Who lacks the qualia of consciousness?

Do you mean the state of having conscious experiences at all, or the qualia of having/being a self? Those seem different to me, but you seem to talk about both.

People with Cotard delusion seem to come close. And there is of course Simon Browne [LW · GW], who explicitly claimed to be "utterly divested of consciousness."

And you have to wonder: long-term memory (SDAM) seems closely associated with aphantasia; and many people vary drastically on levels of 'internal monologue'. If you take someone with no internal monologue, aphantasia, and SDAM, what's left?

I'm not sure if this counts but: the experience you describe as "a vivid sensation of my own presence" is something I only have rarely, in flashes, and it always freaks me out. It's happened to me periodically for my whole life, and I've come to believe it falls under the label of dissociation.

Most of the time, I walk around basically on autopilot. I have feelings and wants, and I can introspect and remember things, but I'm not paying attention to the fact that it's myself doing those things; I just do them. This is very qualitatively different from what it's like to dissociate. When I dissociate, I am very aware that I am a brain in a body, that there's something it's like to be me and not anybody else, that everything around me was constructed by humans, etc. This sounds more like the "vivid sensation" you talked about, but I'm not sure. If so, I don't entirely lack the qualia of consciousness, but I don't have it most of the time, and it freaks me out when I do have it.

Over on Facebook (I don't know if it's possible to link to a Facebook post, but h/t Alexander Kruel) and Twitter, the subject of missing qualia has come up. Some people are color-blind. This deficiency can be objectively demonstrated by tasks such as the Ishihara patterns

Lacking the ability to distinguish colors well means your brain does not know which qualia to use, not that it doesn't have all of the qualia available. I'm red/green color blind (according to the tests, and difficulty determining the color of small things), but I have very distinct red and green qualia. Most of the time my experience feels like "I'm unsure if this line is red or green", which is different than "this line is red-green, as there is not actually a difference between the thing people call 'red' and the thing people call 'green'".

However, I have also had the experience of having red text show up as bright green and then switch on me. I was reading part of the sequences back in the day, and I could tell from the context that the word "GREEN" was supposed to be red (stroop tests), but my brain took that as a cue that the text was supposed to be green. When I brought my face closer to the screen to check, the text flipped to red. When I backed up it returned to green. In between, individual pieces of each letter would start to flip color.

So I shall try to describe the experience. I have a vivid sensation of my own presence, my own self. This is the thing I am pointing at when I say that I am conscious. Whether I sit in meditation or in the midst of life, there I am. Indeed, more vividly in meditation, because then, that is where I direct my attention. But only in dreamless sleep is it absent.

Can you be much more specific about what you mean?

For example, I have had dreams in which:

• I was me, walking around and doing stuff, and aware that I was dreaming.
• I was me, walking around and doing stuff, from the usual perspective, but unaware that I was dreaming.
• I was someone else (with a different name, history, body etc.), walking around and doing stuff, from the usual perspective.
• I was me, walking around and doing stuff, but viewed from a third-person vantage point.
• There were some people. One of them stood out, and was the "focus", but they felt more like the main character of a movie than "me".
• There were some people, and none of them stood out from one another.

In which of these cases was I a p-zombie?

However, dreams to me are vague and fuzzy in comparison to the real deal, being awake. While I'm awake, I typically have what could be called a "self" with the following properties:

1. Spatially, my self is located behind my eyes, I think?
2. My self comes with knowledge and expectations of my personality and behavior. Like "I'm a professional, I'll behave professionally" when working, or "wheee, kitty!" when in proximity to a feline or image thereof.
3. My self comes with a mood. Like "I just woke up, and am groggy, ugghh".

I think these properties are generally lacking when I dream, but it's hard to tell. E.g., I recall dreams in which I was afraid, but not dreams in which I was grumpy or groggy.

After meditating for a long time, I sometimes enter a state of mind that lacks some of these properties:

1. I'm not sure about the spatial location thing?
2. The knowledge and expectation of my personality and behavior is still available, but feels less important and it feels more like I have a choice at each moment.
3. I tend to view moods as their component pieces. E.g. "I'm grumpy" becomes "physical sensation plus change in movement of attention plus bias in what thoughts arise".

Beyond of these specifics, this states of mind tend to come with a very strange feeling of something missing that was ordinarily there.

Which of these properties, when lacking, makes me a p-zombie? Or have I not captured it; is this thing that I call a "self" totally different from what you mean by "qualia of consciousness"? Either way, what properties does your "qualia of consciousness" have?

Epistemic status: generally muddled about all of this; suspicious that my ontology is wrong; certain that most attempts at communication around this topic go poorly.

I recall a conversation about consciousness that I came out of convinced I was a p-zombie, because the description of consciousness didn't describe anything going on in my head. I feel confused about what you're even referring to when you say "a vivid sensation of my own presence."

I don't have any experience of my self as a distinct thing, though it's possible that it's just always there and I can't tell it's there because I have no concept of it not being there, if that makes sense. I haven't meditated much, perhaps doing more will make it more distinct?

I can introspect fine usually, but the me doing the looking doesn't feel separate from the me being looked at. When I do things, I just kind of... do them? It doesn't feel like there's a specific "me" doing things.

I don't know if it's possible to link to a Facebook post

The timestamp of a Facebook post should have a link to its URL, letting you link to the post if it's a public one. (This is a common UI convention: in general, if you want to link to an individual post-like-thing, see if its timestamp would happen to have the link.) E.g. this is the link to the post I assume you were thinking of.

Some people are color-blind. This deficiency can be objectively demonstrated by tasks such as the Ishihara patterns.

This does not mean that color-blind people are missing qualia. In fact we know for sure that at least some color-blind individuals still possess the qualia of the "missing" color.

As a general rule people that cannot smell/touch ect. simply lack the receptors for these kind of experiences; this doesn't mean they lack the qualia.

In one of the sub-comments, I thought about the tests that identified mental-imagery, and started thinking of how you might test for several variants of "lack of sense of self" or some related attributes.

Related Tests for inner-sense or model of self

No-qualia seems challenging to test. But "no model of self" (one form of "lack-of-self-awareness") seems halfway-there, or at least in the correct spirit of the question? And I think that could be tested reliably; just get a group of people to predict their own behavior, and watch that subset of the group who reliably fail catastrophically at this.

For lack of consistency and other-awareness... There's a Nazi (ETA: Eichmann) who seemed likely to be a troublingly-vivid example of "no consistent worldview or other-awareness"; all his words and beliefs were inconsistent platitudes, and he seemed genuinely surprised when Jewish judges didn't feel sympathy for the difficulty in his attempts to get promoted by doing a "good job" optimizing trains for death. Unfortunately, I can't track down his name. If someone knows who I'm talking about, I'd love to be pointed at an article about his strange psychology again.

Lack-of-attachment-to-internal-identity seems to be another semi-related thing. I feel like there are some things where I care about "identity-alignment" a great deal, and other matters that others clearly care about where I just lack any feeling of identity euphoria/dysphoria around the matter regardless of what I do. I suspect there are some people who lack either sensation altogether. Probably some fraction of those people come across as identity chameleons; people who switch out identities according to external incentives, because they have no internal reason not to.

(Personally, meditation updated me considerably towards a reduced attachment to internal-identities, but there are still some I'm attached to and care about maintaining.)

Alexithymia is a phenomenon where you lack awareness of your own emotions, sometimes even as you are acting them out. This seems easy to test in a manner similar to green/red color-blindness; have the person try to appraise what sort of emotion they're feeling, and then read their circumstances or watch their behavior for a read of which emotion it actually is, and see who usually seems to misjudge it (or believe they're not feeling emotions entirely).

Another p-zombie variant

There's a different p-zombie subtype I've been thinking about a great deal myself..

If you set up a system where there's an observer, an actor, and an environment, then there are 2 kinds of consciousness:

• The observer influences, controls, or is the actor who does things in the environment
  • A policy feedback loop
• The observer is just modeling what the actor will do in the environment
  • A one-way modeling of the agent

I suspect the later can feel "conscious" even if the observer never influences the actor in any way.

Humans are usually a bit of both, but someone who only has "consciousness" in the later capacity feels a bit like a... "consciousness hitchhiking on a q-zombie" to me.

(Related: The Elephant and The Rider)

A lot of people seem to associate consciousness with moral worth. Hence, it seems like admitting you lack consciousness is rather dangerous: you may lose value in the eyes of other people.

1. In regard to mental imagery and other lack of qualia phenomena, it seems to me that the lack of qualia can be in the other directions in all cases. For example, people who say that they can form mental images, may not have qualia for real life imagery, so both experiences are more of the same to them.

How you can distinguish between those two possibilities?

2. People without qualia (if exist) will have their “real” interpretation of stuff like "vivid sensation of my own presence", and i think that most definitions will failed to find them.

And to be more specific to your definition - non-qualia person will still have awareness for his presence and a self. And still will have more awareness for what he think and his body when meditate.

"Hi, my name is Lion Kimbro. I identify as conscious."

The discussion on this post reminded me of some incidents when I was overcome with strong emotion as a child.

I had a lot of issues controlling my emotions of anger and sadness, to the point that after other children angered me I exploded in hot, violent rage. Every such time I felt like I lost control of myself and was more of an observer. I needed to lock myself away from the world and let all that anger out somehow, until I came down and calmed down. Looking back, I think that (paradoxically) I felt more conscious during those moments. I think this might be because the overwhelming emotion purged all complex thought and made me focus less on the outside environment, so I could pay more attention to myself and my experience.

In relation to my emotional issues, I've learned to suppress certain kinds of emotions. I don't think I've truly felt angry since I was about 11, and I haven't shut down from sadness since I was 15 or so.

I still cry when seeing some movies (I blame the music - it's always sad music that gets me), and I feel irritated when someone annoys me, but I don't feel like shutting down, or that 'I want to fucking murder someone, so I better close myself in a bathroom stall until I calm down' anymore.

This means that I can't really experience emotions the same way other people do, and I have trouble with empathy, since I had to dull those emotions to be able to work with other people, as otherwise I would can up minor irritations until I exploded violently. In this way, I guess you could consider my experience as less conscious in some way.

I prefer not to form an opinion either way as "consciousness" is way too foggy as a concept, and (as we can see in adjacent comments) people (mildly) disagree on what they mean when they talk about it.

I feel a sense of impossibility that "anything could exist at all".

I feel a sense of impossibility when I contemplate the recursive nature of perceiving myself perceiving thoughts.

I feel a sense of impossibility about something unspeakable that comes before and is outside anything else.

How are we sure we mean the same thing by the word consciousness though? All I can tell for sure is that ppl think consciousness is "impossible" (cus they try to invent quantum phlogiston to explain it), and something about consciousness engendering moral worth.

I don't think I'd have less moral worth if I couldn't recognize myself in a mirror. I still have moral worth when I'm not introspecting.

I get the sense of impossibility but I get it about lots of things, e.g. Greg Egan's dust from permutation city.

I feel like maybe I'm missing something other people are experiencing here, but maybe not.