Consciousness affecting the world

A question, just to make sure we're not totally talking past each other: What is the kind of evidence that would lead you to update in the direction of dualism being true?

Because yours doesn't do any work; as Eliezer said, if you postulate different laws for consciousnesses then you don't actually end up less confused about how consciousness works.

I don't see why this has to be the case. We posited different laws for fields (they don't behave like particles), but that doesn't mean they don't do any work. The dualists I'm describing (and an actual example may or may not exist) aren't describing some completely parallel psychological realm unconnected to the physical realm. They believe one can build good theories where fundamental psychological variables are causally entangled with physical variables, kind of like field variables are causally entangled with particle variables.

I agree that if these psychological properties are completely epiphenomenal then they do no work, but I don't see why they'd have to be. That's a substantive question. Maybe it will turn out that laws like the Weber-Fechner law are the best we can do in the relevant domain, that we can't come up with equally useful generalizations that don't appeal to sensations (a hypothetical example; for all I know, we have already done better in this particular case). In that case, our best theory has sensations as an irreducible component, but I don't see why that makes it mysterious or magical.

If successful reductions are evidence for the general thesis of reductionism, then the absence of a successful reduction is evidence against the thesis. Weak evidence, perhaps, but evidence nonetheless. And the longer the absence persists, the stronger evidence it is.

I'd be more charitable if dualists got their alternative laws to do actual predictive work, even if they just predicted properties of personal experience. But no, it happens that the people who do all the useful work are neurologists. This is the universe saying "hint" pretty loudly.

Well, psychophysics is a field, even though it doesn't presume dualism. Dualists are claiming that we can't do better. Their position is largely a negative one, and so difficult to construct a research program around. I generally dislike positions of that kind in science, but that doesn't mean they couldn't be right. Also, I suspect the intersection of "dualists" and "neurologists" is not the empty set. Some of the neurologists doing useful work might be dualists of some stripe.

In any case, I didn't intend to debate the efficacy (or lack thereof) of dualists. Like I said, I'm no dualist. Perhaps all dualists are crappy philosophers, terrible scientists and horribly confused individuals. Doesn't affect the point I was making.

Neither do I, I think it's evidentially true.

Um... OK, then I don't see where we disagree. In the original comment you responded to, I was simply saying that "consciousness" isn't just a label for a set of neural interactions. If you think dualism is false based on evidence, then I presume you agree. After all, if you believed that "consciousness" simply meant a set of neural interactions, then "consciousness is not reducible to neural interactions" would be false based on the meanings of the words alone, not based on empirical evidence.

Ah, I think I understand your position better now. Thanks for clarifying.

So, OK... if I understand you correctly, you're saying that when a building is burning, we can formally describe that process as a property of the building, but when a program is executing, that isn't a property of the program, but rather of the system executing the program, such as a brain.

And therefore you want to talk about consciousness as a property of program-executors (physical embodiments of minds) rather than of programs themselves.

Yes? Have I got that more or less right?

Sure, I would agree with that as far as it goes, though I don't think it's particularly important.

I would similarly say that I can't actually write a program that calculates the square root of 200, because programs can't do any such thing. Rather, it is the program executor that performs the calculation, making use of the program.

And I would similarly say that this distinction, while true enough, isn't particularly important.

Digressing a little... it's pretty common for humans to use metonymy to emphasize what we consider the important part of the system. So it's no surprise that we're in the habit of talking metonymically about what "the program" does, since most of us consider the program the important part... that is, we consider two different program-executors running the same program identical in the most important ways, and consider a single program-executor running two different programs (at different times) to be different in the most important ways.

So it's unlikely that we'll stop talking that way, since it expresses something we consider important.

But, sure, I agree that when we want more precision for some reason it can be useful to recognize that it's actually the program executor that is exhibiting the behavior which the program specifies (such as consciousness, or calculating the square root of 200), not the program itself.

So, going back to your original comment with that context in mind:

Suppose I just wrote down on paper the states of a simulated brain at time t, t1, t2, etc. Would the model be conscious?

In normal conversation I would say "yes."

But to be more precise about this: in this case there is a system (call it S) comprising your brain, a piece of paper, and various other things. S is executing some unspecified program that generates a series of mind-executing-system states (in this case, simulated brain-states). Not all programs cause consciousness when executed, of course, any more than all programs cause the calculation of the square root of 200. But if S is executing such a program, then S is conscious while executing it.

I'm not exactly sure what "the model" refers to in this case, but if the model includes the relevant parts of S then yes, the model is conscious.

Is it still conscious if I simulate step t1, and then wander away for a while?

This, too, is to some extent a matter of semantics.

If system S2 spends 5 seconds calculating the first N digits of pi, pauses to do something else for a second, then spends 5 seconds calculating the next N digits of pi, it's not particularly interesting to ask whether S2 spent 10 or 11 seconds calculating those 2N digits. If I want to be more precise, I can say S2 is calculating pi for the intervals of time around each step in the execution, so if we choose intervals short enough S2's calculation is intermittent, while if we choose intervals long enough it is continuous. But there is no right answer about the proper interval length to choose; it depends on what kind of analysis we're doing.

Similarly, if S generates state t1 and then disintegrates (for example, you wander away for a while) and then later reintegrates (you return) and generates t2, whether we consider S to remain conscious in the interim is essentially a function of the intervals we're using for analysis.

My sense is that consciousness is a property of biological humans in the physical world and that it's not necessarily useful as a description for anything else. It's a social construction and probably doesn't have any useful summary in terms of physics or computer science or properties of neurons.

Why do you believe this? It doesn't seem to follow from the above: even if consciousness is a property of program-executors rather than of the programs themselves, it doesn't follow that only biological humans can execute the appropriate programs.