now we know physically how to alter consciousness - to make the "apparent" experience that we all can observe as you say, a completely different one. Similar to inducing a hallucination.
We may not be able to understand "why" consciousness exists at all (I think it's like asking why "quarks" exist). But anything useful we want to understand about how consciousness functions we should be able to derive physically, once our science is sufficiently advanced.
The "why" question seems pointless to me. It's like a video game character questioning why it exists. Nothing useful for the video game character will come from that knowledge if it were even comprehensible to the character.
typo: you misspelled “substack post” as “professional publication”
If you get paid, it's a professional publication. If you have paid subscribers, your substack is professional.
You’ve graduated from typo to think-o.
LOL
Thanks for noting typo, which is now corrected.
Of course I agree consciousness is correlated with physical processes, and that science is helping to understand the details of that.
I think the Why question is important even if it's not useful. It's a noble human endeavour to try to work out the nature of reality. Doesn't mean everyone has to be interested in it. Moreover, panpsychism offers a simple and coherent solution, so we have an answer!
Moreover, I think answer the Why question can have some use: the science and philosophy and separable to a significant extent, but they also impact each other in subtle ways.
Sorry, I know I'm the worst about that stuff - pedantic by behavioral health condition - way overreact to small typos.
I was convinced largely by Annaka Harris through work like her discussions with you, that panpsychism is a correct physical description of the world.
I think people use "why" differently in different contexts though, and it gets a little confusing (as you allude to in this post). When I say the "why" doesn't matter I mean it is irrelevant to us whether the universe is a simulation, or if there is a single creator deity, either of which could have imbued the universe with the laws we have derived. Like consciousness might exist because "God made it that way." Or because "a programmer at a desk in the real world made our simulation work that way." But those answers are equally unsatisfactory if we are talking about practical value of consciousness.
"Why" in the sense of "what is the purpose" of consciousness, I think is a valuable question, and I think it is neatly answered by panpsychism. Basically, if you define consciousness as the ability of a thing to sense and respond to it's environment, without that quality, nothing would function at all. We would be in a totally chaotic space or a void, where whatever existed just oozed it's way into everything else without rhyme or reason. It's the source of structure in the universe.
If the "why" is not "why does consciousness exist" but rather, "why does this person experience this particular negative or positive sensation in any given moment" to me that is very easily answered by science, using the kind of example I laid out above. It seems self evident to me, and maybe that's me being naive, that "why a system feels a certain way" (negative/positive, etc) is because if it didn't, we would not behave in the way the system wants us to behave. Meaning, if fire wasn't painful, people would light themselves on fire a lot more than we currently do.
If you are trying to get at something more granular than "good/bad" but more like "why does red look red instead of looking green" there are physical answers like rods/cones, but my guess is probably it's more arbitrary and random than that. Like a cut feels different than a blunt trauma, and they need to be different for us to treat them differently, but why aren't they swapped? Why don't all cuts feel like blunt force trauma, and all blunt force trauma's feel like cuts? I suspect the answer is just completely random - they could have felt one way had our atoms come together differently, but they didn't so they don't.
I kind of like the analogy, building off panpsychism (for lack of a better term), but deviates in the sense of consciousness is not omnipresent, but a pure Nothingness wherein under the right causes and conditions brains arise which tap into this Nothingness, like a radio pulling The Beatles out of the air, in a sort of Droste effect.
> Imagine if you will, you have hooked up a volunteer to something like the neural-link chip. We have tested this volunteer over and over again with a variety of stimulus, and mapped out...
Interesting idea!
But I don't think it's a good assumption that this kind of experiment would produce reliable results.
Who is to say that whatever "subconscious" part of our mind produces pain or other stimuli isn't also conscious? In which case, the pain we feel is a conscious decision, from a lower level of our mind (not the same as our brain, in my view).
The problem is that you are testing on something that is potentially intelligent and aware of your existence, and so is potentially capable of mucking up the experiment to consciously decide to give you either the results you expect or perhaps ones you don't.
A scientist experimenting on a soccer player might find that the defender always tries to stick his foot in front of the ball before it goes into the goal. And then infer that this is a scientific law of nature. But I think, if you start testing on the soccer player too much, he might stick the foot into your face instead! That would be a different experimental result than expected.
Perhaps the reason we suffer is because this lower conscious entity sees our body as its property and therefore wants to torture us whenever we damage its property or allow it to be damaged. This torture usually correlates with physical injury and electrical impulses coming into the brain from our nerves -- but not necessarily, perhaps sometimes we suffer for other reasons or for no explicable reason.
Suffering is an evil god, and we are its tortured slaves, and it's a bit of a capricious master. Do you think it will give us neat, reproducible results? I doubt it.
Can you really test an entity like the subconscious mind scientifically? What if it is aware that it is being tested? How do you prevent it from just doing whatever it wants, rather than giving you consistent, reproducible experimental results? I am repeating myself...
Just my thoughts, I'm curious of what you (or anyone else) think of them.
I am convinced of the idea that consciousness is a part of matter (all matter). I have seen no evidence that this gives matter "sentience" in the way you are describing above. To me, and this is due in no small part to PG himself, all matter is conscious in the sense that it "detects and responds to it's environment." For example, if an electron comes within a certain distance of another electron, it "detects" the change in electromagnetic field strength, and moves away from the source.
I can't tell you what it "feels like" to be that electron. But I can tell you that it must have detected the change in it's environment (otherwise there would be no motion) and that all electrons consistently do this, tells me that it's a "negative" or "aversive" response. It might be the electron equivalent of "pain" when another negatively charged particle comes by or the electron equivalent of "pleasure" when a positively charged particle comes by. But it certainly is "aware" of something, and all consciousness is, what it really means to be conscious, is to have an awareness.
I think the human brain functions not a "seat" of consciousness so much as a "place where conscious signals are sorted and processed." A ridiculous amount of, for example, sound waves hit our body all the time. Most of our body doesn't even register these waves (ie the atoms that make up my knee do not have a conscious awareness of sound). But the parts of my body that do detect sound waves pick up a lot of them. Far more than I am aware of in any given moment. Parts of my brain take that sense data and some combination of "good" and "bad" signals coming from the cells that are effected, and sorts them into something actionable. Instead of constant cloud of white noise, we only hear what we "focus on" even though the body has "heard" all of the sound. The brain "modulates" consciousness, it doesn't create it.
I think the device experiment I suggested would help show how the modulation is done.
so if I understand you correctly, you speculate that even an electron can feel pain, and this is the true source of electromagnetic repulsion. interesting speculation. I think that is a very strange universe from a moral perspective! Which is not really an argument against it, I suppose.
But are we all committing a huge atrocity whenever we bring a lot of electricity together? If *anything* can suffer and suffering is something deterministic that acts in a reproducible, scientifically testable way -- that has some really strange moral implications for our actions. Is possible that it is gravely immoral to bring electricity together?
But I think that electrons probably can't suffer... the difference though between suffering and something like electrical repulsion is that suffering can be ignored. We can choose to ignore it and press on in spite of it, or we can choose to act upon it. But electrical repulsion, as far as anyone can tell, follows purely mathematical laws.
Has anyone ever found a non-conformist electron that just refuses to be repulsed by its like-charged compatriots, despite the pain and suffering it feels when being in their presence? I don't think such a thing is possible, but maybe someone will discover one someday!
This is why I think the pain/pleasure dichotomy is wildly misplaced as a method of ethical decision making, and part of why I am a strong believer in "No free will."
Take the current AI debate about "conscious agents". We know there is no wet substrate in an AI's data infrastructure. It physically cannot experience the world in the precise way a human body does because it has no body. But we give it an objective function - a goal to maximize. Things that don't lead to the optimal output get a "negative" signal; things that do lead to the optimal output get a "positive" signal. To me, that is obviously how brains work too - positive signal, neurons build new lasting healthy positive pathways. Negative signal, neurons do not do that, instead they retreat. "Pleasure" and "pain" at that level of detail are just the bodies' method for conditioning behavior.
Eliminating "pain" means eliminating one of the most important if not the most important method for biological learning that we have. It's a dumb goal, not an ethical one.
Maybe a smart ethical goal could be "not over-signaling" - meaning, providing the exact right amount of pain and pleasure to accomplish meaningful goals, without overshooting or undershooting the target. That sort of intuitively aligns with most people's thoughts on corporal punishment of children.
That's not my belief though. I'm very much a humanist. To me, that which is ethical is that which assures the continued thriving of the human species, and that which is unethical acts as a drag on the continued thriving of the human species.
PS this also neatly allows me to accept that ethical standards change over time. Both the context and the knowledge of the decision makers changes.
Slavery for example, while seemingly objectively evil, sure did not "seem" evil to many slave owners for much of human history. Well, looking at the ancient world, obligatory labor by an otherwise under-developed group of humans, might have felt like the choice more consistent with human thriving, rather than murder (which was usually the alternative when defeated through force of arms) or nothing (which may have been seen as either welcoming revenge killings or letting those humans continue to be "unproductive").
In todays world, we know that slavery is not more productive than voluntary labor, that it actually creates more problems than it solves, and that it actively under-values human capacity. It certainly acts as a drag on human development, not an accelerant. Therefore while it may have felt like the ethical thing to do for Aristotle, no way he believes that today given the information we have.
The problem with this line of reasoning, though, is, let's say hypothetically that slavery -- assume "slavery" means the worst possible type of torture-fueled insanity like what was present in Haiti sugar plantations before their revolution -- let's say that slavery was, in fact, the best economic system and simply produced higher productivity than free labor. What then? Are we to bring it back?
I think there are more important things than economic productivity.Wwe also have to consider: is this the kind of world I want to live in, where I am just tortured all the time for the sake of some jerk's profits, some jerk who kidnapped me, and for the "betterment" of society (I.E. expansion in size and an increase in evolutionary fitness of a population of similar genotypes under group selection). But if life sucks, then why work towards it, and why consider it moral?
And I think, the moral world, as i define it, is something that you would *want* to work towards, not something that is merely inevitable due to economic forces and evolutionary logic.
And I do think you should consider reconsidering your stance on suffering -- you note how Aristotle, if he were alive today, would certainly be opposed to slavery because the evidence shows it is actually holding back human progress.
But is not suffering and slavery the same thing? For we are all born with shock collars in our heads, and whenever we do something "bad", we get blasted.
It is my believe that at this point in our evolution, suffering is holding back our progress. Because once you reach a certain level of intelligence, the logic of "do what I want or get shocked" stops working, you start questioning whether the one doing the shocking is really the one who's bidding you want to be doing.
If we did not suffer, there would be no inner conflict in this regard, there would be no debate between us about what constitutes "morality" -- we would be free to pursue our limitless human potential without the concern of accidentally creating for ourselves a hellish dystopia of torture.
>Eliminating "pain" means eliminating one of the most important if not the most important method for biological learning that we have. It's a dumb goal, not an ethical one.
Well, this is where we completely disagree. Interesting discussion, nonetheless!
In my view, pain is, at best, primitive and stupid, and at worst, evil and malicious. It gives us unreliable advice, which we can improve upon by using our logical, cognitive brains, which make it completely and utterly redundant. We are, at this point of our evolution, in my view, better off completely without it. We should be smart enough to survive without it. Suffering has enslaved us, and it is undignified to react to it.
I've been doing my best to completely ignoring all pain/suffering/negative emotions I feel for the past 9 years (as a religious matter--it is my view that all negative emotions come from Satan who seeks to enslave us through torture). My life has improved dramatically. It is actually remarkable to me how worthless pain is compared to how much effect it (tries) to have on our psyche.
I don't think humanism in the absence of a concept of the intrinsic evilness of suffering is a great idea -- Like, imagine a future where all humanistic goals are met, but social norms are enforced through constant torture and anxiety. So we are materialistically wealthy, but we are also constantly in excruciating pain. Is this really what we want, even if it means the human population is large, safe, and thriving in space? Maybe this would be "overshooting" in your philosophy -- i'm not sure if i completely understood that point -- but if it gets results, then what's the real ethical problem?
Also, if free will isn't real, then what is the point of consciousness in the first place? It seems rather pointless -- we're all watching this happen, but we don't actually have any control, our actions are pre-determined? Seems like a boring simulation, like when your older brother gives you a controller that isn't even plugged in!
LOL, "imagine a future where all humanistic goals are met, but social norms are enforced through constant torture and anxiety. So we are materialistically wealthy, but we are also constantly in excruciating pain." That is to me, in fact, the world we currently occupy. :-)
Think about one of most physically painful things you have ever experienced. For me, this might be I don't know, nearly severing a finger with an electric hedge trimmer. I am certainly smart enough (and this was true before the injury) to not intentionally do that. But guess what, i still did it. Now that I have the memory of the pain, it is super salient. Unlike every time I have ever mowed a lawn with no injury, which I cannot really remember on demand at all, I instinctively remember the pain literally every time I pick up that trimmer. It makes me go more carefully and cautiously. If you removed my pain, I would not have that instinct and almost certainly would cut myself badly again.
That is just how our brains function. We remember painful things with far more clarity than we do pleasant things. It's an adaptation that serves a very good purpose.
For some people, those memories can be maladaptive. For example PTSD. The negative memories have such a cascading impact that you cannot move around usefully in the world. To fix that, we need to understand mechanism of action and break the connection that was perhaps useful in the conditions of being deployed in an active warzone, to being at home working at a Starbucks.
The events that cause PTSD you could classify as "overshooting." Meaning, pain was necessary to save your life in Iraq, but it was so much pain that now, you have a semi-permanent impairment. But "just the right amount" of pain might be what recruits experience at Boot Camp. Prepares your body for a high stress, little rest environment, and conditions your physical awareness in a protective way.
"Why" are people conscious of pain and pleasure is an above my paygrade question - might as well ask your pastor about that. But without consciousness, in the panpsychist sense, matter wouldn't move. There would be no effect of the big bang. Nothing would sense and respond to anything else. A void, a space of endless chaos, whatever you want to call it. Without consciousness, literally nothing would have meaning, because literally nothing would be capable of sensing and responding to anything else.
No free will does not imply people do not make choices. Rather it says the outcomes of those choices are determined by the state of the universe leading up to them. I would suggest that it is the conscious activities of particles that force those outcomes to be what they are.
In the gun debate, I am one of those people who does not blame the guns for the crimes. Likewise, i think of humans as mere instruments. We are moved just as a gun is moved by the person holding it.
There are several things wrong with this. Centrally, it's not science, it's natural history. What you are still lacking is a predictive theoretical explanation: given a body of facts about the brain tissue, you need to be able to infer that this neural activity will produce, say, pain, and that neural activity will produce, say, pleasure. (This explanatory capability is what some commenters have, quite reasonably, called "explaining why".) Your methodology inherently cannot yield that explanatory capability. This failure is called the "explanatory gap". No amount of further brain data or brain models can, even in principle, yield the prediction of conscious experience because the terms that denote conscious experience are not defined analytically in terms of undefined fundamental physical quantities. The fact is that conscious experience is nonphysical and, as Philip wrote, cannot be accounted for by physical science.
¿La consciencia es algo físico?
I agree with all that philip said. The question is simply not a scientific question and so it is not reasonable to have science answering a question which has not the profile of a scientific question. This is exactly how chalmer frame this in his 1992 paper on the Hard Problem of Consciousness. He said that science can in. principle answer all the Easy problem of consciousness, those that can be framed as functional question , i.e. those corresponding to scientific question. But the Hard Problem is precisely not such type of question. There is no functional or scientific question here.