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eve_of_distraction t1_j34bmle wrote

Reply to comment by joseph20606 in I asked ChatGPT if it is sentient, and I can't really argue with its point by wtfcommittee

We have no good reason whatsoever to think they don't. You're choosing to side with solipsism? Really?

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williamfwm t1_j35h7s5 wrote

This is the Other Minds Problem. You don't have to be a solipsist to recognize The Problem Of Other Minds (though that's one position you could take)

But consider this: It's common to suppose that consciousness is "caused by some physical, biological process", yes? Well, take a good look at the way nature operates....we constantly find that, for any feature you can imagine, biology will sometimes fail to give it to some organisms. People are born without the expected physical features all the time, and if consciousness is caused by some physical bit of biology, everybody consistently receiving it is the LEAST likely outcome. The more likely consequence of that assumption, the more reasonable expectation, is that some people have consciousness, and some people don't, as an accident of birth.

Furthermore, if people without consciousness are nearly identical except for having a different philosophy then they probably have the same fitness (or close) and little selection pressure working against them. A large segment of the population could be p-zombies - they could even be the majority.

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eve_of_distraction t1_j366y9w wrote

>It's common to suppose that consciousness is "caused by some physical, biological process", yes?

It's common, but I think it's highly erroneous. I don't subscribe to mainstream physicalism. I'm an Analtytical Idealist. I suspect what we see when we observe the brain is the image of life, as seen within our own perception. Not the thing in itself. It's like the dials on a dashboard.

As a side note, just out of interest, do you really believe there are humans without subjective inner experience?

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williamfwm t1_j3xqqb1 wrote

> As a side note, just out of interest, do you really believe there are humans without subjective inner experience?

I do. I also believe the other minds problem is unsolvable in principle, so I can't ever be certain, but I've come to lean strongly on that side.

I haven't always thought so. It was that essay by Jaron Lanier I linked above that started me on that path. I read it a few years ago and started to warm to the idea. Lanier once described that 1995 essay has having been written "tongue firmly in cheek", that he believes in consciousness "even for people who say it doesn't exist", and he also has a sort of moral belief that it's better pragmatically if we fall on the side of assuming humans are special, but, he has also teased over the years[1] since that deniers may just not have it, so it's hard to tell exactly where he falls. I may be the only one walking around today taking the idea seriously....

For me, I feel like it's the culmination of things that have been percolating in the back of my mind since my teen years. Taking that position brings clarity

The main point for me, as referenced, is that it clarifies the "talking past" issue. People do mental gymnastics to rationalize that both sides are talking about the same thing in consciousness debates, yet appear to be talking at cross-purposes. They always start these discussions by saying "We all know what it is", "It couldn't be more familiar", etc But do we all know? What if some don't, and they lead us into these doomed arguments? Sure, one can take up any goofy position for the sake of argument and try to defend it as sport, but people like Dennett are so damn consistent over such a long time. He himself is saying "I don't have it" [and nobody does] so maybe we should just believe him? Maybe it is true for him?

I also can't wrap my head around why it doesn't bother some people! I've been plagued by the consciousness problem since my teen years. And before that, I recall first having the epiphany of there being a problem of some sort in middle school; I remember catching up with a friend in the halls on a break period between classes and telling him about how I came to wonder why does pain actually hurt (and him just giving me a what-are-you-talking-about look). I'm sure it was horribly uneloquently phrased, being just a kid, but the gist was....why should there be the "actual hurt" part and not just....information, awareness, data to act on?

Some people just don't think there's more, and don't seem to be on the same page on what the "more" is even if you have long, drawn out discussions with them trying to drill down to it. It would make a lot of sense if they can't get it because it isn't there for them.

I also realized that we take consciousness of others as axiomatic, and we do this due to various kinds of self-reinforcing circular arguments, and also due to politeness; it's just mean and scary to suggest some might not have it (back to Lanier's pragmatism). I call it "The Polite Axiom". I think we're free to choose a different axiom, as after all axioms are simply....chosen. I choose to go the other way and choose some-people-don't-have-it based on my equally foundation-less gut feelings and circular self-reinforcing observations and musings.

Lastly, I'm basically a Mysterian a la McGinn etc, because I don't see any possible explanation for consciousness that would be satisfactory. I can't even conceive of what form a satisfactory explanation would take[2]. I also came to realize in the past few years that even neurons shouldn't have authority in this issue. Why should it be in there compared to anywhere else? (Why do sloshing electrolytes make it happen? If I swish Gatorade from glass to glass does it get conscious?). And, unlike McGinn, I don't think we know that it's in there and only there. Nope! We know[3] that it's one mechanism by which consciousness expresses itself, and if we're being disciplined that's the most we can say.

Bonus incredibly contentious sidenote: Penrose's idea, though often laughed off as quantum-woo-woo, has the advantage that it would solve the issue of Mental Privacy in a way that computationalism fails at (the difficulty of coherence would keep minds confined to smaller areas)

[1] One example: I absolutely love this conversation here from 2008, the bit from about 20:00 to 30:00, where Lanier at one point taunts Yudkowsky as being a possible zombie. A lot of the commenters think he's a mush-mouthed idiot saying nothing, but I think it's just brilliant. On display is a nuanced understanding of a difficult issue from someone's who's spent decades chewing over all the points and counterpoints. "I don't think consciousness 'works' - it's not something that's out there", and the number line analogy is fantastic, so spot on re:computationalism/functionalism....just so much packed in that 10 mins I agree with. Suppose people like Yudkowsky gravitate to hardnosed logical positivist approaches because they don't have the thing and so don't think there's any thing to explain?

[2] The bit in the video where Lanier just laughs off Yudkowsky's suggestion that "Super Dennett or even Super Lanier 'explains consciousness to you'". It is "absurd [....] and misses the point". There's just nothing such an explanation could even look like. There's certainly no Turing machine with carefully chosen tape and internal-state-transition matrix that would suffice (nor, equivalently, any deeply-nested jumble of Lambda Calculus. I mean, come on)

[3] "Know" under our usual axiom, at that! We assume it's there, then see it the "evidence" of it there, but we've axiomatically chosen that certain observations should constitute evidence, in a circular manner....

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turnip_burrito t1_j350gah wrote

It's actually a pretty interesting question that we might be able to test and answer. Not solipsism, but the question of whether our machines have qualia, assuming we believe other humans have it.

There some specific subset of our brains that has neural activity that aligns with our conscious experience. If we try adding things to it, or temporarily removing connectivity to it, we can determine what physical systems have qualia, and which ones separate "qualia-producing" systems and unconscious systems while still allowing information to flow back and forth.

We have to tackle stuff like:

  • Why are we not aware of some stuff in our brains and not other parts? The parts we are unaware of can do heavy computational work too. Are they actually also producing qualia too, or not? And if so, why?

  • What stops our conscious mind from becoming aware of background noises, heart beat, automatic thermal regulation, etc?

Then we can apply this knowledge to robots to better judge how conscious they are. Maybe it turns out that as long as we follow certain information-theoretic rules or build using certain molecules, we avoid making conscious robots. For people that want to digitize their mind, this also would help ensure the digital copy is also producing qualia/not a philosophical zombie.

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