Only had the pleasure of lunching with him once as a young researcher at an a-life workshop. The man really had that gentle giant demeanor and impressed me as a true renaissance man with great breath of knowledge.
I really appreciated Daniel Dennett's work, but I couldn't get past his compatiblist take on free-will. It seemed to just try to salvage a phrase for the sake of some fear of the mass's psychological break from believing they don't have free will, because people conflate that with not having a choice.
If folks haven't heard Sam Harris' take on the topic, I encourage you to read his book or listen to one of his many podcast episodes on the topic.
> I really appreciated Daniel Dennett's work, but I couldn't get past his compatiblist take on free-will
I really don't understand people's objections to it. Free will never had a denotational definition that everyone agreed on, it had a set of vague, imprecise connotational meanings, and the free will debate has always been about determining whether we can devise a clear denotational definition that makes of agency and how we reason about moral responsibility. We can, and that's Compatibilism.
Moreover, studies I empirical philosophy have validated that most lay people experimental on moral reasoning questions largely agree with Compatibilist reasoning:
> Free will never had a denotational definition that everyone agreed on, it had a set of vague, imprecise connotational meanings
Agreed in that there is not a coherent definition of free will, but what most people think it means is that if time were wound back and replaced, a person could have made a different choice than they previously made.
> the free will debate has always been about determining whether we can devise a clear denotational definition that makes of agency and how we reason about moral responsibility
Clearly people make voluntary actions and we can influence the voluntary actions people take (through teaching, punishment, reward, etc). This can all be explained through a chain of cause and effect, by which we are all constrained and lack freedom from.
Let me ask you to think of a movie. Now think of a 2nd movie. Now a 3rd.
Did you think of the movie Home Alone 2: Lost in New York? Why not? Why did you think of the movies you thought of and in what sense did you choose which movies to think of?
Of all the things humans consider free will, choosing a movie in your head as among the most uncontroversial personal choices. In what way were you free to choose one and not another? I contend that you are not free to choose what thoughts pop into your head. Where is free will then?
> but what most people think it means is that if time were wound back and replaced, a person could have made a different choice than they previously made.
I disagree and I think the paper I linked literally proves that people do not think this way. Per the paper, most people agreed with "source Compatibilism", where people considered an agent responsible if they were the ultimate source of the choice. I recommend reading the paper, it's well done and very accessible.
> In what way were you free to choose one and not another? I contend that you are not free to choose what thoughts pop into your head. Where is free will then?
The freedom to choose according to your desires. The fact that you don't have a choice in your desires doesn't seem relevant.
Think about it mechanistically: suppose you have a machine learning model that can act as an intelligent agent, and this model responds to moral feedback, eg. you tell it when it did something morally wrong or right, and it updates its internal state to reflect what it's learned and makes better choices in the future. It's capable of abstraction and generalization in order to learn general moral principles rather than merely memorizing specific rules.
After some period of training, doesn't it seem reasonable that you could trust such an agent to make ethical choices, no matter what its initial state was? Even if you initialized it with maximal hostile intentions, but it still operated basically the same as one initialized with maximal altruistic intentions, they would both converge roughly to similar points on important moral questions.
Maybe the hostile one might be a little more selfish in circumstances of moral ambiguity where the other will still err on the altruistic side, but I would argue you can still mostly trust it to make ethical decisions.
Such agents still probably won't be perfect, and where they mess up we would require more ethical feedback to update its internal state that drives its decision procedures.
What is this feedback loop if not holding the agent morally responsible for its choices? How are humans any different from such mechanistic agents? As children we know little but have certain proclivities towards selfishness or charity, and adults teach us when we've done something right or wrong, and we internalize and generalize that kind of logic as we mature. We don't have a perfect system for determining when someone is fully mature and ready to make ethical choices, but the heuristic of 18-21 years old seems to generally work.
The initialization state doesn't seem particularly relevant. Maybe the hostile agent prefers ice cream where the altruistic agent prefers chocolate bars, but this isn't really relevant to whether they are free to make choices according to their internal reasons, and whether they respond to being held morally responsible for poor choices.
The only freedom worth having is the type that lets you choose according to what you value, and that turns out to be the kind of freedom we do have.
Yes, this is the freedom of Compatibilism. It's the freedom from coercion which lets us select from a set of available options, one that aligns best with our values. The question of determinism is simply irrelevant.
Yes, the strange thing with the debate is that ppl seem to think that there is a conflict between compatibilism and incompatiblism, which there isn't. They are just taking about different concepts.
"By clearly defining what freedom is, regardless of whether or not determinism holds, our conceptualization of value freedom allows for a compatibilist view on free will. We are not disagreeing with the classic incompatibilist
argument (McKenna & Coates, 2021) that determinism does not allow for free will; rather, what we propose is that the kind of freedom lay people actually refer to in everyday language is not the same kind of freedom incompatibilists reject. This distinction between what we here call physical freedom vs. value freedom allows for several potentially interesting perspectives."
Dennett's life-long MO was the appeal to reason to the exclusion of mystery.
In my early mid-life, facing a chaotic world of gross conservative christian religious dogma, his posture felt agreeable to me because it seemed to offer a prospect for intellectual adaptation: don't assume magic for what you don't understand.
But it also never felt welcome to me because he comes off as an authoritarian.
As I've become more sensitive to the limits of explanation I've become more interested in how the philosopher encounters the limits of his own language and in this area Dennett is notable for his awareness of limits, but shows no special traits of adaptation to these limits.
Like all philosophers he can't escape the bounds of his own undefined terms, e.g., "free will", and shuffles around the problem of scope by changing the subject to some other area to which he can speak with authority.
As he aged out he became a shaman for his own point of view.
He once appealed to the part of me that takes comfort in the reasoning of a strong father, but I lost the need for this.
It's clear to me that the mysteries not only aren't going away with more thought, but thought expands the mysteries to fill all available space.
In my limited exposure to his philosophy, he appeared to take no obvious joy in the mysterious, nor have any regard for it. He rarely said anything to the effect of the marvelous, i.e, "it's really strange things work this way"
Contrast with Feynman.
Dan Dennett has now crossed over into the fullness of mystery, and I'm skeptical that his philosophy was much solace to him during the trial of that passing. I doubt he took Pascal's wager.
Just yesterday I watched the film “Victim of the Brain”, which includes Daniel Dennett playing himself. The film is an odd mashup of an interview with Douglas Hofstadter, ideas from Dennett and Hofstadter‘s “The Mind's I”, Stanislaw Lem’s “The Cyberiad”, and a tour of MIT’s AI lab in the 1980s.
In the film, Dennett’s brain is transplanted to a vat so it (he?) can control his body remotely using a radio transmitter (to retrieve a subterranean ICBM).
It doesn't say much, it's an obituary from [1] for the author of [2] and other books, and it just vaguely refers to his ideas on consciousness and the brain. Too bad since the concepts seem very interesting.
I don't get it. Denying the existence of qualia is surely convenient but hardly convincing. Saying its a hallucination just sides steps the problem. What is this hallucination you're experiencing? Why hallucinate anything at all when it is not a necessary component of functioning?
Why couldnt a hypothetical human like robot simply reply "I dont know what you mean by did that hurt, I simply know it could have damaged me so I know to avoid such scenarios"
To believe we are all p zombies youd have to believe that a table you punched experienced the same thing as punching me. That, either a table has all the same experiences that I feel, or that I unlike yourself that I feel nothing at all.
I am of the first opinion, that everything does experience some form of consciousness, and that we are a conglomeration of many individual pieces of it.
> Why hallucinate anything at all when it is not a necessary component of functioning?
Who claimed it wasn't necessary for functioning? The text boxes and links and windows on your screen are also illusions, they don't actually exist in the screen or inside the computer, but how useful would a computer be to you without these illusions?
> To believe we are all p zombies youd have to believe that a table you punched experienced the same thing as punching me
Eliminate materialism is the position that qualitative experience is not what it appears to be, and that our perceptions are not trustworthy. That doesn't mean there is no difference between you and a table.
>Who claimed it wasn't necessary for functioning? The text boxes and links and windows on your screen are also illusions, they don't actually exist in the screen or inside the computer, but how useful would a computer be to you without these illusions?
By this reasoning, everything we perceive, including physical reality is an "illusion" (which I am totally onboard with).
There is still the question however, of when does this illusion arise? Is any system that understands its sensory input conscious? Is any system that has the ability to form thoughts in a feedback loop (i.e, the ability to process its own thoughts), consciously experiencing the world in a similar manner as I am? Or what's the criteria?
> By this reasoning, everything we perceive, including physical reality is an "illusion"
Yes and no. An illusion is technically a perception that does not correspond to reality. So it's not an illusion to say there's a table in front of you, but some of the table's apparent properties might turn out to be illusions of sorts, eg. its solidity might suggests that it's solid all the way through, but we know it's 99% empty space and the perception of solidity arises from the exchange of photons.
This is the kind of illusion that consciousness would end up being: some process that useful in evolutionary terms, but which reduces to something completely different and mechanical in terms of particle exchanges, and which at a high-level leaves us with the belief that we have subjective experience. For one possible model of how this would work, see:
Agreed, I've never understood this argument. A hallucination or an illusion, or whatever this school of thought likes to call it, exists within consciousness. It's a qualitative experience. If my consciousness is an illusion, then who or what is experiencing that illusion, and how? Is that experience also just an illusion? Illusions all the way down?
Perhaps I misunderstand Dennet's ideas. Maybe he means something entirely different by "illusion" and "consciousness" than what I understand those terms to mean. But these theories certainly appear to me to be a clever semantic way to ignore the question rather than answer it.
> It's a qualitative experience. If my consciousness is an illusion, then who or what is experiencing that illusion, and how?
Asking "who" begs the question that subjects are necessary, therefore "what" is the only question that matters. What "experiences the illusion" that experiences exist too.
But "what perceives the illusion" dissolves the hard problem entirely since it permits a mechanistic system, where an illusion is a perception that entails a false conclusion, all things that don't require admitting privileged subjects into your ontology.
I said "who or what" in anticipation of this exact tiresome semantic game. Use whichever word you prefer, it's irrelevant to my point.
My point is that qualia exist. You can call them an illusion, but we still "feel" them. Why are we able to feel anything, illusory or real?
My ontology does not require "privileged subjects". I make no claims about where qualia may or may not exist outside of human minds. I merely acknowledge that they do exist in the human mind, the one place where they can be observed and self-reported. And I think the question of what produces them is worth investigating. Unfortunately any discussion is drowned out by the thought-terminating cliche, "it's an illusion".
What exactly do you mean by an "illusion", anyway? Do you mean that I'm programmed by evolution to believe and behave as if I have internal experiences, but I actually don't? I would beg to differ, but I suppose by your reasoning, that's exactly what a befuddled meat robot such as myself would say.
It's not though, the existence of true subjectivity is the central point of the hard problem of consciousness. Science consists of third party objective facts, and so accepting the existence of first person subjective facts is incompatible with materialist science.
> And I think the question of what produces them is worth investigating.
I agree, I don't think anybody disputes that. Illusionism doesn't preclude investigation into how the illusion is produced, it's just a framework for interpreting the results of experiments in a way that's compatible with materialism.
> Do you mean that I'm programmed by evolution to believe and behave as if I have internal experiences, but I actually don't?
Your perceptions of subjective qualitative experience are incompatible with materialist science, as I said. You then have two choices: choose to privilege your perceptions and claim that you have some direct access to some aspect of reality, or accept that your perceptions of subjectivity are not a direct perception of reality and thus illusory.
> or accept that your perceptions of subjectivity are not a direct perception of reality and thus illusory.
I see now that we're using the word "illusion" in different ways and talking past each other.
I agree that qualia are not a direct or accurate experience of reality. Dreams consist of qualia, but most people would not argue that what happens in their dreams must actually be happening.
What is not illusory is the fact that subjective experience exists, and that's the sense in which I use the word. I and everyone else (I presume) experience qualia. The fact that the content of consciousness consists of illusions is undoubtedly correct and quite easy to demonstrate, but that is a different and unrelated matter. It is also unsurprising, since what we actually experience is presumably derived from the inner physical state of our brain, which is at best only a proxy for the reality of our surroundings.
I do not believe that Dennett himself actually makes this distinction. He seems to sometimes ignore and sometimes outright deny the existence of qualia, which is an absolutely baffling position for any introspective conscious being to take.
In regards to whether qualia are compatible with materialism, I will just point out that if a scientific theory denies the existence of a thing that obviously exists, then the problem is with the theory, not the thing. I can think of nothing more un-scientific than insisting on the theory just to spite reality for not conforming to our materialist ideals.
> I see now that we're using the word "illusion" in different ways and talking past each other.
At its core, illusionism is the general position that our qualitative experience is not what it appears to be. That could mean it might just be something else that's incompatible with materialism, but most philosophers take the stricter position that materialism holds, and thus subjective experience doesn't really exist.
> I will just point out that if a scientific theory denies the existence of a thing that obviously exists
Life obviously exists, and people simply couldn't fathom how living matter could emerge from non-living matter, and so proposed vitalism. It died with progressive elaboration of the mechanics of living cells, thus vindicating materialism. I think exactly this same process is currently happening with consciousness, and neuroscience is currently exploring these kinds of models:
Finally, I would be very hesitant to claim that something does or does not exist simply because you perceive it or don't perceive it. I could put an object in your blindspot and you'd swear up and down that nothing was there. Our perceptions are inherently flawed, but still useful in evolutionary terms, and the same would apply to our perceptions of qualitative experience. Dennett formed his position after studying neuroscience extensively, so I urge everyone to take it more seriously.
Ah, so we weren't talking past each other. You actually do argue that the existence of qualia is an illusion. I would argue that qualia are in fact the only thing we can be certain does exist. I won't though, because now that you've brought us back into thought-terminating cliche territory, there's little point.
> Dennett formed his position after studying neuroscience extensively, so I urge everyone to take it more seriously.
I prefer reason over credentialism, personally. All the advanced degrees and study in the world can't make a logically incoherent position correct.
The other problem with arguments from authority is that one can always find people with equal or greater credentials who take the opposing view. One of Dennett's better known opponents, for example:
> [1] In 1993, Chalmers received his PhD in philosophy and cognitive science from Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter, writing a doctoral thesis entitled Toward a Theory of Consciousness. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program directed by Andy Clark at Washington University in St. Louis from 1993 to 1995.
I assume this means you will give equal weight to his point of view.
Otherwise we will be forced to acknowledge that you agree with Dennett not because he's well studied, but because he agrees with you.
> I would argue that qualia are in fact the only thing we can be certain does exist. I won't though, because now that you've brought us back into thought-terminating cliche territory, there's little point.
As I said, there's nothing thought-terminating about eliminative materialism, and I provided a link demonstrating active work in neuroscience to account for consciousness based on that premise. If it were thought-terminating, why are people developing more thoughts based on it?
The only thoughts that are terminated are the attribution of mystical and non-scientific properties to consciousness, which is exactly what you'd expect from actual science.
> I assume this means you will give equal weight to his point of view.
I have but ultimately didn't find his position persuasive. What I wouldn't do is dismiss his entire position as a thought-terminating cliche though, or assume a deep thinker like Dennett didn't consider an objection as trivial as all of our knowledge being built from qualitative experience. You started this thread by stating that you've never understood the argument behind eliminative materialism, and with the way you've described it so far, I suggest it's because you haven't given it a serious effort.
I read your link. To borrow your phrase, I didn't find it persuasive. The paper promises in several places to address the issue of qualia, but never quite gets around to it. Instead it plays the standard linguistic trick that I hear so often: The things we perceive are illusory (though the paper shies away from using that specific word), therefore qualia are an illusion. Once again, this conflates the content of qualia with the existence of qualia.
I find it bizarre that so much energy is devoted to arguing that the content of consciousness is inaccurate, when I've never met a single person who thinks otherwise. Even children understand that their minds can conjure up things that don't exist, and can easily be made to understand that even their day-to-day perceptions are inaccurate. But the vigor with which this argument is pushed makes sense when you realize that the actual goal is to use the ambiguity of the claim "qualia aren't real" (which may refer to either content or existence) to appear to have proven that qualia do not exist while only having to do the work of proving that they are not accurate.
Frankly, I find these conversations immensely frustrating for this exact reason. I go back and forth with someone on the only real issue, which is the existence of qualia. They talk in circles and use this semantic sleight of hand to claim that qualia don't even exist and therefore require no explanation, even as they experience them at that exact moment. When I insist on the issue, they claim that I need to try harder to understand their position, even as they actively avoid honestly engaging with my own. Occasionally I am gullible enough to think "you know, maybe there really is something I just don't get" and I cave in and read their proposed literature, only to be met with the same linguistic trickery.
This is why I use the phrase "thought-terminating cliche". This entire line of argument doesn't even attempt to answer the real question. It makes a big show out of beating a different but similar-sounding question to death, then quickly dodges around the real one while you're dazzled and hopes you don't notice. And this "explanation" is always bookended with a smug "consciousness is just an illusion (you non-materialist simpleton)".
I expect no less going forward, so this conversation has outlived its productivity. Feel free to have the last word if you like.
> They talk in circles and use this semantic sleight of hand to claim that qualia don't even exist and therefore require no explanation, even as they experience them at that exact moment.
Let's flip the script then: demonstrate that qualia are real if you think it's so obvious. Every thought experiment that purports to show something meaningful has been fatally flawed and ends up proving nothing. Do you not see how the position that qualia really exist is the one on shaky empirical ground and playing semantic games trying to claim that something non-demonstrable exists? It's Russell's teapot.
I literally have no reason to accept your claim that qualia are self-evident, and further, considering the remarkable success of materialist science and that the only "evidence" that qualia exist is a subjective perception from an apparatus that is known to have fatal perceptual flaws, how can you expect anyone who's given this serious thought to take you seriously?
I agree the link I gave is not the full story, I said it was the start. It establishes the foundation tackling subjective awareness first, and will be building to qualia in subsequent work. It will take a few decades to root out this mystical nonsense around consciousness, but it will happen just like elan vital before it.
Edit: to be clear, I don't think any eliminativist will seriously claim that qualia don't require any explanation. We still need to understand how the illusion works and so why we come to believe we have qualia, we just don't need to explain what qualia are because that's already done by classifying them as an illusion. It's like you're insisting that a psychologist explain what demonic possession is when we now know it's mental illness. We don't need to explain demonic possession, we need to explain mental illness. Similarly, we don't need to explain what qualia are, because they don't exist, but we do need to explain the mechanics of the brain that lead to perceptual illusions of various kinds, like the perception of subjective experience.
But, and this is the key, this will happen in the normal course of explaining how the brain works. Nothing special or extra needs to be done. The hard problem is reduced to the easy problem. The paper I linked is a starting point on that path.
You seem to be arguing intensely that qualia are not physical truth. No one is claiming that it is. You're assuming materialism then saying "of course qualia is nothing more than material". Well sure, I agree that logically follows.
I mean, forget the term "real" here for a second. Illusion or whatever you want to think of it, qualia in one form or another, exists within the mind. I am alive, I can see, hear, smell, and feel things. These things are as real to me as is seeing two objects hit eachother and deflect, or whatever other test of material reality you purpose. How do I, without already first believing in eliminativism, reject one but not the other? Or rather, on the basis that I sometimes feel pain but do not always feel pain, I assert definitely, that the subjective experience of pain exists. I am not making any claim as to what "pain" is, merely that subjective experiences (which we call qualia) exist within the mind.
How does this illusion come to be achieved when there is nothing remotely similar in any attribute of physical systems? How is it possible that one can explain all the physical properties of a system, but yet not explain the experience of "pain" or "seeing red"? That we can build a robot that physically registers, and reacts to pain as we do, but have no way of knowing whether that robot experienced some subjective experience of "pain" similar to how we do.
That is in essence why its called the hard problem of consciousness. If you have any interesting thoughts to share as to how this is possible, Im all ears, but so far all you've appeared to have said (and I apologize if Im missing something) is "everything has been explained materially, and I believe in material science and thus it is certainly material, end of discussion". I don't find this interesting at all.
Hell lets agree qualia is just physical. But how is it physically possible?
This isnt the eliminativism take though (or at least that of Dennett) its "there is no problem to solve at all because we reject subjective experiences exist at all". The only way I can imagine this of even being true is that I didn't actually feel pain at all, I just made up a thought that says that I did. But this is simply not my experience and simply saying "its in fact what happened" is not exactly convincing. By that same token I dont see why I ought to believe in material reality at all. Did I experience seeing the table in front of me? No I just believed I had. If you believe this fine Im not going to argue.
>how can you expect anyone who's given this serious thought to take you seriously?
Consciousness is an illusion isn't some agreed upon philosophical view, so I don't know why you're speaking as if this is a solved problem and that someones an idiot for considering otherwise.
> You seem to be arguing intensely that qualia are not physical truth. No one is claiming that it is.
I'm not sure what you mean by "no one", but the central claim behind asserting the existence of qualia is the rejection of physicalism. Maybe you're not making that claim, but p-zombies and the Knowledge Argument were intended to but failed to show that qualia exist and physicalism is false.
> How do I, without already first believing in eliminativism, reject one but not the other?
I find this kind of question confusing because it's just so obvious. You've done this millions of times throughout your life, both consciously and unconsciously. This is knowledge synthesis at the level of perception. You're constantly taking your perceptions and comparing them to your internalized worldview, seeing if they fit, and if not, checking if your perception was faulty or your understanding of the world is faulty.
You're even trying to do it now, but you're prioritizing your personal perceptions which are known to be faulty rather than the far more robust, systematic scientific knowledge we've built.
Why is it so easy for you to perceive that water appears to magically break and reconstitute a pencil (https://etc.usf.edu/clippix/picture/refraction-of-pencil-in-...), and discount that perception as a fact, but you can't do so for qualia? Because you've already done the work to internalize a model of the world that can explain what you perceive without the magic, via optics and refraction.
I agree that a full accounting of this sort for our belief in qualia would be nice, but it's not strictly necessary to conclude that we should not prioritize our flawed perceptions over robust systematic knowledge, and further that, we have no evidence or argument that qualia actually exist besides these flawed perceptions. If you agree with these two claims, then I argue that you should take an eliminativist position until such evidence arises, ala Russell's teapot.
My argument is not just "durr, obviously materialism", it's the simple epistemic argument that you probably apply to literally everything else, but you for some reason can't bring yourself to apply to these specific perceptions. The illusion is just too compelling and "obvious", just like demonic possession was obvious to people before modern psychology.
> How does this illusion come to be achieved when there is nothing remotely similar in any attribute of physical systems? How is it possible that one can explain all the physical properties of a system, but yet not explain the experience of "pain" or "seeing red"?
No such thing has been proved, only asserted. This is why eliminativism can dismiss the hard problem: there is no proof that there is a problem to solve, therefore the premise is rejected.
> Hell lets agree qualia is just physical. But how is it physically possible?
I think the paper I linked already hinted at it: the process of integrating signals from our senses also routes through an internal representation which looks up associated context but throws away information about the original perception, thus making it seemingly disconnected from anything. This establishes a separation between our direct perception of "outside" and the labels and other context, like redness, and so we attribute them to "inside".
Depending on how signals are integrated or switched or whatever into our "conscious awareness", this yields a persistent inference of ephemeral internal properties separate from external perceived properties at the conscious level, similar to how a single CPU multitasking gives the impression of parallelism, but which is simply the product of it's fast switching speed compared to our conscious perceptual speed.
If you've ever done cannabis you might have experienced consistent deja vu, caused by subtle timing changes in the signals from our memory vs. direct perceptions. Direct perception appears to be processed into our memory before the direct perception appears in our conscious awareness, so then it seems to us as if we remembered it.
I agree this isn't a fully precise accounting, but as I said, it's a solid working theory that doesn't require any magic and could plausibly explain the weird properties people attribute to qualia. It doesn't mean we stop talking about "experiencing pain", it just means that what "experiencing pain" means changes to something non-magical.
> This isnt the eliminativism take though (or at least that of Dennett) its "there is no problem to solve at all because we reject subjective experiences exist at all".
The hard problem doesn't exist in this framework, so yes, there is no hard problem to solve, there is only the "easy" problem of explaining how the mechanics of the brain work, and the behaviours associated with the illusion will become clear.
This was exactly the same situation with vitalism: there was a hard problem of explaining how life could arise from inert matter that wasn't alive, and those who dismissed the problem and continued to elaborate the mechanics of the cell shrunk the god of the gaps until nothing remained. That's what I predict will happen here, again.
> Even within physicalists, about 50% of those surveyed accept there is a hard problem of consciousness.
I agree, there's still a lot of unfortunate mysticism around this topic. Some philosophers also took vitalism seriously.
My point was that there is no solid epistemic argument for accepting that qualia are real, which is why I asked you to prove they're real. You said you didn't like arguments from authority but then you reverted to one here, which I will take as an acknowledgement that there is no known proof.
Until some solid evidence or proof, I operate on the minimal assumptions needed to explain observations. This requires that I acknowledge the deeply flawed nature of our perceptions, and so I refuse to trust them, particularly since taking them at face value would mean they are directly perceiving some aspect of reality that cannot otherwise be detected or measured.
> You said you didn't like arguments from authority but then you reverted to one here
You're talking to someone else now. Read the usernames.
And they were quite obviously refuting yours by pointing out that the authority you're appealing to doesn't even exist. Another example of your twisting of words that caused me to stop participating in this conversation days ago.
You report feeling the punch. Detecting a punch, assessing the damage are all useful things to do evolutionarily speaking. At some point if you live in society, it's useful to build a virtual machine that describes what your neighbour feels when you punch him. Now if you run the same virtual machine but with all the inputs being measured rather than guessed at, you end up with an emphatic tale of how you got punched and how it seemed to feel like to get punched. But the system isn't built to know how it works, it's like asking chat gpt how it got the answer - it'll happily make up a plausible explanation. Just like you.
That just explains how one can make up words to describe their experience. You can certainly explain all the observations that humans or animals do from an outside perspective. It doesn't explain the fact that one does indeed actually feel the pain. I am not just making up a tale after the fact that it did hurt, it did in fact hurt!
And neither knowing or not knowing how it works, nor making up explanations has nothing to do with it. A robot as I said could easily just say "When you hit me hard, I dont know why but it gives me an instinct to scream and move out of the way" just as easily I could say "I dont know why but what you said made me never want to talk to you again".
Qualia is still something we cant describe, so I am not sure what you mean its like making up some gibberish like an LLM does. If you ask me what red is I cant tell you, I dont go "well its like the frequency of light that resembles autumn and golden leaves". Youve either experienced it yourself or you havent.
> It doesn't explain the fact that one does indeed actually feel the pain.
Nobody denies that you "feel the pain", eliminativism simply denies that "feeling the pain" necessarily has implications for what does and does not fundamentally exist, and therefore, whether your perception of pain necessarily reflects some fundamental reality. There is no "pain" in the standard model after all, so either your pain doesn't really exist, or you're suggesting we add something to fundamental physics literally because of feelings.
Why is it assumed the standard model of physics is all encompassing in the first place?The standard model hasnt managed to explain all of physics even. Unless you can explain consciousness with physics, its only reasonable to assume something additional
> its only reasonable to assume something additional
No it's not, just like it wasn't reasonable to posit something more was needed to explain the difference between living and non-living matter. See the history of vitalism. Making assumptions that aren't strictly necessary to explain evidence is almost never warranted.
The model of physics itself has changed multiple times to explain physics, at great reservation mind you. Relativity required massive changes in thinking to what we considered physically possible, as did quantum physics (things can just happen by chance without further reason, whaaat?)
And in the grand scheme of things, our quest for knowledge has had a very very short timespan. Insisting that the mode of thought that has worked for a few hundred years must persist to eternity is not wise.
Assuming the standard model of physics will explain consciousness without any fundamental alternations is just as big of an assumption as the assumption that there is more to the standard model of physics. No different than having assumed newtonian physics could have explained relativity.
As far as I can see, current understanding of physics has no conceivable way of explaining how a system suddenly becomes capable of experiencing feeling.
And neither is it scientific to deny what is so readily observable to every human being.
Lastly, it would seem that you agree that our model of physics is in itself an illusion, within the framework of our conscious experience. On one hand it would appear you say, our conscious experience of reality is the sole way to find truth, and the other, that our conscious experience is flawed and experience of qualia can be discarded entirely. If we are to say "it only appears that you feel pain", how is this different than to say "it only appears that objects move"?
The proposal here is that your flawed, conscious experience can produce a truth of an "external" reality, whose laws are capable of forming the vary thing which is producing this flawed perception.
> The model of physics itself has changed multiple times to explain physics, at great reservation mind you. Relativity required massive changes in thinking to what we considered physically possible, as did quantum physics (things can just happen by chance without further reason, whaaat?)
That's not what this is about. Science consists only of third-person objective facts. There is no "mind" in particles, no notion of subjectivity, so if we just accept that our minds truly have subjective first-person facts, then this is fundamentally at odds with the very core of materialist science. Every time this has happened in history a materialist explanation has been found, as with vitalism. Maybe it won't happen this time, but odds aren't good.
> On one hand it would appear you say, our conscious experience of reality is the sole way to find truth, and the other, that our conscious experience is flawed and experience of qualia can be discarded entirely.
Your mistaken assumption is that true conscious experience of reality is necessary to this process. I'd argue that it's not, that perception is all that is needed. "Experience" and "perception" are different.
Im not sure how you assign probability to finding truths of this manner. Again in the grand scheme of things, few hundred years is not very long. I think itd be foolish to believe the world as we see it will be parallel as we see it in a million or even a thousand years from now. Do fundmenetal truths fall on some kind of probability distribution? Its as if we were discussing NP class problems, and we had previously found a method to solve polynomial problems to great success and we said "the odds of this being solveable within this framework is very high"
Second, what you consider to be "materialist" is entirely subjective which can and has been amended. We readily accept force/energy and now randomness as part of material science. Why are these things not seen as mystic and immaterial forces of life? No matter deep you go, you have to accept some fundamental, unknown truths. And if one cannot explain onserved phenomena, it is only logical to have to add onto a model. The important part of science is whether we have measureable, meaningful theories that can make accurate predictions, not whether or not our fundamental blocks are "material" or not.
Lastly, what distinction do you make between experience and perception exactly? Im not saying they are the same, but it would be helpful to know how you're meaning these terms. My take is that whatever you consider "true" reality is out of bounds. By all prgramatic approaches we can only discover what is true to our minds. Whatever test you conduct, we can only verify the results within the framework of our mind. The only "universal" (in quotes as one can imagine the existence of some other perceptron that works entirely differently) what we all agree to be verfiable.
> Im not sure how you assign probability to finding truths of this manner. Again in the grand scheme of things, few hundred years is not very
We're not talking a few hundred years, we're talking a few thousand at least. Human specialness rarely survives serious inquiry. There are no divine kings or priests, humans are not created in God's image, we're just another animal, and other animals have similar cognitive functions as we do. All of these and more were believed at one time or another, but have no factual basis.
> Second, what you consider to be "materialist" is entirely subjective which can and has been amended. We readily accept force/energy and now randomness as part of material science.
Materialism hasn't really changed, it's always and continues to be the position that all that we perceive is made of some common, physical substance governed by natural laws. That our understanding of how this works evolves doesn't change anything.
> And if one cannot explain onserved phenomena, it is only logical to have to add onto a model.
The suggestion that we cannot explain observed phenomena is exactly the point in contention. Neuroscience has barely gotten started, and the cracks in mystical properties of consciousness are practically chasms already. There is simply no basis for claiming that we need to extend our ontology to account for the mind.
> Lastly, what distinction do you make between experience and perception exactly?
Machine perception is a thing, machine experience is not. We too are machines with some extra capabilities, and one of them must produce the belief of experience as a side-effect. The conclusion is based on an illusion though, it's only perception and information processing in the end.
I don't think anybody is saying something will persist for eternity. The brain is made of 200bn neurons and something like a hundred trillion connections. That's the most complicated structure in the universe. It is reasonable to assume that there is no new physics involved unless and until we've figured out how it all fits together and still can't work out where the illusion of qualia is coming from. Otherwise you might as well say there's a supernatural soul. Positing a new ingredient without evidence is just fantasy.
Objects don't move, their wavefunctions evolve according to the Schrödinger equation, and in the classical limit where the objects are large enough and the fields they interact with are smooth enough, they appear to follow Newton's laws.
That's the whole point of an illusion, yes. There are people who claim to have felt the presence of their own accidentally selected dirty or seen other creatures from their preferred mythology. Would you claim that their experience are genuine, that if they saw and felt the presence of mythical creatures, then these creatures must exist?
I would say their experience of it certainly exists yes. No one is claiming these conscience experiments are material reality.
It doesnt matter if you call them illusions or hallucinations. It's intriguing that they exist at all. If they simply did not exist there would be no discussion about this in the first place.
I mean do you believe an LLM running is equivalent to you experiencing lucid dreams? Whats the difference? Do you think the difference is simply that I say it's different? That if I added some code for the LLM to say "Yes I really do experience lucid dreams", it would be equivalent to your experience of lucid dreams? Or is there something else, entirely unexplained happening from my experiences and a computer making rudimentary calculations to string words together?
An LLM thinks in text tokens. A lucid dream is more images and animations - so it'll be something more functionality equivalent to SOTA or DALL-E, but it's probably not diffusion itself.
Yes, it exists as a phenomenon in nature, reported by most, if not all humans. It requires an explanation, but it might not have much to do with consciousness/self-awareness/intelligence or whatever you want to call it.
> At some point if you live in society, it's useful to build a virtual machine that describes what your neighbour feels when you punch him.
This is where the argument falls down, for me. Why would this ever happen if your neighbour wasn't feeling things to begin with? Which, considering you're probably the same species as your neighbour, suggests you also feel things.
Nothing is explained. We just have a little story that makes us stop asking questions. A thought-terminating cliché.
I had the same thought. I was thinking perhaps its like language where at one point no one knew any common words but nonetheless formed a common understanding.
But Im not sure that works here. Besides I still dont see how feeling is necessary to accomplish this goal. Youd have to merely teach a robot to emit some unique symbol which another robot interprets as "that hurt".
And pain/empathy is just one thing. Theres a lot more to conscious experience. Seeing/hearing/feeling good/bad, etc
Sure, but what I mean is 1. saying concious experience is just a hallucination implies something is being hallucinated. If there is no such thing as consciousness, how could we speak of it being a hallucination? Why would there be anything to have to explain in the first place?
2. LLMs hallucinate in the sense that they make up random, different ideas, which I agree is necessary for intelligence. In this case however, consciousness is something we all experience.
I like the theory that consciousness is similar to the illusion of motion in film, constructed by a frame rate. Consciousness is a cognitive loop in which one frame is examining the senses, and then your reaction to them. Look outward, then inward. Like the illusion of motion, consciousness emerges when that frame rate exceeds a threshold of perception.
We call it an illusion of motion so maybe it is also an illusion of consciousness. It's difficult to say whether the resulting consciousness is in some sense more real than the motion.
Not sure if this answers the question but one time I took a ridiculous amount of 2c-b(100mg) and and it was like everything was stuttering. Continuous sounds like my computer fan sounded like a repetitive banging sound instead and movement was discontinuous as well.
