​My recent thoughts on consciousness

Consider reading Scott Aaronson on the matter. Here is an excerpt:

In my opinion, how to construct a theory that tells us which physical systems are conscious and which aren’t—giving answers that agree with “common sense” whenever the latter renders a verdict—is one of the deepest, most fascinating problems in all of science. Since I don’t know a standard name for the problem, I hereby call it the Pretty-Hard Problem of Consciousness. Unlike with the Hard Hard Problem, I don’t know of any philosophical reason why the Pretty-Hard Problem should be inherently unsolvable; but on the other hand, humans seem nowhere close to solving it (if we had solved it, then we could reduce the abortion, animal rights, and strong AI debates to “gentlemen, let us calculate!”).

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1951

Aaronson asks the right questions, rather than settle for "dissolving", the way Eliezer tends to do.

We can talk about sweet and sound being “out there” in the world but in reality it is a useful fiction of sorts that we are “projecting” out into the world.

I hate to put on my Bishop Berkeley hat. Sweet and sound are things we can directly perceive. The very notion of something being "out there" independent of us is itself a mental model we use to explain our perceptions. We say that our sensation of sweetness is caused by a thing we call glucose. We can talk of glucose in terms of molecules, but as we can't actually see a molecule, we have to speak of it in terms of the effect it produces on a measurement apparatus.

The same holds for any scientific experiment. We come up with a theory that predicts that some phenomenon is to occur. To test it, we devise an apparatus and say that the phenomenon occurred if we observe the apparatus behave one way, and that it did not occur if we observe the apparatus to behave another way.

There's a bit of circular reasoning. We can come up with a scientific explanation of our perception of taste or color, but the very science we use depends upon the perceptions it tries to explain. The very notion of a world outside of ourselves is a theory used to explain certain regularities in our perceptions.

This is part of what makes consciousness a hard problem. Since consciousness is responsible for our perception of the world, it's very hard to take an outside view and define it in terms of other concepts.

Meta: You appear to have various negative responses; I am not completely clear as to why.

I found this idea useful to discover; while I can't really see its applications in modifying the way I access the real world, it certainly does raise some interesting ethical ideas.

I immediately thought of person X that I know in relation to the idea of ethics and consciousness. X (is real and) does not have the same ethics model as commonly found in people. They value themselves over and beyond other humans, both near and far (while not unlike many people; this is particularly abundant in their life). A classic label for this is "having a big ego" or "narcissism". If consciousness is reduced to "nothing but brain chemicals", the value of other entities is considerably lower than the value an entity might put on itself (because it can). Although this does seems like an application of fundamental attribution error (kinda also reverse-typical mind fallacy [AKA everyone else does not have a mind like me]) being the value one places internally is higher than that which is places on other external entities.

when adding the idea of "not much makes up consciousness", potentially unethical narcissism actions turn into boring, single-entity self-maximisation actions.

an entity which lacks capacity to reflect outwardly in the same capacity that it reflects inwards would have a nacissism problem (if it is a problem).

Should we value outside entities as much as we do ourselves? Why?

My problem with materialist reductionism is that it entails that explanations should suffice to provide descriptions. The taste of honey refers to something entirely descriptive, both without the power of furnishing an explanation of anything about the honey, and incapable of being grasped by means of anything that does explain something about the honey.

You could model the world that provokes you into experiencing sensations without any access to the sensations themselves (you wouldn't know what you were modelling however) using nothing but a collection of flavourless tokens related by explanatory mechanisms.

Neither you nor I will ever know what a glucose molecule is in the way that we know what an orange tastes like. If you found out tomorrow that molecular theory has been a grand, ingenious, astounding and improbable swindle, nothing about your beliefs concerning the taste of oranges will change in the least. I really cannot see how explanatory statements can bear descriptive burdens, which is ultimately what the problem of "qualia" is driving at.

There are even further problems I see, for example if your language is restricted to explanatory statements then your ability to communicate is effectively restricted to statements about the states of some machine (for the sake of completeness of argument, take this to be a turing-complete computer) and changes in this state. This leaves no room for the possibility of a description, any statement concerning a "qualia" could not augment the information we have about the state of the machine or the rules by which it changes. It follows from this that all "senses" available to the machine could at best only be different schemes of drawing up a more compact declaration about machine states and programs, there could be no sense of "sight" as distinct from the sense of "sound" or "emotion". For a machine, the sensation of "sound" might as well be identical to the sensation of sight, but always accompanied by a unique, peculiar shade of blue. If you deny a human being the ability to separate out information according to the sense by which it arrives, he's hardly capable of communicating anything whatsoever.

Explanations are useful because they organize descriptive information, rather than vice versa.

Pan-psychism resolves all philosophical hitches I've been able to come up with, and I would argue that it's not a "mysterious answer" but simply an assumption that our inner experience of consciousness is in fact a feature of the world as mass-energy is assumed to be, without the need for further explanation and not admitting of any such a possibility. Now I don't actually enjoy insisting that no explanation is possible of what is a very confusing topic, but in this case it's not the topic that needs to be explained but the process by which we confused ourselves over it.

Sweetness isn't an intrinsic property of the thing, but it is a relational property of the thing - i.e. the thing's sweetness comes into existence when we (with our particular characteristics) interact with it. And objectively so.

It's not right to mix up "intrinsic" or "inherent" with objective. They're different things. A property doesn't have to be intrinsic in order to be objective.

So sweetness isn't a property of the mental model either.

It's an objective quality (of a thing) that arises only in its interaction with us. An analogy would be how we're parents to our children, colleagues to our co-workers, lovers to our lovers. We are not parents to our lovers, or intrinsically or inherently parents, but that doesn't mean our parenthood towards our children is solely a property of our childrens' perception, or that we're not really parents because we're not parents to our lovers.

And I think Dennett would say something like this too; he's very much against "qualia" (at least to a large degree, he does allow some use of the concept, just not the full-on traditional use).

When we imagine, visualize or dream things, it's like the activation of our half of the interaction on its own. The other half that would normally make up a veridical perception isn't there, just our half.