As someone who could be described as "pro-qualia": I think there are still a number of fundamental misconceptions and confusions that people bring to this debate.  We could have a more productive dialogue if these confusions were cleared up.  I don't think that clearing up these confusions will make everyone agree with me on everything, but I do think that we would end up talking past each other less if the confusions were addressed.

First, a couple of misconceptions:

1.) Some people think that part of the definition of qualia is that they are necessarily supernatural or non-physical.  This is false.  A qualia is just a sense perception.  That's it.  The definition of "qualia" is completely, 100% neutral as to the underlying ontological substrate.  It could certainly be something entirely physical.  By accepting the existence of qualia, you are not thereby committing yourself to anti-physicalism.

2.) An idea I sometimes see repeated is that qualia are this sort of ephemeral, ineffable "feeling" that you get over and above your ordinary sense perception.  It's as if, you see red, and the experience of seeing red gives you a certain "vibe", and this "vibe" is the qualia.  This is false.  Maybe someone did explain it that way to you once, but if they did, then they were wrong.  Qualia is nothing over and above your ordinary sense perception.  It's not seeing red plus something else.  It's just seeing red.  That's it.

Those are what I would call the "objective" misconceptions.  Past this point, our intuitions may start coming apart, and it may become harder to communicate exactly what my position is.  But I can still try.

When defining qualia as a "sense perception", something crucial that's implicit in the definition is that it is your first-person experience of the sense perception.  It's what you actually perceive.  Some people may be thinking at this point, "well, I don't know what this 'first-person experience' is.  There is the data I take as input, there is the processing that my brain does on it, there is the behavior that I emit as a result, and I suppose you could call the totality of this whole thing a 'sense perception', but I don't know what this 'first-person experience' component is supposed to add to the story."  For people who are in this position, I would add two more arguments to help clarify what's going on:

1.) Do you know what it feels like to feel pain?  Then congratulations, you know what it feels like to have qualia.  Pain is a qualia.  It's that simple.  If I told you that I was going to put you in intense pain for an hour, but I assured you there would be no physical damage or injury to you whatsoever, you would still be very much not ok with that.  You would want to avoid that experience.  Why?  Because pain hurts!  You're not afraid of the fact that you're going to have an "internal representation" of pain, nor are you worried about what behavior you might display as a result of the pain.  You're worried first and foremost about the fact that it's going to hurt!  The "hurt" is the qualia.

2.) Imagine that you have a very boring and unpleasant task to do.  It could be your day job, it could be a social gathering that you would rather not attend, whatever.  Imagine I offer you a proposition: while you are performing this unpleasant task, I can put you into a state that you will subjectively experience as deep sleep.  You will experience exactly what you experience when you are asleep but not dreaming: i.e., exactly nothing.  The catch is, your body will continue to function as though you were wide awake and functioning.  Your body will move around, your eyes will be open, you will talk to people, you will do everything exactly as you would normally do.  But you will experience none of it.  It sounds like an enticing proposition, right?  You get all the benefit of doing the work without the pain of actually having to experience the work.  It doesn't matter if you think this isn't actually possible to achieve in the real world: it's just a thought experiment to get you to understand the difference between your internal experience and your outward behavior.  What you're essentially being offered in the thought experiment is the ability to "turn off your qualia" for a span of time.

If you read all that and you think "ok, I have a better idea of what you mean by 'qualia' now, but I still don't see why it's a big deal or why it should be hard to explain with standard physics", then that's ok.  That's a reasonable position that's shared by a number of experts in this area.  I'm not trying to make you into a Believer In The Hard Problem, I'm just trying to make you understand what "qualia" means.

If you still think "I still have no idea what qualia is and I think you're delusional"... well, that sort of makes me think that I still just haven't found the right way to explain it.  But, I suppose at some point we just have to accept that people will have wildly divergent intuitions and ways of modeling the world, and there's only so much we can do to bridge the gap.

I have a simple, yet unusual, explanation for the difference between camp #1 and camp#2: we have different experiences of consciousness.  Believing that everyone has our kind of consciousness, of course we talk past each other.

I’ve noticed that in conversations about qualia, I’m always in the position of Mr Boldface in the example dialog: I don’t think there is anything that needs to be explained, and I’m puzzled that nobody can tell me what qualia are using sensible words.  (I‘m not particularly stupid or ignorant; I got a degree in philosophy and linguistics from MIT.)  I suggest a simple explanation: some of us have qualia and some of us don’t.  I‘m one of those who don’t.  And when someone tries to point at them, all I can do is to react with obtuse incomprehension, while they point at the most obvious thing in the world.  It apparently is the most obvious thing in the world, to a lot of people.

Obviously I have sensory impressions; I can tell you when something looks red.  And I have sensory memories; I can tell you when something looked red yesterday.  But there isn’t any hard-to-explain extra thing there.

One might object that qualia are so obvious that everyone must have them.  But there are many cases where people differ in their mental faculties, which can be determined only by careful comparison, and which provoke amazement when revealed.  Some people have no visual experience of imagined objects at all.  Some people can’t rotate an imagined object to see it from the other side.  Some people maintain a continuous internal narration.  We all get through life.

Integrated Information Theory is peak Camp #2 stuff

As a Camp #2 person, I just want to remark that from my personal viewpoint, Integrated Information Theory is sharing the key defect with Global Workspace Theory, and hence is no better.

Namely, I think that the Hard Problem of Consciousness has the Hart Part: the Hard Problem of Qualia. As soon as the Hard Problem of Qualia is solved, the rest of the Hard Problem of Consciousness is much less mysterious (perhaps, the rest can be treated in the spirit of the "Easy Problems of Consciousness", e.g. the question why I am me and not another person might be treatable as a symmetry violation, a standard mechanism in physics, and the question why human qualia seem to normally cluster into belonging to a particular subject (my qualia vs. all other qualia) might not be excessively mysterious either).

So the theory purporting to actually solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness needs to shed some light onto the nature and the structure of the space of qualia, in order to be a viable contender from my personal viewpoint.

Unfortunately, I am not aware of any such viable contenders, i.e. of any theories shedding much light onto the nature and the structure of the space of qualia. Essentially, I suspect we are still mostly at square zero in terms of our progress towards solving the Hard Problem of Qualia (I should be able to talk about this particular shade of red, and this particular smell of coffee, and this particular psychedelic sound and what they are or what they are made of, so that the ways they are perceived do come through, and if I can't, a candidate theory has not even started to address what matters personally to me).

So, as a temporary measure, I am just adjoining qualia as primitives to my overall world view and building on top of that. For example, as a temporary measure, I would model a subjective reality as a neural machine processing vectors representing linear combinations of qualia among other things, so I am talking about "a vector space generated by qualia and, perhaps, also by other base elements". This is not a pathological assumption; if we eventually understand the nature of qualia, it is still a mathematically legitimate construction to consider a vector space generated by them.

As long as one does take a leap of faith and adjoins qualia in this fashion, classical neuroscience theories (e.g. the old 40hz Crick-Koch theory, or Global Workspace Theory) might just work for a Camp #2 person.

:-) But yes, I certainly do agree with the main punchline of this post :-)

This is a clear and convincing account of the intuitions that lead to people either accepting or denying the existence of the Hard Problem. I’m squarely in Camp #1, and while I think the broad strokes are correct there are two places where I think this account gets Camp #1 a little wrong on the details.

According to Camp #1, the correct explanandum is still "I claim to have experienced X" (where X is the apparent experience). After all, if we can explain exactly why you, as a physical system, uttered the words "I experienced X", then there's nothing else to explain. […] In other words, the two camps disagree about the epistemic status of apparently perceived experiences: for Camp #2, they're epistemic bedrock, whereas for Camp #1, they're model outputs of your brain, and like all model outputs of your brain, they can be wrong.

I think this is conflating two difference senses of ‘claim’. The first sense is the interpersonal or speech sense: John makes a claim to you about his internal experience, in the form of speech. In this sense, ‘John claims to have a headache’ is the correct explanandum, in the Camp #1 view, of John telling you he has a headache, because it’s the closest thing to John’s actual experience that you have access to.

However, there is something different going on in the case where you yourself seem to have had an experience. You can believe you have had a certain experience without telling anybody about it, or without even uttering the words ‘I experienced X’ into an empty room, so the interpersonal or speech sense of ‘claim’ doesn’t really seem to apply. This only leaves us with the sense of ‘making a claim to yourself’, which might more precisely be called ‘thinking’ or ‘believing’.

Even in the Camp #1 view, there really is something different about a claim you make to yourself. You have privileged access to the contents of your own mind that you don’t have to contents of other people’s minds, by virtue of the mundane physical fact that the neurones in your brain are connected to the other neurones in your brain but not to the neurones in other people’s brains. Even if you don’t utter the words ‘I experienced X’, there is still something to be explained that lies between ‘actually experiencing X’ and ‘claiming in speech to have experienced X: why did you have the thought or belief ‘I experienced X’, instead of ‘I didn’t experience X but it would be useful for me to lie about it’? The explanandum in the case of your own experience is located a little deeper than it is in the case of the experiences of others. You can still be wrong about the underlying reality of your experiences – perhaps the memory of having a headache was falsely implanted with nefarious technology – but you have access to a type of evidence about it that John does not.

(I've never been able to figure out if Thomas Nagel, in ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, believes that the mere existence of this sort of privileged evidence about one's own experiences tells us something about the nature of  qualia/subjectivity. He says ‘The point of view in question is not one accessible only to a single individual. Rather it is a type.’ But, from my Camp #1 perspective, he never seems to explain what the difference is.)

So consciousness will be a densely connected part of this network – no more, no less – and it will have fuzzy boundaries because there is, ultimately, no ground truth as to what does or doesn't constitute consciousness.

Perhaps this overly nit-picky, but I don’t believe Camp #1 intuitions imply that consciousness is or arises from a particular ‘part’ of the brain, in the sense that you could say ‘it comes from the neurones in this region’ or ‘it comes from the subset of neurones lighting up on this fMRI’, even allowing fuzzy boundaries. There’s no reason to expect the physical substrate of the brain, or even the network topology of the its connections, to always map straightforwardly to some feature or property of the mind, and particularly not for more abstract and higher-level properties. Sometimes there is such an obvious mapping (e.g. visual pathways), but there’s no more reason to expect that there is a ‘consciousness part of the brain’ than a ‘reasoning part of the brain’ or an ‘optimising part of the brain’; it might just be a thing that the whole brain is or does. By analogy, you might be able to point to a particular bit of circuitry in a computer that processes raw data from a camera sensor, but you can’t point to any one part and say ‘this is where the operating system comes from’.

The upshot is the same: Camp #1 will view consciousness as an ‘inherently fuzzy phenomenon’. We might just find it to be even fuzzier than you suggest here.

This probably isn't the case, but I secretly wonder if the people in camp #1 are p-zombies.

Good writeup, I certainly agree with the frustration of people talking past each other with no convergence in sight.

First, I don't understand why IIT is still popular, Scott Aaronson showed its fatal shortcomings 10 years ago, as soon as it came out. 

Second, I do not see any difference between experiencing something and claiming to experience something, outside of intentionally trying to deceive someone. 

Third, I don't know which camp I am in, beyond "of course consciousness is an emergent concept, like free will and baseball". Here by emergence I mean the Sean Carroll version: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2020/08/11/the-biggest-ideas-in-the-universe-21-emergence/

I have no opinion on whether some day we will be able to model consciousness and qualia definitively, like we do with many other emergent phenomena. Which may or may not be equivalent to them being outside the "laws of physics", if one defines laws of physics as models of the universe that a human can comprehend. I can certainly imagine a universe where some of the more complicated features just do not fit into the tiny minds of the tiny parts of the universe that we are. In that kind of a universe there would be equivalents of "magic" and "miracles" and "paranormal", i.e. observations that are not explainable scientifically. Whether our world is like that, who knows.

I think there's a pervasive error being made by both camps, although more especially Camp 2 (and I count myself in Camp 2). There is a frantic demand for and grasping after explanations, to the extent of counting the difficulty of the problem as evidence for this or that solution. "What else could it be [but my theory]?"

We are confronted with the three buttons labelled "Explain", "Ignore", and "Worship" [LW · GW]. A lot of people keep on jabbing at the "Explain" button, but (in my view) none of the explanations get anywhere. Some press the "Ignore" button and proclaim it an inherently unsolvable problem. Some press "Worship" and declare consciousness to be the fundamental reality of the universe.

I recognise my inability to hit "Explain" and the futility of "Ignore" and "Worship". I leave the buttons floating there. On the one hand, I have subjective experience, but on the other, nothing else we yet know about the world seems capable even in principle of providing an explanation. None that I have seen from either camp seems to me to even touch the problem. Nevertheless, I recognise that the problem is still there.

I'm going to argue a complementary story: The basic reason why it's so hard to talk about consciousness has to do with 2 issues that are present in consciousness research, and both make it impossible to do productive research on:

1. Extraordinarily terrible feedback loops, almost reminiscent of the pre-deep learning alignment work on LW (I'm looking at you MIRI, albeit even then it achieved more than the consciousness research to date, and LW is slowly shifting to a mix of empirical and governance work, which is quite a lot faster than any consciousness related work has done, and it's transition is more complete than the consciousness field.)

2. To the extent that we have feedback loops, we basically only have one, which is competing introspections/intuition pumps, and the problem here is that for our purposes, humans are extraordinarily terrible at reporting their internal states accurately, and self-reports are basically worthless here. In essence, you can't get any useful evidence at all, and thus consciousness discourse goes nowhere useful.

Great post! I think this captures most of the variance in consciousness discussions.

I've been interested in consciousness through a 23 year career in computational cognitive neuroscience. I think making progress on bridging the gap between camp 1 and camp 2 requires more detailed explanations of neural dynamics. Those can be inferred from empirical data, but not easily, so I haven't seen any explanations similar to the one I've been developing in my head. I haven't published on the topic because it's more of a liability for a neuroscience career than an asset. Now that I'm working on AI safety, consciousness seems like a distraction. It's tempting to write a long post about it, since this community seems substantially better at engaging with the topic than neuroscientists are; but the time cost is still substantial. If I do write such a post, I'll cite this one in framing the issue.

One possible route to people actually caring about explanations of consciousness is in public debates on AI consciousness. People are already questioning whether LLMs might have some sort of consciousness and therefore being worthy of ethical consideration like people are. It won't take much more person-like behavior (I think just a consistent memory) before that debate becomes really interesting to me and I think to the public at large. That wouldn't give an LLM phenomenal consciousness much like a human, but it would give enough self-awareness to strike a lot of people as worthy of ethical consideration.

Strong agree all around—this post echoes a comment I made here [LW(p) · GW(p)] (me in Camp #1, talking to someone in Camp #2):

If you ask me a question about, umm, I’m not sure the exact term, let’s say “3rd-person-observable properties of the physical world that have something to do with the human brain”…then I feel like I’m on pretty firm ground, and that I’m in my comfort zone, and that I’m able to answer such questions, at least in broad outline and to some extent at a pretty gory level of detail. (Some broad-outline ingredients are in my old post here [LW · GW], and I’m open to further discussion as time permits.)

BUT, I feel like that’s probably not the game you want to play here. My guess is that, even if I perfectly nail every one of those “3rd-person” questions above, you would still say that I haven’t even begun to engage with the nature of qualia, that I’m missing the forest for the trees, whatever. (I notice that I’m putting words in your mouth; feel free to disagree.)

If I’m correct so far, then this is a more basic disagreement about the nature of consciousness and how to think about it and learn about it etc. You can see my “wristwatch” discussion here [LW · GW] for basically where I’m coming from. But I’m not too interested in hashing out that disagreement, sorry. For me, it’s vaguely in the same category as arguing with a theology professor about whether God exists (I’m an atheist): My position is “Y’know, I really truly think I’m right about this, but there’s a gazillion pages of technical literature on this topic, and I’ve read practically none of it, and my experience strongly suggests that we’re not going to make any meaningful progress on this disagreement in the amount of time that I’m willing to spend talking about it.” :-P Sorry!

-It's obvious that conscious experience exists.

-Yes, it sure looks like the brain is doing a lot of non-parallel processing that involves several spatially distributed brain areas at once, so

-You mean, it looks from the outside. But I'm not just talking about the computational process, which I am not even aware of as such, I am talking about conscious experience.

-Define qualia

-Look at a sunset. The way it looks is a quale. taste some chocolate,. The way it tastes is a quale.

-Well, I got my experimental subject to look at a sunset and taste some chocolate, and wrote down their reports. What's that supposed to tell me?

-No, I mean you do it.

-OK, but I don't see how that proves the existence of non-material experience stuff!

-I didn't say it does!

-Buy you qualophiles are all the same -- you're all dualists and you all believe in zombies!

-Sigh....!

In other words, the two camps disagree about the epistemic status of apparently perceived experiences: for Camp #2, they’re epistemic bedrock, whereas for Camp #1, they’re model outputs of your brain, and like all model outputs of your brain, they can be wrong.

Both camps are broad. You don't have to regard qualia as incorrigible to belong in camp #2. You don't have to believe in zombies, either.

Something that is very important for camp #2, but not mentioned in the OP is the reducibility, of qualia. We don't have a reductive explanation of qualia, and according to the intended conclusion of the The Mary's Room thought experiment , we can't -- complete physical knowledge just isn't enough. The belief in irreducibility is much more of a sine qua non of qualia[philia].

Consciousness Explained gets brought up a lot more than The Conscious Mind

And on top of that, Chalmers views are regularly strawmanned and misrepresented in a way that Dennett's aren't.

Eg.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies?commentId=mDcrepyDkhyoZX9JJ [LW(p) · GW(p)]

ETA:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies?commentId=kZ57nbWk8SennPuzm [LW(p) · GW(p)]

And of course,

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies?commentId=5qKe5gQ8HWgfRq9Dw [LW(p) · GW(p)]

There are many features you get right about the stubbornness of the problem/discussion.  Certainly, modulo the choice to stop the count at two camps, you've highlighted some crucial facts about these clusters.  But now I'm going to complain about what I see as your missteps.

Moreover, even if consciousness is compatible with the laws of physics, ... [camp #2 holds] it's still metaphysically tricky, i.e., it poses a conceptual mystery relative to our current understanding.

I think we need to be careful not to mush together metaphysics and epistemics.  A conceptual mystery, a felt lack of explanation - these are epistemic problems.  That's not sufficient reason to infer distinct metaphysical categories.  Particular camp #2 philosophers sometimes have arguments that try to go from these epistemic premises, plus additional premises, to a metaphysical divide between mental and physical properties.  Those arguments fail, but aside from that, it's worthwhile to distinguish their starting points from their conclusions.

Secondly, you imply that according to camp #2, statements like "I experienced a headache" cannot be mistaken.  As TAG already pointed out, the claim of incorrigibility is not necessary.  As soon as one uses a word or concept, one is risking error.  Suppose you are at a new restaurant, and you try the soup, and you say, "this soup tastes like chicken."  Your neighbor says, "no, it tastes like turkey."  You think about it, the taste still fresh in your mind, and realize that she is right.  It tastes (to you) like turkey, you just misidentified it.

Finally, a bit like shminux, I don't know which camp I'm in - except that I do, and it's neither.  Call mine camp 1.5 + 3i.  It's sort of in-between the main two (hence 1.5) but accuses both 1 + 2 of creating imaginary barriers (hence the 3i).

I think you are a bit off the mark.

As a reductive materialist, expecting to find a materialistic explanation for consciousness, in your model I'd be Camp 2. And yet in the dialogue

"It's obvious that consciousness exists."

-Yes, it sure looks like the brain is doing a lot of non-parallel processing that involves several spatially distributed brain areas at once, so-

"I'm not just talking about the computational process. I mean qualia obviously exists."

-Define qualia.

"You can't define qualia; it's a primitive. But you know what I mean."

-I don't. How could I if you can't define it?

"I mean that there clearly is some non-material experience stuff!"

-Non-material, as in defying the laws of physics? In that case, I do get it, and I super don't-

"It's perfectly compatible with the laws of physics."

-Then I don't know what you mean.

"I mean that there's clearly some experiential stuff accompanying the physical process."

-I don't know what that means.

I much more relate to the position expressed via bold text. Because the Camp 2 person here smuggles the assumption that qualia are non-material and experience stuff is separate from the physical process. Some definitions of consciousness/experience/qualia are incoherent and we may not even know about it yet because we do not know all the related physics. Doing Socratic method here and refusing to accept vague handwaving aka "you know what I mean" is a valid strategy to get rid of the confusion around the topic. 

People are confused about consciousness due to their initial intuitions, and then they find full fledged philosophies built around this confusion, created long before we made substantial progress in neuroscience. Thus people get validation of their confusion and may form their identities around it, instead of trying to resolve it. And for these historic reasons we have completely different narratives around consciousness, not unllike political ones among those, who try to resolve their confusion, and those who don't. 

According to Camp #1, the correct explanandum is still "I claim to have experienced X"

I wonder, can we mend the rift by introducing a bit of recursion. Consider:

I experience to have experienced X. 

Now I can make statements like: 

My experience of experience is different from my experience of matter

Without smuggling the assumption that experience is indeed different from matter. It's curious how many philosophical problems can be deconfused by the propper understanding of map-territory framework.

This is a really clear breakdown. Thank you for writing it up!

I'm struck by the symmetry between (a) these two Camps and (b) the two hemispheres of the brain as depicted by Iain McGilchrist. Including the way that one side can navigate the relationship between both sides while the other thinks the first is basically just bonkers!

It's a strong enough analogy that I wonder if it's causal. E.g., I expect someone from Camp 1 to have a much harder time "vibing". I associate Camp 1 folk with rejection of ineffable insights, like "The Tao that can be said is not the true Tao" sounding to them like "the Tao" is just incoherent gibberish.

In which case the "What is this 'qualia' thing you're talking about?" has an awful lot in common with the daughter's arm phenomenon [LW · GW]. The whole experience of seeing a rainbow, knowing it's beautiful, and then witnessing the thought "Wow, what a beautiful rainbow!" would be hard to pin down because the only way to pin it down in Camp 1 is by modeling the experiential stream and then talking about the model. The idea that there could be a direct experience that is itself being modeled and is thus prior to any thoughts about it… just doesn't make sense to the left hemisphere. It's like talking about the Tao.

I don't know how big a factor, if at all, this plays in the two camps thing. It's just such a striking analogy that it seems worth bringing up.

I don't feel like I fall super hard into one of these camps or the other, although I agree they exist. I think from the outside folks would probably say I'm a very camp 2 person, but as I see it that's only insofar as I'm not willing to give up and say that there's nothing of value beyond the camp 1 approach.

This is perhaps reflected in my own thinking about "consciousness". I think the core thing going on is not complex, but instead quite simple: negative feedback loops that create information that's internal to a system. I identify signals within a feedback circuit as the core thing we care about when we talk about qualia. Humans just happen to be made up of very complex circuits layered on top of each other to create very complex, multi-circuit signals that combine in ways to create the relatively complex sorts of experiences we have, and this causes all kinds of confusion.

I think folks of both camps dislike this sort of thing though because, if we reduce consciousness to this, it implies pansychism, but not pansychism of the kind most panpsychist proponents put forward. Thus, everyone is pissed off. Still, I don't see a better option.

I wrote about these ideas in some depth a while back [? · GW] as part of trying to figure out some things about AI alignment. I'm not sure I was very successfully on the figuring out things about AI alignment part, but I feel pretty good about the understanding consciousness stuff 5 years later, especially given everything we've since seen about the mind thanks to evidence suggesting something like perceptual control theory is probably close to right.

I agree that the epistemic status of experience is important, but... First of all does anyone actually disagree with concrete things that Dennett says? That people are often wrong about their experiences is obviously true. If that was the core disagreement, it would be easy to persuade people. The only persistent disagreement seems to be about whether there is something additional to the physical explanation of experience (hence the zombies argument) or whether fundamental consciousness is even coherent concept at all - just replacing absolute certainty with uncertainty wouldn't solve it, when you can't even communicate what's your evidence is.

Great post, I felt it really defined and elaborated on a phenomena I've seen recur on a regular basis.

It's funny how consciousness is so difficult to understand, to the point that it seems pre-paradigmatic to me. At this point, I like, like presumably many others, evaluate claims of conscientiousness by setting the prior that I'm personally conscious to near 1, and then evaluating the consciousness of other entities primarily by their structural similarity to my own computational substrate, the brain.

So another human is almost certainly conscious, most mammals are likely conscious and so on, and while I wouldn't go so far as to say that novel or unusual computational substrates such as say, an octopus, aren't conscious, I strongly suspect their consciousness is internally different than ours.

Or more precisely, it's not really the substrate but the algorithm running on it that's the crux of it, and it's only that conservation of the substrate's arrangement constrains our expectations of what kind of algorithm runs on it. I expect a human brain's consciousness to be radically different from an octopus because the different structure requires a different algorithm to handle, in the latter case a far more diffuse one.

I'd go so far as to say that I think substrate can be irrelevant in practise, since I think that a human brain emulation experiences consciousness near identical to one running on head cheese, and not akin to an octopus or some AI that was trained by modern ML.

Do I know this for a fact? Hell no, and at this point I expect it to be an AGI-complete problem to solve, it's just that I need an operational framework to live by in the mean time and this is the best I've got.

I'm wondering where Biological Naturalism^[1] falls within these two camps? It seems like sort of a "third way" in between them, and incidentally, is the explanation that I personally have found most compelling.

Here's GPT-4's summary:

Biological Naturalism is a theory of mind proposed by philosopher John Searle. It is a middle ground between two dominant but opposing views of the mind: materialism and dualism. Materialism suggests that the mind is completely reducible to physical processes in the brain, while dualism posits that the mind and body are distinct and separate.

Searle's Biological Naturalism, on the other hand, asserts that while mental processes are caused by physical processes in the brain, they are not reducible to them. This means that while consciousness and other mental phenomena are rooted in the physical workings of the brain, they also have their own first-person ontology that is not captured by third-person descriptions of the brain's workings.

Searle uses the analogy of water and H2O to explain this concept. Just as water is composed of H2O molecules but has properties (like wetness) that are not properties of individual H2O molecules, consciousness is caused by physical processes in the brain but has properties (like subjectivity) that are not properties of individual neurons or neural networks.

In other words, Biological Naturalism acknowledges the physical basis of consciousness while also recognizing that consciousness has a subjective character that is not explained by purely physical descriptions. This theory allows for the study of the mind as part of the natural biological sciences, while also acknowledging the unique properties of mental phenomena.

Setting aside how problematic of an individual Searle is, this theory has always struck me as the most cogent and has stood up to the test of time in my own ontology.

Taking it a step further into my own theorizing: I suspect consciousness is a natural feature of all systems and exists on a spectrum from very-low-consciousness systems (individual atoms, stars, clouds of gas, rocks) to very-high-consciousness systems (animals). My pet theory is that we will one day find out that everything is conscious and it's just a matter of "how much." Hmm, maybe this indicates I'm a Camp #2 person? I'm finding it hard to classify myself. Maybe someone else will find it easier.

1. ^{^}

   Despite its name, I don't think there's anything in the theory that says consciousness has to arise from biological components per se, just that consciousness is a natural byproduct of at least some information processing systems, most notably the biological ones that exists in our skulls.

I wonder how much camp #1 correlates with aphantasia.