The hard problem of consciousness

[skiba]

If you want someone else to share the experience of chocolate that you have, you need to provide their neurons with the same signals that yours received -- the raw binary, if you will -- and this is impossible for an unassisted human.

Yes, I believe in the future we will have the ability to copy and transfer the same exact, electrical patter to another human brain. So, possibly this subjective experience problem will go away.

Is the brain a physical system? If it is, it can be modelled by a "computational device". If it isn't, what are the non-physical components?

I think its a combination of both. I wont start speculating on the non-physical, i'll just say it might be in the field quantum mechanics.
All I know for certain is that something vital is missing from the model.

Can you let me know precisely what it is to "enjoy math" and how it is you know whether you or any other person enjoys math? If enjoyment can only be defined subjectively, how do you know that your enjoyment of math really should be using the same word ("enjoy") as, say, Darat's enjoyment of math?

No I can't. I can only hope we are talking about the same thing when we say "enjoy".

Anything asserted without evidence can be dismissed just as easily. You are defining "experience" in such a manner as to exclude "doing";

No, I dont exclude doing, only experience of doing. Can't there be a "doing" without an experience? All the "no HPC folks" here want to keep these two aspects together. Why is that?

In other words it does not 'just compute', it learns an associative response to the inputs, which is plastic.

This has great implications.

I know, "just computation" is a gross simplification

It's very dynamic and flexible, I'll give you that, but still based on computation. (as far as we know)

 

[Piscivore]

Personally I think the issue is more that people who are obsessively rational don't feel many emotions and so can't understand what the HPC is all about.

Nick

Is that Argument ad Spockinem?

 

[leon_heller]

I think its a combination of both. I wont start speculating on the non-physical, i'll just say it might be in the field quantum mechanics.
All I know for certain is that something vital is missing from the model.

What is missing?

Leon

 

[skiba]

Personally I think the issue is more that people who are obsessively rational don't feel many emotions and so can't understand what the HPC is all about.

Nick

Yes, that's what I think too. Some people are so mind bound and logical that it seems hard to convey. I am one of those mind bound people, but I've had my moments of "peace of mind." Maybe some meditation would do good....

 

[Darat]

Doesn't the HPC require an assumption of dualism before we can say it is in fact a problem?

 

[Darat]

So if you don't agree that p-zombies could exist you are a p-zombie! Wow!

 

[cyborg]

Personally I think the issue is more that people who are obsessively rational don't feel many emotions and so can't understand what the HPC is all about.

Personally I think the issue is that people who are so enamored by the idea that they are a ghost in the machine refuse to acknowledge that there is a machine in the ghost and they can't understand illusions are all about.

 

[rocketdodger]

For sure there are. Can you rationally define an emotion? Can you rationally define "I?"

Nick

Yes.

Emotion --> feeling I get when I am feeling an emotion.

I --> Me.

Why are those definitions unacceptable?

 

[Mercutio]

No I can't. I can only hope we are talking about the same thing when we say "enjoy".

There is really only one way we could be talking about the same thing--if we are talking about the set of publicly available referents that were the examples used while teaching us the word "enjoy".

No, I dont exclude doing, only experience of doing. Can't there be a "doing" without an experience? All the "no HPC folks" here want to keep these two aspects together. Why is that?

Turtles.

Doing
Experience of doing
Sensation of experience of doing
Perception of sensation of experience of doing
Feeling of perception of sensation of experience of doing
Qualia of feeling of perception of sensation of experience of doing

As Darat implies, it is only the assumption of dualism that initially creates "these two aspects". It is not that we are denying an additional something; rather, it is that we are not making up an additional something in the first place.

 

[westprog]

Doesn't the HPC require an assumption of dualism before we can say it is in fact a problem?

No.

 

[westprog]

Yes.

Emotion --> feeling I get when I am feeling an emotion.

I --> Me.

Why are those definitions unacceptable?

They are rational. They are also understandable to most people.

They are, OTOH, somewhat circular.

 

[westprog]

Personally I think the issue is that people who are so enamored by the idea that they are a ghost in the machine refuse to acknowledge that there is a machine in the ghost and they can't understand illusions are all about.

If there's an illusion, what is experiencing the illusion?

 

[cyborg]

If there's an illusion, what is experiencing the illusion?

The machine.

 

[westprog]

Thank you for illustrating my point. What you are forgetting (it has been a while, after all) is that the same assumption about that other person's internal state was also made about yours, by the people in your life who taught you to label your internal state. There is, of course, no way to know if your internal state and mine are at all similar (it is, as you say, an assumption). But we can and do know that the publicly available referents that taught you and them are the same. These are the behaviors that correspond to your and the others' presumed internal state.
But you do label it, with words taught you by people who did not experience it. You cannot--simply cannot--know if what you feel as "love" is what any other person on the planet feels. The "qualia" is not and cannot be the bedrock of what is known.

The qualia are the hard problem. It's the fact that they are inherently subjective, and individual, that makes them nearly impossible to pin down. Ignore the qualia, and we just have behaviour. We can pretend that experience = computation, and we all work like thermostats.


I've posted this before, but it seems to cover this case.

The Mystery Of Consciousness[/I]]
But in comtemporary philosophy the most common move is to insist that materialism must be right and to eliminate consciousness by reducing it to something else. Daniel C. Dennett is an obvious example of a philosopher who adopts this position. Favourite candidates for the phenomena to which consciousness must be reduced are brain states described in purely "physical" terms and computer programs. But... all of these reductionist attempts to eliminate consciousness are as hopeless as the dualism they were designed to supplant. In a way they are worse, because they deny the real existence of the conscious states they were supposed to explain.

You can substitute "assume" or "infer" for "know" in that sentence, and it would be much more accurate.

If that's the case, I can't ever use the word "know". If the momentary singular experience isn't real, then what is?

 

[westprog]

The machine.

I'm not aware of machines experiencing illusions.

 

[Piggy]

Doesn't the HPC require an assumption of dualism before we can say it is in fact a problem?

See, this is what I don't get.

I've actually read thru the thread, and a lot of this back-and-forth just loses me.

Maybe I'm missing something.

I see the HPC as a very real problem, and one amenable to inquiry.

I don't see how dualism has to be involved.

If I understand correctly, the "hard problem" consists merely in explaining how our brains produce the experience of self and sensation.

This is a different question from how the brain processes sensory input and how it generates responses, although obviously the latter are inextricable from the former.

I mean, we have no reason to expect that a rock has anything like a conscious experience. We know that humans do. It's reasonable to assume that apes, elephants, and other mammals do, too.

If Dennett is correct with his brain-in-a-brain theory, then insects and arachnids have no conscious experience, and yet they process input and produce responses.

So the problem is real, seems to me. You can tackle all the small problems, yet that doesn't necessarily tell you how it is that I have the experience of sitting here typing, how I'm aware of it.

 

[Piscivore]

I mean, we have no reason to expect that a rock has anything like a conscious experience. We know that humans do. It's reasonable to assume that apes, elephants, and other mammals do, too.

If Dennett is correct with his brain-in-a-brain theory, then insects and arachnids have no conscious experience, and yet they process input and produce responses.

The thing that rocks, insects and arachnids seem to lack that humans, apes, elephants, and other mammals have seems to be memory. Memory seems to be sufficient to explain "experience of self and sensation". Why does consciousness need be any more complicated than that?

 

[Hokulele]

The thing that rocks, insects and arachnids seem to lack that humans, apes, elephants, and other mammals have seems to be memory. Memory seems to be sufficient to explain "experience of self and sensation". Why does consciousness need be any more complicated than that?

I disagree. Bees have demonstrated that they can "remember" the location of a food source relative to the hive, and can communicate that location to other hive members. This was one of the examples in my longer post right after the pie derail.

 

[Piggy]

The thing that rocks, insects and arachnids seem to lack that humans, apes, elephants, and other mammals have seems to be memory. Memory seems to be sufficient to explain "experience of self and sensation". Why does consciousness need be any more complicated than that?

Computers have memory.

I don't mean to be flip, but it's certainly possible to consider memory apart from consciousness.

I don't see how storage and retrieval of information is equivalent to having an experience of your own existence.

One thing we all do know is that we do have this experience.

One thing we can assume from all the evidence we have about the brain is that this experience is entirely the result of the activity of the brain.

Therefore, it's a meaningful and significant question to consider how the brain produces this effect.

I can't see how it can be simply equated with memory.

 

[Piscivore]

I disagree. Bees have demonstrated that they can "remember" the location of a food source relative to the hive, and can communicate that location to other hive members. This was one of the examples in my longer post right after the pie derail.

Blast. I forgot the damn bees.