Today there was a discussion about Is the 'Hard Problem of Consciousness' Nonsense Invented by Philosophers? on the Mind Chat channel:
In a nutshell, Yes.
Below are my detailed thoughts on the topic.
But first, let me make my position crystal clear. I am a physicalist and think that we will one day (hopefully) soon understand how the brain generates consciousness and more importantly subjective experience. In addition, I think that science will also explain why we have intuition that there is (was) a possibility of thoughts of "hard problem of consciousness.
I also want to state that consciousness is not a thing or substance. It is a process. There goes panpsychism.
The term hard problem of consciousness was coined by David Chalmers. I have noticed that he has now moved on to meta problem of consciousness. I sometimes wonder it it because he has realized that there is no hard problem of consciousness after all? Also what is surprising is that he is dabbling into virtual reality via physicalist based approach to generating virtual environments and entities. But surprisingly, to me, he is anti-physicalist.
Now, let me say first thing about the video. In it Michelle Liu said the following:
I think the dominant view the consensus is that lay people do identify color as features of external objects and and I think that's how philosophers tend to think about color as well
Wow!!!!!!!!! Really? Really? I was not aware of this and I am disappointed.
Arguments in favor of physicalism
The 'Hard Problem of Consciousness' is nonsense unless you are willing to ignore the mountain of evidence coming from neuroscience, psychology and biology. What I mean is that we are solving the problem slowly by dissolving it. Anil Seth and Dan Denette have it right. I think this is a last gasp of people who still think there IS a hard problem.
IMO we are in the same stage with respect to "consciousness" now, as we were with respect to "life" or "living" explained on the basis of mechanism like Élan vital. We were incredulous then about "living" as we are about "consciousness" today. But that will pass.
You should see the research being done in biology - not even neuroscience or psychology - by Michael Levin on planarians and cell cultures and how self is an expanding (multi-cellular, tissue level, organ level and organism level) and contracting notion (cancerous cells) and his idea about cognitive light cone. The point is that it is now starting to become a biological problem. Not even a neuroscience problem. See:
Advances in other areas like AGI or GAI and systems like ChatGPT (and similar) are starting to show how conscious-like behavior can be generated by software implemented program. I hope no one thinks that ChatGPT is a non-physical based system.
Now the details
It is not only about the sensory inputs that results in certain patterns in the brain. The story does not stop there. The mechanisms and processes which interpret (internally) those patterns as "qualia" are also part of the brain. These mechanisms are trained throughout the lifetime of the organism to convert sensory input to "qualia". And by perturbing these mechanisms it is possible to produce a "qualia" without the input of actual sensory input. And the mechanisms of these perturbations have to be physical in the end. For example, brain damage, drugs, EM pulse, even suggestions (hypnosis) but not telepathic (to mean non-physical). In case of brain damage certain kinds of qualia cannot be had because the mechanisms to interpret them as qualia are damaged. Similarly with drug (like DMT) one can experience "qualia" without the attendant sensory input or even physically impossible "qualia". Same is true with dreams where internal spurious brain processes affect the internal state and result in dreams. It is possible to completely stop any "qualia" with general anesthesia - once again a physical mechanism.
Think of a digital voice recorder and player. When it records sound the machinery on the input side of things is at work. The sound gets converted into electrical voltage by some mic like mechanism, then the analog signal is sampled and converted into a digital data and then that is stored in some kind of memory system. There may be some internal implementation of processing that could analyze and extract metadata from the digitally recorded data. For example, a transcript may be extracted and stored along side the actual digital data for the voice. Other analysis may try to match the data and identify the artist/band whose song it is. So far the recorded sound has not left the system. When someone wants to play back the data, then the output machinery kicks in. The digital data is red from the memory, passed through digital to analog converted and then sent as voltage signal to a speaker and then the sound is heard. The point of this is that for all stages of this a physical component of a recorder+player has to be in a working condition. If any of the parts is broken then the respective functionality is not available. Same is true for the brain.
Even though we do not fully understand these qualia generating mechanisms in the brain, there is ample evidence that they are in the physical mechanisms and processes in the brain.
Then there are mechanisms which can take those qualia interpreting mechanisms as input and further convert them into "reporting to external world" phenomenon. They are also part of the brain.
Not sure why Mary being in THE BLACK and WHITE room and stepping out to COLORED outside world is a big deal. This can be said about any new experience she would have which she did not have before. There is nothing special about black and white to color contrast - albeit it is dramatic. If she had never seen a magenta color and the she sees it for the first, her brain will go to a different state which it had never before and that she will experience as a different sensation. B*D.
I think there is misunderstanding of how we scientifically understands things. Science finds general principles and captures them in a compact set of equations and models and after that it does not have to enumerate every possible scenario that the principle applies to. We understand the planetary motion in general form and describe it using general theory of relativity. Once that is done we do not have to enumerate every planet around every star in the universe. It is true that the very specifics of orbits (exact size and shape of elliptical orbit) of each planet around each star will be different. But once the principle is captured, the compact form is sufficient. The same principle applies to this knowledge argument. Once Mary has understood the principle, and if she can predict what the future state of someone else's brain and subjective experience will be based on the past knowledge of their brain that is good enough. Let me explain with an example. Let us say a person is trained to see pale green color and dark green color. Similarly we show them pale blue and dark blue colors etc. so that the notion of pale and dark is understood by them. Now assume that they have not seen red color yet - pale or dark. Then we show them pale red color. Tell them that this is pale red. And then we predict that the next color they will report as seeing will be dark red. And then we show them dark red color. And sure enough they will say they saw dark red. This is what I am talking about. If Mary can predict then that is all the knowledge she needs to have about the color perception subjective experience. The idea of physicalism is not about every experience. It is about understanding the principle behind the nature of experience and consciousness. The last bit about not having that exact experience is IMO a very minor and unimportant and terminal point to the discussion of understanding of consciousness.
Another example is, say a person has never seen or imagined a circle. Then we teach them the basics of two dimensional geometry - plane, points and distances. Then we tell them to imagine the set of points on a two dimensional surface that are equidistant from a point. And you will agree that they would have imagined a circle. And when we show them a picture of a circle they would agree that that is what they had imagined. We do not have to imagine what they were actually imagining. If we can predict that they would imagine a circle that is good enough.
Similarly, I always wonder why is "what it is like to be a bat" made a big deal of. Basically in truest sense anything does not fully know what is it like to be another thing. The very fact of notion of identity makes one entity be not able to imagine what is it like to be the other precisely.
Sociology related to this topic
There is a sociological and human psychological aspect to the discussion about "the hard problem of consciousness":
It is simply the case that people do not like the fact that science will be able to explain the "consciousness". They prefer that it is something beyond the reach of science. They prefer it to remain mysterious. So, generally speaking - the force of public opinion is on the side of non-physicalists. Incredulity - they just cannot believe that science will be able to explain consciousness....or they simply don't want to.
Just - They do not like the word "just". And I blame scientists for this. Let me explain. When it is said the consciousness is "just" the word for the state and processes in their brain, they hate it. So instead of saying to them - "your consciousness is "just" the state (connectivity of neurons) and processes (dynamical electro-chemistry)" if it is said something along the lines of "science has progressed so well because of the power of human intellect, that we now now understand to large extent how the conscious phenomenon is generated by brain states and processes" - they are more receptive to the later idea. Simply giving the credit to human intellect eases their anxiety about scientific knowledge about consciousness. You may think this is a trivial point, but I have done social experiments along these lines and it was clear that there is something there. BTW I am not a scientist, but very science literate so you may call my social experiments anecdotal. But you can try them yourself. BTW this is very similar to what happens with the word "illusionism" that the philosopher Keith Frankish is a proponent of. Lay people simply do not like if one calls their conscious experiences "illusions". That is just a sociological fact. So in my conversations about consciousness I studiously avoid the word "just". In people's mind it is a degrading word. BTW a similar resistance was experienced when science was dealing with the "life" and "living" and it came in form of general public favoring Elan Vital type explanations. It took a lot more scientific effort to finally overcome it and there are residues of it in lay public still today.
Intuition - Intuition is a powerful convincer to lay people. It is the intuitive reason as to why most people were flat earthers in antiquity (and unfortunately some are even today). Lay people trust their intuition to a degree more than they should not. That is why we have idioms like "seeing is believing". As we all know magic and optical illusions precisely are interesting because they fool our intuition. It was the same intuitive feeling about "life" and "living" that gave rise to favoring of Elan Vital. Same is going on with consciousness. Lay people have intuitive sense and understanding of conscious phenomenon that is presented to them readily through the "consciousness" user interface that brain generates (or has learned to generate via evolution). Imagine if we had to be painfully aware of processing of the image of a Sabretooth cat that was about to attack us in the savannah. The past religious aspects also enforce a very selective understanding of consciousness to favor the notions of soul that the religions want. Talk of consciousness as a separate non-physical thing is partly exploiting this intuition. BTW that was the genius of Steve Jobs. By making the interaction with the computer through metaphorical graphical user interface with interaction through mouse pointers and drag and drop and touch interface made the computers and phones accessible to lay people. The notion of desktop, folder and files is clearly an example of this as well. There are no cabinets, drawers, folder and files inside your computer. But by modelling them as such make it intuitive for lay people. That is why we get the silly, Hollywood's rendering of navigating the Unix file system graphically in movies like Jurassic park and Avatars like in Minority report and Disclosure.
History - Human history has the trajectory from less knowledge about explanatory understanding of the physical world to more knowledge. That is why we do not see that physicalism is the default and we are arguing about moving away from non-physicalism. The non-physicalism is the default position for most lay people as far as concepts like "life" and "living" and "consciousness" are concerned. This is simply because of how the Human history has evolved.
Of course this is my take on it and you may disagree.
IMO ChatGPT's apparent consciousness is going to start breaking down the opposition to physicalism wrt consciousness. Because unlike physical Robot's which still do physical activities, ChatGPT and similar new software technology is starting to get into the consciousness space. And we know that these are software robots, and what they do is programmed, but if we get more and more convinced that what they do is conscious, we will be more and more receptive to accepting physicalist explanation of our consciousness. In fact one of the Google employees claimed that their AI is conscious and was fired. I do tend to agree that his claim was probably too forward but we are getting closer to that scenario day by day.
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