Human consciousness as a tractable scientific problem

Basically, try as I might, I can't think of any piece of evidence that would let you distinguish between a being -- other than yourself -- who is consciousness and experiences qualia, and a being who pretends to be conscious with perfect fidelity, but does not in fact experience qualia. I don't think that such evidence could even exist, given the existence of perfect zombies (since they would be imperfect if such evidence existed). Thus, you are forced to conclude that the only being who is conscious is yourself, which is a kind of solipsism (though not the classic, existential kind).

Ah! Okay. Three points:

• I think you're arguing for something I agree with anyway. I don't think of qualia as being inherently independent of everything else. I think of qualia as self-evident. I don't think my experience of green can be entirely separated from the physical process of perceiving light of a certain wavelength, but I do think it's fair to say that I'm conscious of the green color of the "Help" link below this text box.
• Even if I did think qualia were divisible from the physical processes involved in perception (which I think would force dualism), I wouldn't be able to conclude that I'm the only one who is conscious. I would have to conclude that as far as I currently know, I have no way of knowing who else is or isn't conscious. So solipsism would then be a possibility, but not a logical necessity.
• I'm not arguing that p-zombies can exist. I seriously doubt they can. If this is a point you've been trying to argue me into agreeing, please note that we started out agreeing in the first place!

It seems like we agree on this point, then -- yey ! Of course, I would go one step further, and argue that there's nothing special about our subconscious mind.

Er... Except that we're not conscious of it! I'd say that's pretty special - as long as we agree that "special" means "different" rather than "mysterious".

I don't just think it would be odd, I think it would be logically inconsistent, as long as you're willing to assume that people other than yourself are, in fact, conscious.

Sorry, I meant "odd" in the artistically understated sense. We agree on this.

I reject the existence of qualia as an independent entity altogether.

So here, I think, is a source of our miscommunication. I also reject qualia as being independent.

I think part of the problem we're running into here is that by naming qualia as nouns and talking about whether it's possible to add or remove them, we've inadvertently employed our parietal cortices to make sense of conscious experience. It's like how people talk about "government" as though it's a person when, really, they're just reifying complex social behavior (and as a result often hiding a lot of complexity from themselves).

"Quale" is a name that has been, sadly, agreed upon to capture the experience of blueness, or the sense of a melody, or what-have-you. We needed some kind of word to distinguish these components of conscious experience from the physical mechanisms of perception because there is a difference, just like there's a difference between a software program and the physical processes that result in the program running. Yes, as far as the universe is concerned, it's just quarks quarking about. But just like it's helpful to talk about chairs and doors, it's helpful to talk about qualia in order to understand what our experience consists of.

I suspect in the future we'll be able to agree that "qualia" was actually a really bad term to use, with the benefit of hindsight. I suspect consciousness will turn out to be a reification, and thus talking about its components as though they're things just throws us off the track and creates confusion in the guise of a mystery. But even if we dump the term "qualia", we're still stuck with the fact that we experience, and there's a qualitative sense in which experience doesn't seem like it's even in-principle describable in terms of firing neurons. If you told me that it was discovered that there's actually a region of the brain that's responsible for adding qualia to vision (pardoning the horrid implicit metaphor), I wouldn't feel like hardly anything had been explained. So you found circuitry that, when monkeyed with, makes all yellow vanish from my conscious awareness. But how did yellow appear in the first place, as opposed to being just neuronal signals bouncing around? Pointing to a region of the brain and saying "That does it" still leaves me baffled as to how. I don't see how explaining the circuitry of that brain region in perfect synapse-level detail could answer that question.

However, I could totally see consciousness turning out to have this "hard problem" because it's like trying to describe where Mario is in terms of the transistors in a game console.

Similarly, "qualia" and "consciousness" are just abstractions that you'd created in order to talk about human brains -- including your own brain. I understand that you can observe your own consciousness "from the inside", which is not true of magnets, but I don't see this as an especially interesting fact.

On this point, I think we might just be frozen in disagreement. You seem to be taking as practically axiomatic that there's nothing significantly different about consciousness as compared to anything else, like gravity. To me, that view of consciousness is internally incoherent. You can make sense of gravity as an outside observer, but you can't make sense of your own consciousness as an outside observer. That's hugely relevant for any attempt to approach consciousness with the same empirical eye as used on gravity, or magnetism, or any other physical phenomenon. We can look at those phenomena from a position that largely doesn't interact with them in a relevant way, but I cannot fathom a comparable place to stand in order to be conscious of consciousness while not interacting with it.

This is not to say that consciousness is intrinsically more mysterious than gravity. I'm just utterly dumbfounded that you can think that your ability to be aware of anything is somehow no more interesting than any other random phenomenon in the universe.

I don't think that we need to necessarily pin down a single part of the brain that is the "seat of consciousness".

I don't think so either.

We can't pin down a single part that constitutes the "seat of vision", either, but human vision is nonetheless fairly well understood by now.

...

We seem to keep doing this. I agree, because that's part of the point I was making.

Similarly, we can't just "remove consciousness", although we can remove parts of it (e.g., cutting out the narrator or messing with the coordination, as in meditation or alcohol).

I'm not sure I follow your reasoning here. What do you mean by "removing consciousness" and "cutting out the narrator", and why is it important ? Drunk (or meditating) people are still conscious, after a fashion.

Removing consciousness is exactly the process that would turn a person into a p-zombie, yes? So what I've suggested as a general direction to consider for how consciousness appears passes the sanity test of not allowing p-zombies.

As for the narrator... Well, you know how there's a kind of running commentary going on in your mind? It's possible to stop that narration, and if you do so it changes the quality of consciousness by quite a lot.

Meditation, alcohol, and quite a number of other things can all monkey with the way parts of the mind coordinate and also get the narrator to stop narrating (or at least not become an implicit center of attention anymore). And I'm not claiming that doing these things removes consciousness. Quite the opposite, I'm pointing out that drunk and meditating people have a different kind of conscious experience.

Basically, try as I might, I can't think of any piece of evidence that would let you distinguish between a being -- other than yourself -- who is consciousness and experiences qualia, and a being who pretends to be conscious with perfect fidelity, but does not in fact experience qualia.

As I discussed here - see also this comment for clarification - we should in theory be able to discover if other beings have qualia if we were to learn about their brains in such microscopic detail that we are performing approximately the same computations in our brains that their brains are running; we then "get their qualia" first-hand.

As for arguing about qualia verbally, I hold qualia to be both entirely indefinable (implying that the concept is irreducible, if it exists) and something that the vast majority of humans apprehend directly and believe very strongly to exist. There is little to be gained by arguing about whether qualia exist, because of this problem - the best that can be achieved through argument is that both of you accept the consensus regarding the existence of this indefinable thing that nonetheless needs to be given a name.