Hard problem of consciousness

> If this was only a question of behavior, then you would be right. But this is a question of why it is something like to be me.

It is a question of behavior. The thing you think is there that is in addition to behavior doesn't actually exist.

>Why doesn't this "trickery" of just chemistry go on in the dark, without the first person subjective experience?

It does*. We have absolutely no evidence of anything other than the behavior of you speaking about "first person subjective experience." All your brain needs to do is make you act and speak as though this magical "experience" thing has happened, which is what it does. It compels you to engage in this reporting behavior where you insist you truly did have an "experience" even though you didn't. The brain uses this ultimately non-real "experience" concept as a convenient substituted point of reference for topics which would be more difficult to communicate with others about otherwise. Instead of telling someone "I'm engaging in a response to stimuli my body has classified as harmful" when stubbing your toe, you get to say "ow" or "that hurts" and this common everyday point is delivered with less philosophical baggage.

*Although I'll point out that you calling it "in the dark" betrays your faulty assumption that there's still some sort of magical, non-physical "experience" involved even in this attempt you've made to describe a case where there isn't any. "Dark" is another ultimately non-real "experience" concept. When you're under the false impression you're "experiencing dark," what you're actually doing is engaging in a response to a decrease in light stimuli.

>I'm experiencing qualia right now.

If you believe that then you believe in dualism.

>It is a question of behavior. The thing you think is there that is in addition to behavior doesn't actually exist.
>We have absolutely no evidence of anything other than the behavior of you speaking about "first person subjective experience."

But we do. The first person experience in of itself is evidence. Even if you call it an illusion created by the brain, you're still taking for granted the mechanics involved that allows the experience to exist.

But if you truly believe that you have no subjective experience then obviously it's impossible for you to understand the hard problem intuitively, and for you to see any logic in my arguments. Without that intuetive understanding of the differentiation between behavior and experience, your arguments will seem circular to me, and mine circular to you.

Nothing in the definition of qualia implies dualism. It is possible to experience qualia and not know what causes it, as we are both doing right now.

> begging the question

>Daniel Dennett's 100% correct.

Even Dennett admits that qualia can't be permanently explained away until there is a provable biological theory of how the "illusion" of consciousness is created.

This is a serious problem because human understanding even based on empiricism / the scientific method still functions on the basis of intuition. For example, when you conclude an experiment you intuitively assume that you are actually viewing real results of that experiment and not just an illusion of real results.

Because the "feeling" of subjective experience (qualia) is about the most intuitive thing that we can experience, we have to begin from the assumption that it is a real thing (we can't begin with the assumption that there is no qualia just like we can't begin with the assumption that there is no planet we are standing on).

Thus the onus is on reductionists like Dennett to prove there is no qualia rather than the other way around.

>the problem of falsifiability
>dualists: lol what problem? Xddd

You thinking that you have this
>first person subjective experience
is precisely you
>"being tricked"

You don't like this answer, however, because of any one of an infinite number of reasons that you're also being tricked into feeling. Thus, you claim
>nuh uh that's not what I'm asking
and then make a word salad for the same question.

>as we are both doing now

No, we aren't.

>we have to begin from the assumption that it is a real thing

No, that's a poor assumption to make given that we already know reported perceptions are subject to all manner of unreliability and illusion and given it can be explained without appealing to some extra-physical realm of magic if you just stop overrating the reliability of your own brain and accept it can and does make you believe things that upon closer inspection don't really exist.

>(we can't begin with the assumption that there is no qualia just like we can't begin with the assumption that there is no planet we are standing on).

The planet's existence can be confirmed as a part of consensus reality. "Qualia" on the other hand can't be pointed to or even indirectly detected through technology because doing so would be like looking for the number five in your hand. Like numbers, qualia are a trick of language and behavior. They're a useful fiction.

How can the existence of experience itself be the illusion? Obviously our perceptions can be unreliable when trying to observe the external world, but it's still true you're having perceptions regardless how inaccurate they may be.

If you take psychedelics you'll have perceptions of things that aren't really there, but it's still true that you experienced hallucinations. The fact that experiences take place is what this is all about.

Is consciousness NP hard?

>ITT: AN UNSTOPPABLE FORCE COLLIDING WITH AN AN IMMOVABLE OBJECT

>How can the existence of experience itself be the illusion? Obviously our perceptions can be unreliable when trying to observe the external world, but it's still true you're having perceptions regardless how inaccurate they may be.
Depending on how you define "experience" and "perception", either "perceptions" are something behavioural and an LDR connected to an opamp has one, or they're connected to consciousness and a convenient fiction constructed by your brain to help with planning and socialisation.

I'm not aware of any reason to believe there's another meaningful possibility.

Also? Claiming that no-one is addressing your arguments doesn't make you seem right, it's just makes you look bad at explaining things,

>No, that's a poor assumption to make given that we already know reported perceptions are subject to all manner of unreliability and illusion

How can we assume that anything is real? The world might just be a simulated reality. But that's irrelevant. We just have to carry on as if the world is real by relying on our intuitions, until the very day that the world is proven to be a simulation.

Likewise, the absolute base assumption we have from our intuitions is the existence of our subjective reality (aka qualia). And that is a belief we should keep holding until the day it is disproven. You should know that Dennett isn't claiming with absolute certainty that there is no qualia, much like he's not claiming with absolute certainty that there is no God. He just believes it is extremely unlikely and points to a bunch of circumstantial "evidence" why he thinks it is so.

The difference is that the existence of biblical God isn't a base intuition given we do not experience evidence of any such being, not even an illusion, so we don't have to presume a biblical God's existence. The onus is on those claiming God's existence.

Qualia on the other hand is actively experienced by every person (at least we think so, we know that we experience it ourselves). Just like a simulated reality, it is possible that the truth is that we are being fooled by an illusion. But given evidence to the contrary we must start from the position that it is real. Thus the onus is on those who claim it doesn't exist.

>The planet's existence can be confirmed as a part of consensus reality. "Qualia" on the other hand can't be pointed to or even indirectly detected

The majority of people in this world would claim they are feeling subjective experience.

How is that different than consensus reality that we are all standing on a planet?

You've watered the "hard problem" down to the point that it's meaningless. No-one is disputing that "people experience things" - They're disputing the idea that you need something spooky to have an experience, rather than just a brain connected to senses.

Consciousness is a bit like quantum mechanics. Everyone who thinks they understand it, do not in the slightest understand it. Consciousness is also a lot worse, since it leaves the realm of objectivity and measurability. A lot of people here cannot deal with this since their precious little "scientific" world is so neatly constructed and consciousness doesn't fit in at all. Since they can't or don't want to adjust they are stuck in their ignorant world view. A sad display.

>They're disputing the idea that you need something spooky to have an experience, rather than just a brain connected to senses.

As I said, the people that support the existence of qualia don't have to prove anything since the onus isn't on them. Whether qualia is something spooky (meaning dualist?) or not is irrelevant.

It's down to those who dispute the existence of qualia to prove that it is an illusion.

All Chalmers did is go "hold on a second, you guys never actually proved qualia isn't real so stop acting as if you did". He never tried to prove it was real or even explain how it works because he didn't have to.

It's Dennett and co that attempt to go to extreme lengths to explain how the illusion works (or how it WOULD work if only there was more evidence...).

>there are people that still don't know that the hard problem has been solved

Not by Dan Memett who is a faggot
By Donald Hoffman

quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/

The brain does not create subjective experience. Subjective experience creates the brain, which does not exist outside of our subjective experiences.

>Qualia on the other hand is actively experienced by every person (at least we think so, we know that we experience it ourselves).
>we know

You don't know. You're overrating the immediacy and reliability of what you think you're "experiencing." Consider a robot who reacts exactly as we do and insists just as much as you do his "experience" is real but who you know is actually just behaving in accordance with his cause and effect programming. Then realize you're the same as him. You're compelled to insist you definitely, very deeply know for certain you're experiencing colors and emotions in ways that can't be reduced to mere behavior, just like the robot, and the simple but somehow horrifyingly disagreeable truth is you've both been programmed to behave in terms of an abstract idea (qualia) that doesn't actually exist in physical reality.

>quantamagazine
>Subjective experience creates the brain

I hope you're just pretending to be retarded.

Hoffman has had to resort to sketchy outlets to promote his ideas because of how strange it is. If you can make the mental shift to understand what he is saying though, you'll find that it makes a scary amount of sense.

Oh it definitely makes a lot of sense why people come to that mistaken conclusion:

>Consciousness is mysterious
>Quantum physics are mysterious
>Let's use a misunderstanding of one to explain a misunderstanding of the other!

So fucking disgusting. I hate quantum flapdoodlers. Neuronal firing doesn't operate at the necessary timescales for quantum coherence to be able to influence them by the way so you have to claim neuronal firing had nothing to do with consciousness if you want to claim consciousness is the product of quantum mechanical phenomena.

arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9907009

>You don't know. You're overrating the immediacy and reliability of what you think you're "experiencing."

I already addressed this. If we can't trust the existence of our subjective experience through intuition then we can't trust our intuition about anything, including the truth of our observations.

Hoffman does not make that argument. Try reading the article, it is interesting at the very least. He is saying quantum shit and neuronal firing both do not even exist, much less generate consciousness. I would like to hear your objections but you should actually read the article maybe.

It is meaningless. It accomplishes [math] nothing [/math].

If you lived in a small 5m by 5m by 5m box your entire life, how could you have any idea of what was outside the box? You could put 10 people inside that box to discuss it and you would have accomplished nothing besides making it very crowded.
You will have some people that claim
>There is nothing outside the box, all of existence and reality is inside here.
And you will have others who claim
>I feel that there must be something outside the box. We can't explain how this box could be the sole entirely of existence.

They can go back and forth forever and they will never find an answer unless they physically break out of the box. It is fruitless to pose a question if you're not actually willing to seek out its answer.

If you MUST know the answer to whether or not we have a soul independent of our physical bodies, kill yourself and find out; the rest of us have science to do.

Forms of awareness you have:

>physical sensations
>sensation of being in a 3D space
>emotional reactions
>awareness of awareness

And many more, which are thrown together into one term, "Consciousness", as if a thing is the conglomerate and not merely its parts.

There's not a single one of these things which cannot be reduced to the functions of the physical brain (nor should there be, given that there is nothing there but the physical brain itself). There is no "hard problem". There is no reason to suspect that so-called "qualia" is irreducable to physical mechanisms or is even a falsifiable concept. To propose so is to engage in creationism-tier ignorance of our material reality.

tl;dr lots of things are happening at once to give you the feeling of "consciousness". These things can be reduced to parts and we will probably be able to build or breed some form of intelligence which has consciousness in the near future.

You literally just said
>we cant know nuffin'
Intuition != induction != perception

Sure, if our underlying premises are incorrect, all of our conclusions built on those premises also stand to be incorrect. What is your point?

>Intuition != induction != perception

Are you actually trying to separate these things? They are associated and build on each other.

>What is your point?

My point was already made here To reiterate, we make many assumptions in life based on our intuition and we behave on the basis of that intuition UNTIL there is evidence to the contrary. Qualia is inherently intuitive.

There have been plenty of reductive theories, but none of them have proved anything. They only provide a model of how consciousness might work if there was more evidence.

It is hilarious when the likes of lists a few "forms of awareness" and explains that if you add the bunch together you magically get subjective experience. And he claims that it is OTHERS who use creationist style logic.

He doesn't even define what a form of awareness is. Is it a reduced version of subject experience? Is it a chemical reaction in the brain? It's a fucking Dennett tier theory that smugly believes it has solved the problem while all it has done is bury it deeper in layers of abstraction.

>If we can't trust the existence of our subjective experience through intuition then we can't trust our intuition about anything, including the truth of our observations.

Except we already do exactly that in all mainstream scientific disciplines. Why do you think there's so much doubt cast on "qualia" as some extra-physical phenomenon but very little doubt comparatively on topics like polymer chemistry? We (correctly) take topics involving phenomena that can be observed and reproduced by multiple different parties more seriously than the anecdotal claims of individual "experience." Even in the softest sciences like psychology the tendency is still to focus on objectively measurable behavior rather than on whatever the test subject claims was real in his or her mind. As individuals we're notoriously shit at giving reliable accounts of reality. That's why you need the scientific method in the first place, to make sure you have more than just some guy's opinion supporting an idea about how the world works.

>Except we already do exactly that in all mainstream scientific disciplines

My point just flew way over your head. That's exactly what I said above - the same intuition we use to trust the truth in our observations (say in scientific disciplines) is used to trust our sense of subjective experience.

>Why do you think there's so much doubt cast on "qualia" as some extra-physical phenomenon but very little doubt comparatively on topics like polymer chemistry?

You're begging the question, nobody here said qualia had to necessarily be extra-physical, just that it had to be real and not illusionary.

>We (correctly) take topics involving phenomena that can be observed and reproduced by multiple different parties more seriously than the anecdotal claims of individual "experience."

If you're talking about reality via consensus, more people will claim the existence of individual experience than any other physical phenomenon. In fact, virtually everybody except trolls will claim so. Even Dennett says individual experience is there, it's just that he says it's an illusion.

>Even in the softest sciences like psychology the tendency is still to focus on objectively measurable behavior rather than on whatever the test subject claims was real in his or her mind

You need to get over the idea of "objective" measures. Every person reacts to the world from their own subjective view point

What allows us to remain as functional individuals and not question everything with a "we cant know nuffin'" approach is delegating our behavior to intuition and playing along with the world and assigning it objective "reality" outside of ourselves, irrespective if the world is truly an illusion or not

Thus our default approach (lacking evidence to the contrary) is not to view qualia as illusionary either. The real "we cant know nuthin" people are those who deny qualia because they are literally saying that by default we should believe our own subjective experience can't be trusted

>. Experiment after experiment has shown — defying common sense — that if we assume that the particles that make up ordinary objects have an objective, observer-independent existence, we get the wrong answers
Wrong. What QM tells us is that the properties that make up objective realities are distinct from the observables.
Pure woowoo

>solving a problem by getting rid of the problem
nice meme

>add the bunch together you magically get subjective experience
Does IBM's Watson have a first-person, subjective experience?

My problem with the word "physical" when talking about the materialist side of consciousness: What we define as physical is generally very tied to our current understanding of the universe; the standard model of science. If there is more to matter than we currently understand, that aspect would become part of the physical as soon as it's discovered. If you claim that undiscovered aspects of matter would be connected to consciousness, you would be called a dualist for suggesting so before those aspects were accepted as "physical". The same problem is why the definitions of dualism is silly as well: Because our limited understanding of consciousness, it looks as if there is a mental and a physical reality, but only because our framework of understanding is built from incomplete information about "the physical".

So really the two groups should be debating whether consciousness is reductable to physical processes that we currently understand, or physical processes that we don't yet understand.

You fail to solve the problem if you don't get rid of it. It's like using a word inside its own definition. If your explanation for consciousness itself involves consciousness, then you haven't even begun to explain it yet.

A reasonable explanation of "consciousness" would need to involve non-conscious components which somehow work together to produce "consciousness." Just like with any other explanation. You don't explain water in terms of more water. You need to get down to the parts that aren't yet water like oxygen and hydrogen and explain how water forms from them. Of course this is assuming "consciousness" is actually a literal thing and not just a useful fiction. You could spend a thousand lifetimes looking for the physical structure underlying the number five and you'd never succeed because the number five only exists in the abstract. I believe "consciousness" is the same sort of "thing."

>nobody here said qualia had to necessarily be extra-physical, just that it had to be real and not illusionary

Explain how "qualia" can be entirely within the realm of the physical and also not illusory. Every definition of the word I've ever seen would not work that way.

>can't know nuffin

We can pretty well know all sorts of things. Exactly the sort of things "qualia" aren't: the real, physical world which can be examined both by multiple human witnesses as well as by mechanical tools and mathematical modeling. Unlike with "qualia," we're not being held hostage by one person's "it was real to me" beliefs. Unless we can crack open your "qualia" and poke at it as third party witnesses it's magical bullshit.

Philosophers are by definition morons, the field comprising "questions without answers" which are then argued over for thousands of years as if there is anything of substance being spoke about.

Think about it for a moment, if thousands upon thousands of extremely educated, well read, "intelligent" people can hold entirely opposing points of view on subjects that they've spent their LIVES worrying over, what's the chance that the arguments either way are entirely independent of content and instead arise PURELY due to different interpretations because language is such an ambiguous medium.

The alternative is that some people are in fact right, and whether or not you're part of that group on a given topic is down to chance. In other words, trusting your intuition is equivalent to trusting a coin flip to come up heads.

You fuckwits arguing that "oooh consciousness is an illusion because it's too mysterious and I'm too anxious to accept the existence of something that doesn't seem to neatly fit into my paradigm" act like existing in some "universe" where time moves forward and particles fly around and things "interact" isn't mind blowing for the same reason you don't freak out about the ~200 gram metal rectangle that sends images through the air sitting in your pocket, you're used to it.

You're doing the exact same thing you're criticizing others for doing. "There's no answer" / "it's a trick of language" are both extremely well established lines of philosophical argument. See new mysterians and Wittgenstein for one example of each.

I know that, I am not exempt from obsessive philosophical contemplation that more than anything wants to come to some conclusion about any aspect of existence and for what it's worth I believe that thinking about these things probably brings us closer to the "truth" (in the average case) than not thinking about these things, but acting like you understand the hard problem of consciousness then going on to say "this is the solution" screams that you don't understand the problem at all.

>acting like you understand the hard problem of consciousness then going on to say "this is the solution"

It's more like the "hard problem of consciousness" is a cancerous lie and it's every sober minded upstanding citizen's duty to stomp it out wherever it shows its face. I think it's actually holding back AI progress.

Spiritualism belongs on Philosophy belongs on Neither belong on Veeky Forums

I think it's time to go to bed, Dennett. You've shitposted enough for one day.

I think we'll just have to wait for some more years of neuroscience and physiology progressing and these problems will become obvious as remnants of a time in which we knew too little and simplified too much.

>There is no hard problem of the geocentrism
>clearly Earth is at the center, why else would everything in the sky appear to revolve around us?

No, the analagous argument would be there is no hard problem of geocentrism because geocentrism is an illusion. Which is true.

Dan Dennett, PhD in hand waving.

youtube.com/watch?v=hUW7n_h7MvQ

>B-But he didn't explain how that magician sawed a lady in half and then put her back together unharmed! He just claimed the lady was never actually sawed in half and that it was an illusion, way to ignore the real question!

I can't explain it, therefore its not real!

If it isn't real, "it's not real" is in fact the explanation. You're looking for magical explanations and will never find them because it was never magic to begin with.

>If it isn't real, "it's not real" is in fact the explanation.

Yes but your argument, and Dennett's is assuming that conclusion and working backwards from it.

That is literally one of the most common ways to solve a difficult problem.
Way better than standing at the base of the wall and scratching your head.

If by solving a problem you mean convincing yourself that you have solved the problem then yeah sure.

>I'm experiencing qualia right now.
Prove it.

It's a research program fegit.
Infinitely better than HURR DURR U CANT NO NUFIN ITS TOO HARD

That isn't the implication at all. The hardness of the problem comes from emphasizing the differences between understanding behavior and understanding why it feels like something.

It's not that we can't know, it's simply that we don't know yet. The discussion of whether we can solve the hard problem or not is another entirely.

Dennett is meme tier.

How is it possible to have subjective experience and not understand the hard problem?

It sounds like you're implying people who don't believe the hard problem is real don't understand it. Maybe you should consider the possibility they're the only ones who are understanding it.

consciousness isn't real, the idea that there's a problem is just one more iteration of the human need to feel special and different, just like the earth being the center of the universe. We're nothing but meat machines.

>the idea that there's a problem is just one more iteration of the human need to feel special and different

Dubs checked, also this exactly. You see it nonstop with all those "robots could never learn to do X!" comments.

I create a computer program which can model a human brain perfectly.

Is it conscious?

I distribute this program over a distributed cluster. Is it conscious?

I slow it's speed down to 1%. It still produces intelligent behavior. Is it conscious?

I implement the program on neuron-like silicon chips. Is it conscious?

I ask it whether it is conscious. It says "I am conscious". Is it conscious?

it's just as conscious as you and me.

Theres is no justifiable explanation for why a machine would ever experience anything

There is no justifiable explanation for why the random motion of molecules creates temperature

The random motion of molecule IS temperature it doesnt create it

That's not the real question

The question is: can it be done?

A machine is a dynamical system made of molecules
An animal is a dynamic system made of molecules

If animals can be conscious, why can't machines? Is it something in carbon? But who's to say that the behavior of carbon can't be emulated in a simulator?

reminder than dan dennett thinks that free will exists

Maybe he has a unique snowflake definition of free will

What's the definition of free will anyway?

>something in carbon
That's a silly notion. individual particles have nothing to do with consciousness.

the act of being conscious has probably something to do with the brain structure and how our memory works and interconnects with all of the brain.

The human brain is basicaly a machine anyway, so if the brain can be conscious, then a machine can be as well, we just have no god damn idea how does any of that work. for me, It's like thinking about how the universe is infinite, my brain just get's stuck in a loop of thoughts, proofs and mistakes and can't grasp the concept. It's a difficult (but fun) thing to think about.

I would maybe say that the consciousness of a brain is there because of the brain being in an unstopping spiking loop of signals and chemicals, and everytime you see something or start a train of thought (or continue one from earlier) you get spiking signals with stuff related to that topic. so now you "see the connections" and "realize similarities" just because these stuff are already classified and stored in the memory. on top of that, you can run more classifications on those same ideas with other ideas (like abstract thinking) to create further connections. like, not everything looks like a chair, but if it is structured in a way that can hold your weight and support your possition well enough, you can sit on it (something that a commonplace machine couldn't ever figure out unless programmed to do exactly that)... funny shit this brain of ours!

The free will argument is ultimately semantical and retarded. In order to even talk about those things, you have to deconstruct so much that the word "free" doesnt even mean anything anymore.

Right. Now take the next step, consider how there's also no justifiable explanation why a biological machine would ever "experience" anything, and realize the concept of "experience" has no substance to it in reality and only "exists" as shorthand for expressing information about sensory organ stimuli.