Can science come to understand consciousness? A problem of philosophical zombies (Yes, I know, P-zombies again.)

I don't know how we could possibly know if the AI is aping consciousness for it own ends or if it actually is conscious.

How do you answer that question for human beings? ;-)

How do you know if a tree falling in the forest is just aping a sound for its own ends, or if it actually makes a sound? ;-)

Thinking about p-zombies is a sure sign that you are confused, and projecting a property of your brain onto the outside world. If you think there can be a p-zombie, then the mysterious thing called "consciousness" must reside in your map, not in the territory.

More specifically, if you can imagine robot or person A "with" consciousness, and robot or person B "without" it, and meanwhile imagine them to be otherwise "identical", then the only place for the representation of the idea that there is a difference, is in the mental tags you label these imaginary robots or people with.

This is why certain ideas seem "supernatural" or "beyond the physical" -- they are actually concepts that exist only in the mind of the observer, rather than in the physical reality.

This isn't to say that there might someday be a reductionist definition of consciousness that refers to facts in the territory, just that the intuitive idea of consciousness is actually a bit that gets flipped in our brains: an inbuilt bit that's part of our brain's machinery for telling the difference between animals, plants, and inanimate objects. This bit is the true home of our intuitive idea of consciousness, and is largely unrelated to whatever actual consciousness is.

In young children, after all, this bit flips on for anything that appears to move or speak by itself: animals, puppets, cartoons, etc. We can learn to switch it on or off for specific things, of course, but it's an inbuilt function that has its own sense or feel of being "real".

It's also why we can imagine the same thing having or not-having consciousness, because to our brain, it is an independent variable, because we have separate wiring to track that variable independently. But the mere existence of a tracking variable in our heads, doesn't mean the thing it tracks has a real existence. (We can see "colors" that don't really exist in the visible spectrum, after all: many colors are simply our perception of what happens when something reflects light at more than one wavelength.)

I suggest that if you are still confused about this, consult the sequence on the meaning of words, and particularly the bits about "How an algorithm feels from the inside" -- if I recall correctly, that's the bit that shows how our neural nets can represent conceptual properties like "makes a sound" as if they were independent of the physical phenomena involved. The exact same concept applies to our projections of consciousness, and the confusion of p-zombies.

It's extremely premature to leap to the conclusion that consciousness is some sort of unobservable opaque fact. In particular, we don't know the mechanics of what's going on in the brain as you understand and say "I am conscious". We have to at least look for the causes of these effects where they're most likely to be, before concluding that they are causeless.

People don't even have a good definition of consciousness that cleanly separates it from nearby concepts like introspection or self-awareness in terms of observable effects. The lack of observable effects goes so far that people posit they could get rid of consciousness and everything would happen the same (i.e. p-zombies). That is not a unassailable strength making consciousness impossible to study, it is a glaring weakness implying that p-zombie-style consciousness is a useless or malformed concept.

I completely agree with Eliezer on this one: a big chunk of this mystery should dissolve under the weight of neuroscience.

Given the rich history of cultures we have to draw on, I think it should be unsurprising that we have more words to use than actual concepts to apply them to (especially in nebulous topics like consciousness).

Let me switch gears and use another example. Reality, World, Being, Existence, Nature, Universe, Cosmos, ect. Aren't these all basically referring to the same thing?

I'm suggesting that perhaps a big problem with a scientific theory of consciousness in the current landscape is various vague terms for a single concept.

With that in mind, I humbly suggest that "mind", "consciousness", "experience", "qualia" and similar terms are redundant. What they all refer to is "subjective".

Consciousness, as far as I can tell, and someone feel free to kindly correct me if I'm wrong, is just a fancy word for the subjective part of reality.

So, with that in mind, what precisely are our expectations for a scientific theory of consciousness?

Are we literally trying to develop an objective description of subjectivity?

If not, how is what we are trying to do different?

If so, while it seems impossible at first, there may be options.

Phenomenological investigation allows us to break something like consciousness down.

We for example think that perceiving the qualia of red and blue are each something that consciousness is about. We can add a third color base color via gene therapy and model ask people do describe how their conscious experience of colors changes.

Just because investigating it might need conceptual advances doesn't mean that those can't be made.

The practically relevant philosophical question is not "cam science understand consciousness?", but "what can infer from observing the correlates of consciousness, or from observing their absence?". This is the question that for example anesthesiologists have to deal with on a daily basis.

When formulated as this, the problem is really not that different from other scientific problems where causality must be detected. Detecting causal relations is famously hard - but it's not impossible. (We're reasonably certain, for example, that smoking causes cancer.)

In light of this, maybe Bradford Hill criteria can be applied. For example, if we're presented with the problem of a non-consious AI agent that wants to convince us of being conscious, then it's likely we can reject its claims by applying the consistency criteria. We could secretly create other instances of the same AI agent, put them in modified environments (e.g. in an environemt where the motivation to lie about being conscious is removed), and then obseve whether the claims of these instances are consistent.

Similarly, if the internal structure of the agent is too simple to allow consciousness (e.g. the agent is a Chinese room with table-lookup based "intelligence", or a bipartite graph with a high Phi value), we can reject the claim on the plausibility criteria. (Note that the mechanist for intelligence is not a priori required to be the biological one, or it's emulation. For an analogy, we don't reject people's claims of having qualia just because we know that the don't have the ordinary biological mechanisms for them. Persons who claim to experience phantom pain in their amputated limbs are as likely to be seriously treated by medical professionals as persons who experience "traditional", corporeal pain.)

I tend to agree with you, although I think of this as a strict limitation of empiricism.

We expand scientific knowledge through the creation of universal experiences that are (in principle) available to anyone- replicable experiments- and on the models that follow from those experiences. Consciousness, in contrast, is an experience of being onesself (and in exceptional cases, the experience of being aware that one is aware of onesself, and on down the rabbit hole). What would it mean to create the experience of being a particular entity, accessible to any observer? That question looks suspiciously like gibberish. The excellent and admirable What is it like to be a bat? develops this idea quite a bit.

But hopefully, this problem becomes fairly trivial even if it doesn't disappear as such. We can certainly notice that human bodies tend to seem conscious and that shoes tend not to, and by developing AI from a (gulp) basically phenomenological perspective we can create a future we have every reason to believe is rich with selves and perspectives, no more a leap of faith than biological reproduction. We just won't be able to point a consciousness-detecting machine at them and wait for it to go 'ping'.

http://philpapers.org/rec/ARGMAA-2 - this may be relevant to your question, although I haven't read the whole article yet.

1) Conscious beings reasonably often try to predict their own future state or the state of other minds.

2) In order to successfully mimic a conscious being, a p-zombie would have to also engage in this behavior, predicting its own future states and the future states of other minds.

3) In order to predict such future states, it would seem necessary that a p-zombie would have to have at least some ability to model the states of minds, including its own.

Now, before we go any further, how does consciousness differ from having a model of the internal states of one's own mind?

We assume that those around us are conscious, and we have good reason to do so, but we can't rely on that assumption in any experiment in which we are investigating consciousness

This is contraidtory in strictly literal terms. Either the reasons are godo and we can build a technical equivalent or actually we just approve of our stance without ever having any basis to belief so. It is kinda like Turing having said that when in doubt whether agents you deal with are unconcsious or not, it is polite to assume so. But this doesn't have epistemological weight. Maybe consiousness turns out to be a fiction necceary for humans to aknowledge psychology in a similar way that some people need the concept of god to found morality. But consiousness as a mode of social interaction doesn't have import to it's turth.