What you're describing is "the best way to do science, so we can make some progress". That's all well and good but what other people are talking about is the nature of reality which, in pursuit of, those crazy people, they are perfectly willing to doubt axioms.
As well they should and as is their right since a set of axioms are effectively ground facts which are selected to make logical reasoning across a domain possible, nothing more.
That doesn't make them true in the big sense of True, it makes them expedient, productive of theory, generative, a lot of wonderful things, maybe even strongly implied by all evidence, but not apriori true. They're dubitable.
> That's all well and good but what other people are talking about is the nature of reality which, in pursuit of, those crazy people, they are perfectly willing to doubt axioms.
Solomonoff induction does doubt and change axioms. It's a fundamental part of the whole process in fact.
> That doesn't make them true in the big sense of True, it makes them expedient, productive of theory, generative, a lot of wonderful things, maybe even strongly implied by all evidence, but not apriori true. They're dubitable.
Logic is used to make distinctions. Two theories with differing axiomatic bases will make different distinctions, but if they make the same predictions in all cases, then they are logically the same, ie. there is a fundamental isomorphism between them. In this case, it literally doesn't matter if one is "actually really true", and the other is a mathematical dual of some sort.
For instance, polar and Cartesian coordinates are completely equivalent. A theory cast in one might be easier for us to work with, but even if reality really used the other coordinate system, it quite literally doesn't matter.
In the case when the two theories do differ in their predictions, we should epistemically prefer one over the other, and Solomonoff Induction shows us how to do this rigourously.
Someone, a woman, I forget her name, a physicist has lately questioned the parsimonius assumption or more accurately the whole beauty assumption, meaning, roughly, the most beautiful or parsimonious theory is correct. Just a data point to this conversation, not an argument.
Re: Solomonoff, if you're chucking away unnecessaries, which is what I understand Solomonoff to be doing (I had to be reminded what his theory was truthfully) then that's all well and good, let's chuck. But you still are left with the problem of whether the axioms are true. That's a different thing entirely except to the extent we define true operationally, as having predictive power over the things we understand and know about in the way we understand them.
We moderns are all deeply enmeshed with Scientism which is an ism that says logic and reasoning and the scientific method etc. are the only valid tools for aquiring certain (indubitable) knowledge. What if it's just not true ? Then what ?
But ArialMinaei there's not that much more they could have done. It still would have had 20x the mortality rate of the usual flu strain and it still would have had an RO of 3 or 4. Once something that fits those parameters is loosed on the world, the rest is a fait accompli- we're going into social distancing, lockdown, whatever it's being called.
Yes respirators and masks, I know, but the previous administration had gone through the same thing on a smaller scale and stockpiles were not replenished possibly because experts said it won't happen again for a while (I am giving the previous administration the benefit of the doubt here.. I don't know why they didn't replace those items).
The point here is, there's not that much that even had all information been available, and masks, and respirators, the world could have done. It's literally a force of nature that humans have a limited ability to deal with instantly.
I am not defending any political or public policy department past or present. I am just stating the obvious. Everything else is 20/20 hindsight aimed at the margins of effectiveness, so why go there ?
If you look at who has the LEAST per million (absolute number of cases are worse than useless and what most statisitic sites are showing) it's not nations usually associated with good governance, ahem...
So what's going on.
It's traffic. Flights into a nation, and especially flights from China. The nations with the best per capita numbers are low-air-traffic nations, per capita, so Belize, South Africa, Thailand, Andorra places like that.
So mystery solved. The difference between the US and Germany, the best of the "developed" nations, is not that big at all. For a long time, weeks and weeks, it's been mid 700s for BOTH nations. I am not sure where the very latest data is getting we're at 100 per million now, but still they're comparable in the larger scheme of things.
It's not some foreign virus anymore. It's endemic everywhere. How many people die in any given place is now directly a result of the containment measures put into place there. You can't keep blaming this on China. Even places that have very tenuous connections to China are now experiencing massive death rates, because they aren't handling it well.
"How many people die in any given place is now directly a result of the containment measures put into place there"
Without supporting an alternative theory, this sounds doubtful to me. Do you think, for instance, that the difference between West Virginia and New York is a result of the superior containment measures in the former? WV has a lower death rate so far than even South Korea.
It's way too early to be making these comparisons. Wait until the pandemic is over and then we can analyze the death rates. Otherwise you're just talking about where it spread first, which is not the same as how well each place managed the totality of it.
The virus started in China.
The virus spread from China because of of the Communist Chinese Party's denial and lack of response.
Those are, in turn intimately connected to the fact that China is a one-party dictatorship that murdered the doctors who first tried to bring their attention to COVID-19 in the early days of the virus, lest the world forget.
Currently, Chinese epidemological numbers cannot be trusted because the Chinese Communist Party, on top of being a murderer of its own truth-telling scientists, is a pathological liar and manipulator of information, like all Communist regimes.
That's all I said about China; maybe someone said something more, so talk to them.
How many people die, the death rate from COVID-19, is about the same in most nations and mostly a function of age and previously existing health issues.
Aside from these facts, I don't even know what in my post you could be reacting to.
We didn’t need different CCP numbers to have taken more effective action in the UK, we just needed to listen to public health experts rather than statistical epidemiologists and motivated thinkers in government. Germany, Austria, S Korea are all just as, if not more, connected to China than the UK and Spain but are faring much better because they have competent govt, distributed and robustly funded public health systems. This is not a black swan event because it has long been predicted by mainstream epidemiologists.
I think people may be rushing to judgment, as a snapshot in time right now may not tell you where things will end up in each country.
I was looking at a chart of the trajectory of the epidemic in different countries, and it was interesting because there were at least three qualitatively different types of curves.
South Korea and China are notable for nearly completely flattening out after a certain point. The former might tend to undermine conspiracy theories about China, I don't know. On the other hand, why have no other countries had the same experience? Could it be the response, or characteristics of data gathering and reporting?
Japan and Singapore have risen much more slowly than the US and hard-hit European countries, but do not seem to be flattening which is surprising and seems ominous.
The western countries that have a lot of cases seem to have a characteristic sort of gradual curve, that rose faster early on, gradually is leveling out, but not completely (yet). The US looks similar to the others, except it is larger and continuing to suggest a higher peak.
I am wondering if Japan, and maybe the US states that are not initially seeing a lot of cases, will end up being a second wave after things seem to be under control in a lot of places.
From the article:
"The first is that it overlooks the negative impacts on consumer sentiment and spending, which are likely to persist for many months, if not years. "
Yeah, right. Citation needed. My to-buy list of pent-up demands grows longer by the hour.
I assume you're not one of the 17+ million Americans who became unemployed in March?
In addition, there will be structural changes to consumption habits. Many meetings will persist online when this is over, creating a drag on demand for airline services. Cruise ships, large sporting events, and concerts will take years to bounce back.
They are not talking about electronics or haircuts.
For example, many people have vowed never to step on a cruise ship after this and attending large scale events in person will probably give a lot of people anxiety for some time.
My mom is a nurse. One of her refrains when I was growing up was (and is) "Germs are real!"
People who previously didn't think anything of it will, for decades, be aware that if you're indoors and/or closer than six feet from a person who coughs, you will likely inhale airborne droplets that may contain viruses or bacteria from their lungs. I think this was known academically by some, and the risk was calculated and accepted by a few, but most people wouldn't have expected to inhale airborne droplets from someone they pass in a grocery store aisle.
Pause? There is no way I'm taking my family to a crowded restaurant until either full scale frequent testing (with intra-region travel quarantine) proves it's gone or an effective vaccine is deployed at scale, or lastly if some medicine which means you get mild symptoms and no after-effects is developed.
Man I do not believe this. The restaurant and bar industry cater to the reckless youth segment. Seeing "nothing bad happened" to people you know who are less risk-averse than you is enough to coax people back into herding into bars and restaurants. We herded for a century before anything happened and those are clear memories everyone has, too.
What is going to change is the world's attitude toward the Communist regime currently running China. I feel pretty confident in saying that that regime is slated for death, even as public officials and famous people act, in public, like they're willing to get back to normal.
This is where some of us have been for a long time. You cannot permit an intolerant, racist, minority persecuting, citizen murdering, dictatorial, totalitarian government armed to the teeth with the latest in biowarfare who is inclined to make aggressive noises towards everyone who is not like them and some who are (Taiwan) to exist, period.
I think COVID-19 finally brought that home to everyone who is not just outright anti-Western in their outlook.
People are going back to bars and restaurants and jobs, the stock market is going to go up, but the Communist regime in China is going down.
I agree with the first point regarding a low impact of risk aversion in younger demographics.
Your point on the consequences for the CCP, not so much. They have an iron grip on their people and information flows. COVID provides them with validation to tighten that grip. I think what will topple them will the be long run consequences of resource misallocation rather than anything their citizens can do. Their 'cost-to-control' is too low for civil unrest to be an issue, in my opinion.
I don't see it. We might be able to sanction China but we cannot do much more than that, and any incredibly rigid sanctions might be seen as an act of war and _nobody_ wants to fight a war with nuclear power China. Maybe it'll be a cold war, but that could take 30 or 40 years to peter out and the CCP does seem a bit more sophisticated than the Soviet's.
Not all bars and restaurants cater to "the reckless youth" segment, heck, not even most, because there simply isn't enough money in that segment to keep the industry afloat.
Wishful thinking, IMHO. Just because the CCP is Very Bad, doesn't mean they will actually fall. After all, Orange Man is Very Bad, and he hasn't fallen yet, even given repeat opportunities.
Sure. Communists gone from China by 2035. Latest. 15 years across multiple administrations across multiple nations.
It's just like before WWII. Some people see the mortal danger and realize by hook or by crook something HAS to be done. Some people are suing for "peace in our time". Only one of these camps is right. Guess which one.
Say what you want, this is something we DID learn from WWII. Know the signs and don't kid yourself about them. However bad your situation is now, it will only get worse in the future.
Covid-19 onboarded the majority of the population in all nations to this little project. Have no doubt.
The USA won't even have most of its supply chain under domestic control by 2035.
The response to the virus was typically disorganized and indicative of wider issues. The last 40 years have seen a huge slide in power and credibility, what is going to stop that?
Recapturing the supply chain is not hard to do. Even the cheerleaders from the 90s for neoliberalism, which lead to "that great sucking sound" Ross Perot warned about, now admit they made a mistake.
Formerly, before COVID-19 and China building up outcroppings of rock into military bases, and declaring the whole of the South China Sea to be their personal property, and the genocide of the Uyghurs the details of which are far far more horrifying than the average Westerner is aware of (proof on demand), before the bellicose anouncements about the upcoming "China Century" before all that... the conventional wisdom was the growing propserity of China would lead to a burgeoning middle class, which in turn would demand their human rights causing a reform of the Communist regime. That and giving China MFN status would make them behave like other nations with respect to IP laws and pirating and currency manipulation etc. etc.
It didn't happen. Instead what we got was a blustering, expanionistic kleptocracy provably willing to murder their own people, other people's people and anything else that stands in the way of the mighty Century of China, where China takes its "rightful place" as the undisputed world leader.
A treatment will be the first through the gate. Then a vaccine. But a treat will be enough to get people out again. That and the discovery through testing that people are immune.
They may, however, be talking about replacing the microwave oven that is on the fritz or the things that they really want but can't justify it at the moment.
Not sure what that even means. Many studies over an extended period of time show that a majority of US households cannot deal with a US$400 emergency without taking on more debt.
Perhaps they'll start reducing non-essential purchases. While many people are paycheck-to-paycheck, there are many of those same people that buy things they don't need and incur debts they shouldn't have incurred.
The loudest complaints are always from the groups in the minority. Lots of people have small businesses who are suffering, or jobs that are basically incompatible with social distancing. But also think: just Bank of America employs 200k+ people. Most of them are still at work, doing their stuff from home, receiving their normal paychecks. Hundreds of thousands of small Amazon sellers and still shipping packages. There's a wide swath of America that's not feeling the pinch and is more eager to consume out of boredom than ever before.
Average is a very loose concept, but many Americans who appear to have steady discretionary income for 'non-essentials' are constantly walking the thin line of living within their means/being broke at best, but worse, in debt.
ianmerrick: I never understand this. How is the fact of experience in any way debateable or something which people disagree on? I am not asking about the epistemological details which appear to be a prerequisite to experiences we have, neurons and neurotransmitters and brain networks and the physics of light and phosphorus and the eye etc , I am talking about experience itself. How can it be confusing?
Often when I have this conversation it appears to me that somehow, impossibly, the other side suddenly gets fuzzy on this thing I call "experience".
Well, they don’t call it “the hard problem” for nothing.
I’m reminded of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where Deep Thought points out that they can’t begin to answer the ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything because they can’t even clearly state what the actual Question is.
hackinthebochs: Your point seems to be that a thing has to exist- have some ontological status, to have thoughts at all, even if that "thing" is only itself a thought or, more vaguely, a temporary convergence of "something or other." When you say "self" or "I" as in, "I think therefore I am" people drag in a whole load of qualities they attribute to a self or an I. I feel like that is what your interlocutor is getting caught on. I understand and take your point.
naasking, as I see it, Dennett (in Consciouness Explained) engages in a sleight of hand. He redefines consciouness as "a bunch of distinct phenomena that gets muddle together", but that doesn't touch the mystery of qualia, it tries to just deny that there is anything to explain, owing to the fact (Dennett claims) that the problem is mischaracterized from the start.
And your mind plays sleight of hand all the time, which Dennett clearly establishes in his work. Or do you actually see the physical blind spot that's a fundamental feature of your eyeball?
So why would you trust your direct perception over the mountains of evidence that clearly demonstrates that we can't trust our perceptions?
No literate scientifically minded person disputes your point, but it doesn't address my point. My point is this- qualia as a phenomena exists. Even if I think a red thing is blue, I am still experiencing some color and the experiencing itself- aside from its accuracy- is what needs explaining.
So experience, aka qualia as a phenomena unto itself is in need of explaining, not any particular qualia and not the presence of absence of any correlation between the qualia and objective reality, i.e. the "truthfullness" or "accuracy" of the qualia.
> My point is this- qualia as a phenomena exists. Even if I think a red thing is blue, I am still experiencing some color and the experiencing itself- aside from its accuracy- is what needs explaining
Dennett wouldn't deny that either. He would simply say that we have no reason to think the qualitative experience of our perceptions are anything other than a cognitive trick with a functional purpose. Certainly how this trick works should absolutely be explained, and I don't think any materialist would deny that.
It is what Dennett thinks. Actually, it's what Dennett thinks he thinks, because that idea of Dennett's is inherently non-sensical; it is self-contradictory.
Here's why.
To explain qualia as a "trick" is to void the onotological status of qualia itself. He can't do that. It doesn't matter if it's all an illusion or a trick, it doesn't matter what its ultimate epistemological status is. Qualia is experienced and it's the experience itself, whatever its biological underpinning turns out to be (you can't have sight without eyes), which is relevant.
Yes, all experience could be fallible and illusory but the fact of experience itself cannnot be an illusion.
Experience qua experience is the thing no scientific theory of perception and cognition needs. So why does it exist? In other words, why are we not as not-conscious as rocks and chemical processes and planets and electrical activity, doing all we do, saying all the things we say? It's certainly possible.
Dennett, and I am inferring this I haven't heard him say it, is an ontological positivist. Only those things which the methods of science reveal to exist are "real" and everything else is, as you say, some kind of illusion. Sonunds good. But an illusion (which is some experience whose epistemology we have misconstrued) is not itself an illusion. Its ontgological status as "a thing which does exist" is secure.
> Yes, all experience could be fallible and illusory but the fact of experience itself cannnot be an illusion.
Sure it can, and it remains only to explain how and why this illusion works to fool us into making erroneous statements, like "the fact of experience itself cannnot be an illusion".
> Experience qua experience is the thing no scientific theory of perception and cognition needs. So why does it exist?
It probably doesn't! Although I'm not as convinced as you that qualia are entirely non-functional.
> But an illusion (which is some experience whose epistemology we have misconstrued) is not itself an illusion.
What is an illusion? To my mind, an illusion is a perception or inference thereof that, taken at face value, entails a falsehood. So to call phenomenal consciousness an illusion is to say that the claims inferred from our direct perceptions are false, eg. "I have subjective awareness". There's nothing problematic about this that I can see.
>What is an illusion? To my mind, an illusion is a perception or inference thereof that, taken at face value, entails a falsehood.
But that is not the part of the illusion we're interested in. The part of it we're interested in is the part it shares with all other experiences. It was an experience. Stop. That fact can't be gainsayed.
What you're using to deny this is the epistemological status of the illusion experience. So that's things like "it was caused by brain cells XYZ firing" or "it did not accurately represent reality" or "it did not correspond to anything in reality at all". All those things could be true but they are beside the point being made.
Either one gets this fundamental idea or they don't in my experience (lol).
We're discussing the ontological status of phenomenal experience, so its illusory nature is very much relevant to this question.
No one, not even eliminative materialists, would deny that people have what they believe to be phenomenal experience. See Frankish [1]:
> Does illusionism entail eliminativism about consciousness? Is the illusionist claiming that we are mistaken in thinking we have conscious experiences? It depends on what we mean by ‘conscious experiences’. If we mean experiences with phenomenal properties, then illusionists do indeed deny that such things exist. But if we mean experiences of the kind that philosophers characterize as having phenomenal properties, then illusionists do not deny their existence. They simply offer a different account of their nature, characterizing them as having merely quasi-phenomenal properties. Similarly, illusionists deny the existence of phenomenal consciousness properly so-called, but do not deny the existence of a form of consciousness (perhaps distinct from other kinds, such as access consciousness) which consists in the possession of states with quasi-phenomenal properties and is commonly mischaracterized as phenomenal.
If we can't trust our perceptions, then there is no mountain of evidence to say the mind is playing a trick on us regarding consciousness. That's because the scientific evidence is empirical, which is knowledge based on perception. Dennett's argument risks undermining the foundation for scientific knowledge.
The question of knowledge is indeed tricky. Your specific objection has kind of already been answered by science: you can't trust your senses, so you build instruments to extend your senses into domains you can't sense, you translate that data into sensory data you know is somewhat reliable, and you adhere to a rigourous process of review, replication and integration of all observations into a coherent body knowledge. Eventually, you converge on a reliable, replicable body of knowledge.
And so far, this body of knowledge suggests strongly that we can't trust our perception of consciousness.
> And so far, this body of knowledge suggests strongly that we can't trust our perception of consciousness.
But perception is a part of conscious experience. We don't perceive consciousness independent of things in the world. They go hand in hand. So we know about the world because we have conscious experiences of perceiving the world.
What Dennett and others are trying to argue is that only the qualities of perception which are objective exist, even though those qualities are accompanied by the subjective qualities. So we know the shape of an object by color and feel. If you abstract the shape out and argue the colors and feels aren't real, then what status does our knowledge of the abstract shape have?
goatlover said: "only the qualities of perception which are objective exist,"
If you change "objective" to "scientifically validated" you have defined a position known as "ontological positivism", and I would say Dennett does subscribe to this.
The funny thing is, the school of thought which says consciousness is computation by our brains and any computer properly programmed can be conscious, a school known as "functionalism", itself gives ontological status to a non-corpreal abstract thing, namely computation.
If computation can be abstracted from not just the brain but any substrate at all then it exists. So computation can take place on an AMD chip and a Intel chip and a Turning Tape and anything you'd care to rigged up made out of anything whatsoever so long as it could represent the computation of a Turing Tape.
> If computation can be abstracted from not just the brain but any substrate at all then it exists.
Existence is a tricky as a proposition, as Kant famously argued. Does the following make sense to you: the law of non-contradiction exists.
Computation has similar logical character as other rules of logic. In fact, intuitionism ensures a 1:1 correspondence between the two. So computation is not a "non-corporeal thing" any more than any other form of logic. If you take rules of logic to also be non-corporeal things, well then this "problem" you speak of was present in functionalism from the start, and yet it doesn't seem to trouble anyone.
Do mathematical things exist independently of the minds who conceive of them ? The ontological status of abstract things, right? My point is, materialists deny these kinds of things. That's disembodied spiritual bunkum and it has no place in modern thinking.
Then, later in the day they're perfectly happy to deal with things just as abstract and non-corpreal without feeling like they're cheating in any way.
The fact is the philosophy of science has not caught up to the advances in science as any good QM thread here will show.
>Does the law of non-contradiction exist?
The fact that neither of us can answer this (assuming we both agree to what it implies about the world, which actually, heh... I am not totally convinced of, but that's another matter) ... anyway the fact that neither us can answer this in the way you meant it is an interesting fact in the same family of interesting questions as raised in this discussion.
The quarks->atoms->molecules->neurons->brains->experience (consciouness) chain of causality, which is the standard model of reality and has been for a few hundred years now, is broken at both ends by which I mean the descriptive philosophical ideation at both ends is to no one's real satisfaction.
> Do mathematical things exist independently of the minds who conceive of them ? The ontological status of abstract things, right? My point is, materialists deny these kinds of things.
Sure, and they would have to provide some sort of naturalist account for mathematics. There are some proposals for this kicking around.
> is broken at both ends by which I mean the descriptive philosophical ideation at both ends is to no one's real satisfaction.
Indeed, there is no hole-free reduction along the chain you cite, but those holes are continuously shrinking. This is why I consider the special pleading around consciousness a god of the gaps. There are some very interesting puzzles around consciousness, but I think ascribing a special status to consciousness will ultimately be abandoned, just like vitalism.
Science is a set of evolving traditions about how to fix errors and it relies on the consciousness/perception of individual scientists. Consciousness/perception is error-prone but it does seem intimately connected with the correction of error, too, as we strive towards better understanding. Aren't we compelled to trust it in this regard? That things will seem to be more like they really are, including consciousness itself?
The brain is the most complicated structure in the known universe. The probes currently available to science- fMRI and GSR - are both gross measures of cortical electrical activity. They're enough to start to explore apparent structural and (gross) electrical correlation between brain areas and (gross) alterations in "consciousness", in this case unconsciousness invoked via propofol and ketamine. Fair enough.
However, it irritates me when I hear scientists loosely throw the word "consciousness" into these studies and here's why.
In these studies, consciousness is always implicitly defined operationally as the electrical activity in some identified networks- DAT and DSM and front-parietal and sensory motor etc.. But the concept of consciousness has another life in philosophy where in works by people like Patricia Churchland and others, it references something more subtle- the mystery of why there should be anything we call experience at all.
Experience itself doesn't seem to be necessary to the working of any machine, including our brains. We don't think our TVs have any experiences despite (being capable of) accurately representing all human visual experiences. The reason we don't think they experience what they're displaying is because we know how they work and we know there's no ghost in the machine. Adding on "experiences" to an explanation of how TVs work is gratuitous and unnecessary.
But that's not the case with humans-just the opposite. Experience is absolutely foundational.
Descartes tried to boil his world down to what he could know with absolute certainty and arrived at his famous "Cogito ergo sum" formulation, but actually, he skipped a step; that step is simply- "There is experience".
Experience is perfectly gratuitous to any explanation of brain activity since all that activity, like an electrical storm, could take place in exactly the same way without it. We (our brains) could be, and most scientists believe are, very complicated, but purely mechanical machines. They could be exactly as they are with no more awareness- not to say feedback loops- than a blender.
But that account leaves the problem of experience or consciousness completely untouched. That would be O.K. except we know we have it.
The mystery of consciousness is not totally defined by questions like of "can I make you unconscious or conscious?" or "can I cause you to have this or that illusory experience by stimulating your brain?". The mystery of consciousness is why is there anything like experience at all ?
So whenever I read a paper that makes some confident assertion about consciousness, it gets under my skin. It's electrical activity and perhaps human behavior and speech they are actually examining, not consciousness. I hear these papers gratingly assuming the consequent with respect to the biggest mystery there is. They are implicitly saying "this is consciousness, this pattern of electrical activity in the brain and here is what we have discovered about consciousness". That's one perspective, but to philosophers, both academic and non-academic, it's a form of punting on the real question.
Consciousness is to brain science what AGI is to AI. Researchers just love to make assertions and grand predictions.
Actually the correlation between the two is closer than that since strong AI claims that consciousness can be captured in a computer; Kurtzweil and his Singularity concept is in this school of thought.
He and people like him claim that not only does experience arise as a direct result of brain activity but any substrate- including general purpose computer platforms- will similarly give rise to the same experiences if only they are programmed in a particular way, specifically, if the computations are functionally equivalent to the brain's computations.
Are badly programmed computers therefore experiencing chaos? Well, why not? Are simpler computers, like a thermostat which "experiences" temperature changes, also somehow dimly conscious? If that seems like a straw man argument to you, you should know Marvin Minsky bought it and so do a lot of other scientists whether they realize it or not.
All of this is just a non-starer to people like me. You don't get to skip a step because it keeps your theory neat or provides you the promise of immortality because you uploaded your "you" to a machine.
Consciousness, understood in this way, is a genuine mystery which for now at least I don't think we have the conceptual tools to even define much less make pronouncements about.
I think we're a long way from a good understanding of how consciousness works, but I also think a lot of people are going to subscribe to a sort of consciousness-of-the-gaps idea no matter how much progress is made in understanding the actual mechanisms. Even if we fully understood and and could reproduce it, there would be scores of people who would flat out refuse to see the evidence and would simply assert that the ineffable "experience" does not exist within beings for which they don't want to acknowledge it. The very concept of p-zombies illustrates this a priori refusal to admit any possible evidence whatsoever of consciousness. Another person could simply decide that I am in fact a p-zombie and lock themselves in a closed system of thought out of which there is no path to demonstrating that I "experience" anything at all.
I think if you want to put forth a hypothesis that there is some ghostly ineffable part of consciousness called "experience" that cannot ever be touched or measured by scientific means, then you have a self-defeating argument that cannot be supported. You might as well go full solipsism. There's nothing stopping you.
Consciousness is a genuine mystery at this point, but I think some people will still see it that way even if we solve it, and this is clearer to me every time I see people trash any kind of effort or progress made by science in understanding the brain, claiming that it is not in fact progress at all.
On the other hand, I think that many people are emotionally invested in believing that science must be capable of solving the hard problem of consciousness even though there is no reason to assume that science is.
It is perfectly possible that the hard problem of consciousness is in principle and forever beyond the reach of scientific investigation.
Just to toss off one more worthwhile idea to you since it seems like you're interested in this topic. p-zombies is not the most challenging scenario strong-AI deniers are likely to face. Brain cell replacement is.
With p-zombies you have two observers outside the system arguing about the system's inner life. With brain cell replacement, you have the subject directly and quite authoritatively experiencing the system in question and reporting back.
It seems many times more likely some of us will live to see this, but you just never know. Newtonian mechanics had it all locked up save for a few details and look what those details held.
Every brain science / cog-sci paper it seems has some alternative amputating conclusions to pronounce about consciouness.
They sort of have to do that because of the funding model they live under. Positive results only ! It's not the researcher's fault; I don't fault them. I just adopt a highly skeptical, wait and see, there's-probably-more-to-the-story attitude generally in science, that, and the more concrete counter-arguments I mentioned in my other comments make me a very highly dissident observer of this field.
"The very concept of p-zombies illustrates this a priori refusal to admit any possible evidence whatsoever of consciousness. Another person could simply decide that I am in fact a p-zombie and lock themselves in a closed system of thought out of which there is no path to demonstrating that I "experience" anything at all."
This is a good point and makes the problem interesting in an additional way. We (I) assume something like p-zombies exist in non-human consciousness, dogs and cats for example. It's like something to be a dog. How far down do we want to go ? Frogs? I'll bite; it's like something to be a frog:
But here's a counter to the p-zombies argument, OK?
The p-zombies argument is usually taken to mean there comes a point where what has been created is so indistinguishable from "real" people, ala Ex Machina, that arguing over it is a form of ideologically motivated perversion.
Let me turn that round and say that the p-zombie argument is (accidentally) making the following strong claim- it is impossible to build a machine which in every way acts human but has no experience.
That's a very very strong claim on this universe. I wouldn't take the bet, because someone's going to do it.
But if someone is going to do it, how can we tell when they have or they haven't? The Turing Test is outdated (as I see it) and anyway already passed for some judges ( re: ELIZA).
To me, this circles back to the original problem. We can't distinguish between the high probability that someone can eventually create an actual zombie and "real" experience-having artificial intelligence, and why is that ?
The issue is just another form of the basic problem- we don't have the conceptual framework to get our minds around what experience is.
Our basic assumptions may be off. Instead of quarks et.al. being the basic building blocks of matter and matter of brains and brains of consciouness, some people take experience to be the most basic building block of the universe.
This was my conclusion and I thought it would just brand me as an eccentric so I never pushed it, but now I see it's being kicked around by people with careers.
Another assumption is that experience/consciousness is comprehensible to the level of scientific causality/reality we're aiming at, (let's just shorthand it to "ultimate reality"), because there are separate, distinct things in the first place.
But what if separate things is not a fact about ultimate reality? What if they're more like a hardwired perceptual compulsion we can't escape? Then we might very well find truly insoluable mysteries on the foundational tier of our conceptual scaffolding, because none of the "things" we think about are real in the first place. Things which don't exist, don't have to "add up".
So this would mean our minds and ultimate reality are just not made for each other, even as that reality directly impinges on our personal daily lives in ways we can and do readily experience and talk about.
It seems like the most far fetched and deflating hypothesis possible, but consider we'd merely be joining the rest of the animal kingdom in this regards.
The thing is, if you're an atheist (and I write from one of the non-USA countries in which being an atheist is entirely unremarkable) then experience (or qualia) and consciousness itself are still very mysterious, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that it must all be a side effect of processing or information somehow.
Daniel Dennett has some good stuff on this (see Consciousness Explained, etc). Its not that he knows the answers, but his point is that consciousness might not be exactly what we think it is, there are lots of thought-traps around it, so we have to carefully unpick some of our assumptions about it to get anywhere - e.g. what he calls the cartesian theatre is one very powerful misconception (too long to explain here).
Also I always like to drop this Iain Banks quote in these kinds of discussions (from A Few Notes About The Culture)
Certainly there are arguments against the possibility of [strong] Artificial Intelligence, but they tend to boil down to one of three assertions: one, that there is some vital field or other presently intangible influence exclusive to biological life - perhaps even carbon-based biological life - which may eventually fall within the remit of scientific understanding but which cannot be emulated in any other form (all of which is neither impossible nor likely); two, that self-awareness resides in a supernatural soul - presumably linked to a broad-based occult system involving gods or a god, reincarnation or whatever - and which one assumes can never be understood scientifically (equally improbable, though I do write as an atheist); and, three, that matter cannot become self-aware (or more precisely that it cannot support any informational formulation which might be said to be self-aware or taken together with its material substrate exhibit the signs of self-awareness). ...I leave all the more than nominally self-aware readers to spot the logical problem with that argument.
Edit: changed 'cant really avoid the conclusion' to 'its hard to ...'
Never take the arguments of a side from their opponent's mouths.
The arguments I offered have nothing to do with any of the three he claims they all boil down to.
If you think I made one of these three, please tell me which one so I can clarify the argument.
Assuming it's a side effect of processing- known as an epiphenomena- immediately commits you to answering the question- does a badly programmed computer have a form of consciouness? Does a thermostat have a primitive form? Is it specifically impossible to create AI which emulates human thinking to the last detail, but has no consciouness, i.e. really is just an empty machine with zero experience? Is that an impossible task which could not be achieved by anyone by any means?
Suppose I debate with someone who has a computer programmed to be conscious. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to very very slightly change the programming so whatever output it's producing which is proving, my opponent claims, the computer is conscience, starts to degrade.
I'm going to do that then ask my opponent- still conscious? I'm going to do this and I'll guess my opponent will say "less so perhaps" , which would be his best reply.
Then I'm going to repeat until I get a "probably not" and then a "no" from him, which by his own hypothesis has to happen.
Then I'm going to diff the conscious program and the unconscious program and ask him if he really thinks those slightly altered lines of code are the difference between consciousness and a humdrum computer.
Because that's where this goes, this idea that a certain type of computation is consciousness.
It also goes to consciousness being granted to a machine like a Turing Tape. You may not think that squishy biological matter should be bequeathed with a "magical" property which hosts consciousness, but tell me, how do you feel about a Turning Tape?
I'm going to very very slightly change the programming so whatever output it's producing which is proving, my opponent claims, the computer is conscience, starts to degrade.
[...]
Then I'm going to diff the conscious program and the unconscious program and ask him if he really thinks those slightly altered lines of code are the difference between consciousness and a humdrum computer.
Is that not equivalent to giving a human being alcohol, observing that they become progressively less conscious, and asking if you really think that a few centiliters of alcohol is the key to consciousness?
Doesn't that kind of reasoning lead you down a path towards panpsychism or panexperientialism?
Either there is a phase transition of consciousness or there is not. If there is, we have no idea where it is because we can't prove that another being has subjective experience the way we can ourselves. If there isn't, then something roughly panexperientialist follows and even, say, a gas cloud has (very occasionally and very limited) experience. But which is it?
The problem to science itself seems to be that we can't make any comparison of the "what it is like to be" sense of experience. I experience things right now. I can't tell you what it's like with the kind of certainty that is usually associated with science. I can't even tell my future self with that certainty, because memory is a sense in itself and when I recall something, I'm just experiencing something with the sense of memory.
If whatever experience is can't be "frozen", then science has nothing to work on, apart from trying to get at it from the objective side of things. But it seems like it's very easy to get sidetracked, hence the argument that Dennett just redefines consciousness as executive function and then proceeds to explain the latter in a materialist framework.
panpsychism or panexperientialism can't be right because they're not weird enough- to paraphrase Bohr. Would it surprise anyone to find out that, in our exploration of the brain we come across something as weird and upsetting to standard theory as QM is to physics ?
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If we do a gradual, over a long time, brain cell by brain cell replacement of a living human's brain, that human's self-report is our best bet to get around the impenetrability of the subjective experience of other minds.
It is also the biggest challenge to people like me and could point strongly to consciousness as a thing supportable by machines.
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I agree that this is a problem that science, as it is right now, can't deal with. But that doesn't mean it's not real. The Big Scientific Inquiry, the spirit of science, seeks to explain and understand everything. Many really dramatic upheavals come out of corner cases in science; the things that are slighly off or not accounted for in an otherwise productive theory.
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It's not important to anyone's brain research, but it is important to society because making a mistake about what is and is not conscious has the potential for huge negative repercussions.
When Dennett dismisses the issue and effectively assumes the consequent of the argument he's supposedly engaged with, not only is he making an error but the consequences of that error are far-reaching into how we act towards one another.
What I am arguing, to the extent I am arguing for anything, is that people like Pat Chruchland have a point and it's not an "academic" one; it's substantive. We are making a mistake if we ignore it.
>if you're an atheist [...] you can't really avoid the conclusion that it must all be a side effect of processing or information somehow
Why? I'm an atheist-leaning agnostic, but I think that the hard problem of consciousness might well turn out to be impossible for scientific investigation to tackle.
I cannot think of any valid logic that would show that "there are no gods" implies "consciousness is a side effect of processing or information somehow".
Well yes OK. I guess I'm jumping from 'being an atheist' to 'general distrust of the so called supernatural'.
Do you mean 'impossible for scientific investigation to tackle' because its just too complex (in the same way we can't predict the weather very accurately) or do you mean more like: because you suspect there is some outside-of-known-physics involvement that we wont ever be able to get a grip on?
Not because it is too complex, but because I suspect that there may be something to consciousness that is outside of knowable physics. There is no reason to assume that scientific investigation is in principle capable of getting a grip on all of reality. That does not mean that consciousness is some mystic woo-woo, it just means that scientific investigation may in principle be limited. Consciousness might well turn out to be impossible in principle to tackle using mathematical modeling, reproducible experiment, theories of physical mechanisms, etc. - but that would not mean that consciousness is not real. It does not require scientific inquiry to show that consciousness is real. Subjective experience is immediately obviously real, as subjective experience.
I agree that what you say is possible, but it's also possible that consciousness does lie inside known physics, so I reckon it's worth people investigating that angle, as formidable as it seems.
I've edited my comment above to be a bit less absolutist
I wouldn't say it's impossible, although honestly I cannot even begin to imagine how consciousness could lie inside known or even knowable physics. But if people want to try, more power to them. I'm open to my suspicion being wrong.
All true enough, and I think any honest scientist would say that the most we can hope for is to notice a few patterns in the wallpaper on Plato's Cave. There's no reason to think that any real insight beyond that is possible.
A police state is a one-party state whose domination is maintained through the application of despotic force against the civilian population.
We, on the other hand, are experiencing a once-in-a-century, world-wide, corona virus pandemic with a mortality rate at least 10x the normal rate of corona viruses and which no one has immunity to because it just recently jumped species.
Since the vast majority of ultimate victims of this disease are the old and the infirm, we are undetaking a collective, other-sparing, selfless plan of action.
No one is alarmed by this action. It says absolutely nothing about our form of government and.what it says about our national character is inspirational and affirming.
About this one he said :(paraphrasing from memory now), "A big book is a big evil. You may ask why then the author proposes to lay before you the present work..."
As well they should and as is their right since a set of axioms are effectively ground facts which are selected to make logical reasoning across a domain possible, nothing more.
That doesn't make them true in the big sense of True, it makes them expedient, productive of theory, generative, a lot of wonderful things, maybe even strongly implied by all evidence, but not apriori true. They're dubitable.