
The Consciousness Deniers - o_nate
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/
======
mannykannot
The author almost finds his way out of his impasse:

"Proponents of this view insist that their position does not eliminate
consciousness, but instead reduces it to something else. They’re right,
formally speaking... When you reduce chemical processes to physical processes,
you don’t deny that chemical processes exist."

...but instead of following through, he returns to the truisms of his chosen
tribe: "All true. And yet, to reduce consciousness to behavior and
dispositions to behavior is to eliminate it. To say that consciousness is
really nothing more than (dispositions to) behavior is to say that it doesn’t
exist." The use of the phrase "really nothing more than..." is the response of
someone who doesn't want to pursue the issue further.

~~~
goatlover
> The use of the phrase "really nothing more than..." is the response of
> someone who doesn't want to pursue the issue further.

I don't see how consciousness can simply be predispositions to behavior,
because I have conscious experiences without any behavior. It also doesn't
make any definitional sense. My experience of seeing red isn't the same thing
as whatever behavior I might have as result.

~~~
mannykannot
The way I look at it, conscious experiences are behavior: the behavior of an
information-processing organ that has, in some mysterious but not necessarily
magical way, become aware, to some extent, that it is not only an actor in its
own model of what its sensory inputs mean, but also that it is a special
actor, the one that actually creates the model.

Seeing red may be less mysterious than that - is it anything more than
recalling similar sensations, and things (including abstract things like
information/language constructs and emotions) that were associated with it?

~~~
xaedes
I totally see it your way, that conscious experiences are just (internal)
behaviour. But I don't think that conscious experience itself creates the
model of itself and the rest. It merely views or recalls or traverses it. It
certainly also has some kind of influence. But I like to seperate it from the
unconscious rest that happens.

------
Xcelerate
I like to make a distinction between what I consider "neurobiological
consciousness" — that which can be studied in a lab using the scientific
method — and "experiential consciousness" — that which cannot be studied,
because it is only capable of being experienced by one person and thus fails
the criteria for reproducibility.

I agree with the article's author that it is bizarre that there are people who
outright reject the existence of experiential consciousness. If I were to make
a list of _everything_ in order of my subjective probability that each item
actually exists, experiential consciousness would be at the top of the list.
Everything else on the list could effectively be faked by an advanced
simulation technology.

I'm not sure that there is actually a resolution to the dilemma, because
resolving it would require an experiment that can be reproduced, and by
definition, something that is capable of being experienced by only one person
cannot be experienced by another person. So there's really no way out of the
mess. The "believers" and "deniers" will be forced to remain at a stalemate.

~~~
Retra
>and "experiential consciousness" — that which cannot be studied, because it
is only capable of being experienced by one person and thus fails the criteria
for reproducibility.

How do you even know it exists if it can't be studied? How is anybody supposed
to know what you're even talking about if they can't recreate it in their own
brains?

When you get down to it, even though the processes occurring in our brains are
extremely complex, there is nothing that indicates that the behavior in one
cannot be reproduced in another, within any given scale of accuracy.

So you only _presume_ that it cannot be studied, and you _assume_ that it is a
different kind of process. With no reason for it to be either, when it could
simply be something currently out of our reach.

~~~
goatlover
> How do you even know it exists if it can't be studied?

Because you experience your own and therefore assume that other people (and
probably many animals) have experiences do to the similarity in behavior and
biology.

> How is anybody supposed to know what you're even talking about if they can't
> recreate it in their own brains?

We do so by imagining other people feeling things like we do. This can be a
problem when we come across people with experiences different enough from our
own. I don't know whether I can imagine giving birth, since I'm male. I also
can't imagine what it's like to see in more than three primary colors, but
some animals can.

~~~
Retra
>Because you experience your own and therefore assume that other people (and
probably many animals) have experiences do to the similarity in behavior and
biology.

This is called 'studying it'.

Different experiences do not preclude understanding. You can't imagine "what
it's like", but "what it's like" is always a biological process of analogy.
And you _can_ convey understanding of subjective experience through analogies.
That's the whole point of art.

Just because you can only get arbitrarily close to understanding something
doesn't mean you can't understand it. By that measure, you don't even
understand your own senses - they are transient, fleeting, and reflexive. But
we're not supposed to deny the _entire_ concept of knowing and understanding,
are we?

Ok, so you don't see more than three primary colors. Doesn't mean you can't
understand it. You know the difference between being in a room with only red
light versus being in a room with white light? Then you know what it is to see
more colors.

Personal anecdote: I've felt things in dreams that I've never felt awake. I
can imagine sensations I've never experienced while awake. So I can't believe
that it's impossible to feel things outside of our current experiences or to
experience things arbitrarily close to as how others do. Especially since we
can hook electrodes up to our brains, do computations outside, and arbitrarily
increase the state space of our brains. So like I said: out of reach doesn't
mean impossible.

------
lists
As a software engineer whose original line of work was continental European
philosophy, its striking to read things like this because it shows how little
we've progressed in philosophical thinking since Immanuel Kant's Critique of
Pure Reason. The radical idea in Kant is that _subjective experience has an
objective structure_ : that means we can grant the validity of scientific
observation, the key insight being that what you feel and see empirically
(what gets called qualia), doesn't exhaust the definition of subjective
experience, but is derivative of its essential structure. Once you make these
distinctions, talking about why scientific observation is valid is easy.

The fault is that this doesn't completely eliminate a certain nuanced form of
solipsism, and this is where Hegel comes in, but does make strong guarantees
that gravity won't stop working the same way tomorrow.

~~~
Aqueous
I'm also a software engineer, and I never turned philosophy into a job - it
was just a major for me in college. Nevertheless it's interesting that we are
both drawn to Kant, as his seemed to be the only suitable reply to the radical
skepticism you're left with near the end of Descartes' Meditations (Even
Descartes' disproof of his own skepticism is inadequate compared to Kant.) To
this date Kant's response to Cartesian and Humean skepticism is the only one I
find remotely compelling. It also lines up with my intuition that the form of
subjective experience has properties which make subjective experience itself
not entirely discoverable by analyzing first principles - those conditions
being space and time, concepts that cannot be derived analytically but must be
known prior to experience. And in that sense space and time have objective
reality in a sense, as conditions of our perception. Our experience must
already conform to the conditions of space and time in order for us to have it
at all - which means that some reality exists, even though it has no knowable
character independently of our perception.

I don't know why Kant has not experienced a resurgence, as his philosophy
seems more and more relevant the more scientific theories like quantum
mechanics are developed - theories which intimately tie up experience and
objective reality and which, like Kant, both declare the knowledge of things-
in-themselves, independent of perception, impossible and at the same time
affirm that things-in-themselves exist. This is something no philosophy, with
the possible exception of Kant's, has ever been able to conclusively
demonstrate.

~~~
whatshisface
Quantum mechanics doesn't necessarily make any statement about experience. It
only seems to after "leaving" an assumption in your explanations about what
measurement means for you to find later. (Only one out of the many
interpretations involves "the part where the scientist observes the system,"
and it takes the specialness of measurement as axiomatic for philosphical
reasons.

------
arbre
Disclaimer: I have some meditation, observation of the mind and advaita/Zen
practice.

If you look at all your experience since you are born, it all happened in your
mind, exclusively. The faces of your parents, your first girlfriend, your job,
swimming, eating all sums up to senses which all appear in your
mind/conciousness. So it is not only that conciousness exists, it is what
everything you have ever known is made of. You can claim you experience
something that is outside of you, but there is no proof for that. There will
never be a proof. A proof would happen in your mind as well. The thoughts of
'outside of mind' will also happen in your mind. Based on experience
conciousness is the only thing that really exists.

~~~
zombieprocesses
> If you look at all your experience since you are born, it all happened in
> your mind, exclusively.

It happened in your brain. Whether it happened in your mind or even whether
the mind exists is up for debate. As we learn more about the brain, the mind
recedes and it may disappear altogether. Just like how our increased
understanding of physiology ended any serious notion of the soul.

The issue of the mind suffers from the same problems that soul did. Can a soul
get old? Of course not. Our bodies get old. Can the mind get drunk? Of course
not, our brains get drunk. If you take psychotropic drugs, do these drugs
target the mind or the brain? Obviously the brain.

~~~
sdfin
There's no understanding about how "it happens in the brain". Of course that
supposition is the most reasonable one when we accept a materialistic
paradigm. I don't discard any explanation, but I find it difficult to imagine
how a material thing, the brain with its neurons and electric impulses and
neurotransmiters, can be able to generate what philosophers of mind call
qualia, which is something apparently non material.

I have an experience. How my brain/hardware causes the experience? Is the
experience material? Perhaps. I wonder: how? e.g.: when I see a cup, where in
my brain is the subjective experience of the cup? Is it coded as electric
impulses? What decodes it and translates the impulses to qualia?

~~~
zombieprocesses
> but I find it difficult to imagine how a material thing, the brain with its
> neurons and electric impulses and neurotransmiters, can be able to generate
> what philosophers of mind call qualia, which is something apparently non
> material.

There was a time when people said the same thing about the body. How can a
slab of muscle and bones move? What is moving the body? Of course, it has to
be a soul. The same thing with the heavens. Look at those magnificent planets
and stars. Certainly gods must reside there and are moving them.

> I have an experience. How my brain/hardware causes the experience? Is the
> experience material? Perhaps. I wonder: how? e.g.: when I see a cup, where
> in my brain is the subjective experience of the cup? Is it coded as electric
> impulses? What decodes it and translates the impulses to qualia?

This is basic philosophy questions. It can't be answered by philosophy. It has
to be answered by science ( neuroscience ).

Honestly, philosophically pondering about the brain/mind right now is akin to
pondering about the gods/planets a few hundred years ago. Or philosophizing
about where the soul reside in our body ( pineal gland? heart? liver? )

Now, we see how absurd those assumptions were because we advanced
scientifically and we gained knowledge. I'm fairly certain the same will
happen with the mind/brain questions.

All I know is that there is no "qualia" without the brain. Applying occam's
razor, why do we need the mind? Other than as a crutch for our lack of
understanding of the brain?

~~~
sdfin
> There was a time when people said the same thing about the body.

Movement, electric impulses, nerves, are observable/measurable stuff. I'm not
sure that your example is analogous to qualia. You suppose that qualia is
material. It may be, still I find it very hard to imagine how it could be.
What is our subjective experience made of? How electricity and
neurotransmitters cause subjective experience? It appears that there's a gap
between objects and qualia because only I can see my qualia, while everybody
can see a brain or measure electric impulses.

Anyway, I like your hypothesis that it could be answered by science. It can
lead to interesting experiments and theories.

~~~
zombieprocesses
> It appears that there's a gap between objects and qualia because only I can
> see my qualia, while everybody can see a brain or measure electric impulses.

That could be true. Or it could be true that you don't really exist and the
subjective experience is an illusion. The subjective self seems to be just
another iteration of the unique soul. The soul is what makes you you and the
soul is why you experience things.

> Anyway, I like your hypothesis that it could be answered by science.

It's the only way we can settle things one way or the other. We can argue
about gods on mount olympus til the cows come home. The only real way to be
sure is to actually climb the mountain and see for ourselves.

My inclination at the moment is the mind is fiction. We no more have a "mind"(
aka brain's soul ) than plants which move to capture more sunlight have a
"mind".

We just have to patiently wait for science to advance to answer the mind/brain
questions. In the meantime, it is fun to philosophize about it.

------
0xcolton
I'm happy to see this article posted here. Many people in technology seem so
sure that AI is on some kind of path to singularity, and don't give respect to
the deep controversy of that belief. Merely examining how the brain 'works' is
missing the point. The nature of consciousness (qualia) that this author is
talking about is not the same as the neurobiological machinery that sustains
it.

Think about the limit at which the problem of consciousness is falsifyable or
measurable. Qualia is whatever is beyond that. Its subjective experience.

From the author:

> Perhaps it’s not surprising that most Deniers deny that they’re Deniers. “Of
> course, we agree that consciousness or experience exists,” they say—but when
> they say this they mean something that specifically excludes qualia.

~~~
thisrod
At some point, your phone might tell you that it has subjective experiences.
What will you do then?

~~~
Koshkin
One can do nothing about that: a simulation can be indistinguishable from the
real thing.

~~~
bcjordan
Consciousness: the ability to convince people (including yourself) you're as
special as they are.

~~~
mannykannot
That, I think, is the premise behind the Turing test.

------
pdonis
This author clearly does not understand the actual beliefs of the people he
calls "Deniers". Here is the "smoking gun" paragraph:

 _One of the strangest things the Deniers say is that although it seems that
there is conscious experience, there isn’t really any conscious experience:
the seeming is, in fact, an illusion. The trouble with this is that any such
illusion is already and necessarily an actual instance of the thing said to be
an illusion. Suppose you’re hypnotized to feel intense pain. Someone may say
that you’re not really in pain, that the pain is illusory, because you haven’t
really suffered any bodily damage. But to seem to feel pain is to be in pain.
It’s not possible here to open up a gap between appearance and reality,
between what is and what seems._

And here is how a typical "Denier" would respond:

The move you are making here is not actually a statement of fact; it's a
_definition_. You are _defining_ "qualia" to be "those things for which
seeming is identical to being". Which is fine as far as it goes; you can't
argue with a definition. But then you must also admit that this thing you've
defined, "qualia", does _not_ have some other important properties: for
example, your qualia do _not_ infallibly tell you about your own internal
state. You admit this, because you give the example of someone being
hypnotized to feel intense pain even though they have not suffered any actual
bodily damage.

In short, the problem is not that some people (the "Deniers") deny that
consciousness exists. The problem is that other people (like the author of
this article) claim that consciousness, real consciousness, has properties
that it does not, and cannot, have.

