Consciousness baffles me, but not the Hard Problem

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Simply put, the Hard Problem asks the following question: how can the machinery of the brain (the neurons and synapses) produce consciousness — the colours that we see, for example, or the sounds that we hear?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-07/david-chalmers-and-the-puzzle-of-consciousness/8679884

“Consciousness baffles me, but not the Hard Problem. The Hard Problem arises only if one makes a metaphysical assumption, namely that the intrinsic nature of the world’s quantum fields – the essence of the physical – is non-experiential.”
— David Pearce

https://www.facebook.com/tyler.s.anderson.54/posts/pfbid02VaMvEC4E6H7ip4k2diwnkvpLEDnkDdteesjnSvsJs9qZ1tfEGudjAUSfJfyMbjskl

Physical theories of consciousness reduce to panpsychism

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The necessary features for consciousness in prominent physical theories of consciousness that are actually described in terms of physical processes do not exclude panpsychism, the possibility that consciousness is ubiquitous in nature, including in things which aren’t typically considered alive. I’m not claiming panpsychism is true, although this significantly increases my credence in it, and those other theories could still be useful as approximations to judge degrees of consciousness. Overall, I’m skeptical that further progress in theories of consciousness will give us plausible descriptions of physical processes necessary for consciousness that don’t arbitrarily exclude panpsychism, whether or not panpsychism is true.

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A conversation between Brian Tomasik and Luke Muehlhauser

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Luke and Mr. Tomasik found that they agreed about the following:

  •  Physicalism and functionalism about consciousness.
  •  Specifically, Mr. Tomasik endorses “Type A” physicalism, as described in his
    article “Is There a Hard Problem of Consciousness?” Luke isn’t certain he
    endorses Type A physicalism as defined in that article, but he thinks his
    views are much closer to “Type A” physicalism than to “Type B” physicalism.
  •  Consciousness will likely turn out to be polymorphic, without a sharp dividing
    line between conscious and non-conscious systems, just like (say) the line
    between what does and doesn’t count as “face recognition software.”
  • Consciousness will likely vary along a great many dimensions, and Luke and
    Mr. Tomasik both suspect they would have different degrees of moral caring
    for different types of conscious systems, depending on how each particular
    system scores along each of these dimensions.

 

A core disagreement

In Luke’s view, a system needs to have certain features interacting in the right way in order to qualify as having non-zero consciousness and non-zero moral weight (if one assumes consciousness is necessary for moral patienthood).

In Mr. Tomasik’s view, various potential features (e.g. ability to do reinforcement learning or meta-cognition) contribute different amounts to a system’s degree of consciousness, because they increase that system’s fit with the “consciousness” concept, but all things have non-zero fit with the “consciousness” concept.

Luke suggested that this core disagreement stems from the principle described in Mr. Tomasik’s “Flavors of Computation are Flavors of Consciousness“:

It’s unsurprising that a type-A physicalist should attribute nonzero consciousness to all systems. After all, “consciousness” is a concept — a “cluster in thingspace” — and all points in thingspace are less than infinitely far away from the centroid of the “consciousness” cluster. By a similar argument, we might say that any system displays nonzero similarity to any concept (except maybe for strictly partitioned concepts that map onto the universe’s fundamental ontology, like the difference between matter vs. antimatter). Panpsychism on consciousness is just one particular example of that
principle.

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What if a panpsychist view of consciousness encourages us to have more babies?

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Danny Donabedian wrote:

Assuming a pan-psychist view of consciousness for a moment, with the potential for suffering subroutines to extend to fundamental physical particles and the simplest of physical systems, I am unsure if more complex systems like those found in living creatures and their neural networks or even unicellular organisms increase or decrease net suffering.
If it turns out that net universal suffering decreases when matter is incorporated into more complex (life-like) systems, I guess we must switch it to have more babies.

While I don’t necessarily believe that, I do believe that it can’t be excluded as a possibility due to the significant s-risk involved with making such a mistake if it turns out to be true. I guess a third option would be that the suffering of simple systems is no greater or less than complex systems.
Though if I had to give a reason per say why one might think simple systems contain more suffering, perhaps a cessation of suffering, a tranquilism, or knowledge/certainty of its attainment, is only observed in certain complex systems and is an emergent property of those systems.

Timothy Chan wrote:

Does that idea that complexity decreases net suffering rely on the consciousnesses of simple systems being cancelled by being incorporated into a complex one though? If that’s the idea I’m not too sure about the intuition behind that. It seems difficult to draw a boundary around a system and say that it’s the ‘terminal’ system that cancels everything simpler.

Danny Donabedian wrote:

Even if their consciousnesses weren’t fully canceled during such an incorporation, perhaps the simpler systems are affected in some other positive manner (with the suffering component of consciousness broadcasted upstream?). But I agree with you that carving up boundaries is challenging and at least not possible for the time being.

Manu Herrán wrote:

Another (scary) very similar hypothesys is that the basic state of simple matter is intense suffering and it thrives to more complex systems in an attempt to avoid that suffering. I put that idea long ago on lyrics of a song called Hypothesis Mass of a Death Metal band called Mortem Tirana.

Danny Donabedian wrote:

That’s similar to but a better/updated model reminiscent of the buddhist approach to realms where hellishness seems to be very simple and correlates with decreased complexity and intense craving, and its converse, happy godliness is associated with max complexity and less overall craving compared to the lower realms.

—

This conversation takes place in July 2020 in a thread started by Wolf Bullmann in  the “Sounds like something Brian Tomasik would be against but ok” private facebook group. Excerpts taken with the consent of the authors.

 

The Eliminativist Approach to Consciousness by Brian Tomasik

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This essay explains my version of an eliminativist approach to understanding consciousness. It suggests that we stop thinking in terms of “conscious” and “unconscious” and instead look at physical systems for what they are and what they can do. This perspective dissolves some biases in our usual perspective and shows us that the world is not composed of conscious minds moving through unconscious matter, but rather, the world is a unified whole, with some sub-processes being more fancy and self-reflective than others. I think eliminativism should be combined with more intuitive understandings of consciousness to ensure that its moral applications stay on the right track.

…

My version of eliminativism does not say that consciousness doesn’t exist. […] Rather, eliminativism says that “consciousness” is not the best concept to use when talking about what minds do.

I think eliminativism should be combined with more intuitive understandings of consciousness to ensure that its moral applications stay on the right track.

Compare an insect with a human. Rather than imagining the human as conscious and the insect as not, or even the human as just more conscious than the insect, instead picture the two as you would a professional race car versus a child’s toy car.

Compare your brain with another part of your nervous system — say the peripheral nerves in your hand. Why is your brain considered “conscious” and your hand not? […] The eliminativist approach encourages us to stop thinking about neural operations as “unconscious” or “conscious”.

Those who value conscious welfare […] aim to attribute degrees of sentience to different parts of physics and then value them based on the apparent degree of happiness or suffering of those sentient minds. Because it’s mistaken to see consciousness as a concrete thing, sentience-based valuation, like the other valuation approaches, involves a projection in the mind of the person doing the valuing. But this shouldn’t be so troubling, because metaethical anti-realists already knew that ethics as a whole was a projection by the actor onto the world. The eliminativist position just adds that the thing (dis)being valued, consciousness, is itself something of a fiction of the moral agent’s invention.

Actually, calling “consciousness” a fiction is too strong.

A humanoid doll that blinks might look more conscious than a fruit fly, but the 100,000 neurons of the fruit fly encode a vastly more complex and intelligent set of cognitive possibilities than what the doll displays. Judging by objective criteria given sufficient knowledge of the underlying systems is less prone to bias than phenomenal-stance attributions.

I think attacking the core confusion about consciousness itself is quite important, for the same reason that it’s important to break down the confusions behind theism.

Viewing consciousness as a definite and special part of the universe is a systematic defect in one’s world view, and removing it does have practical consequences.

Looking at the universe from a more physical stance has helped me see that even alien artificial intelligences are likely to matter morally, that plants and bacteria have some ethical significance, and that even elementary physical operations might have nonzero (dis)value.

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The hypothesis of the universe self-simulating itself in a strange loop

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A paper from the Quantum Gravity Research institute proposes there is an underlying panconsciousness.

The physical universe is a “strange loop” says the new paper titled “The Self-Simulation Hypothesis Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics” from the team at the Quantum Gravity Research, a Los Angeles-based theoretical physics institute founded by the scientist and entrepreneur Klee Irwin. They take Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis, which maintains that all of reality is an extremely detailed computer program, and ask, rather than relying on advanced lifeforms to create the amazing technology necessary to compose everything within our world, isn’t it more efficient to propose that the universe itself is a “mental self-simulation”? They tie this idea to quantum mechanics, seeing the universe as one of many possible quantum gravity models.

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Physical theories of consciousness reduce to panpsychism, by Michael St. Jules

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The necessary features for consciousness in prominent physical theories of consciousness that are actually described in terms of physical processes do not exclude panpsychism, the possibility that consciousness is ubiquitous in nature, including in things which aren’t typically considered alive. I’m not claiming panpsychism is true, although this significantly increases my credence in it, and those other theories could still be useful as approximations to judge degrees of consciousness. Overall, I’m skeptical that further progress in theories of consciousness will give us plausible descriptions of physical processes necessary for consciousness that don’t arbitrarily exclude panpsychism, whether or not panpsychism is true.

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If we are sentient robots, without will, sentience is not useful. And if it’s useful, how can it be?

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When it is stated that sentience has a purpose, this idea is usually explained by indicating that sentience is useful because it motivates doing certain things and avoiding others. In addition, in this explanation, it is usually indicated that sentience motivates but does not force. That is, under this explanation, sentience is not simply the cause and behavior the consequence, but sentience motivates to strive to make the best possible decision, under the threat of pain and the reward of pleasure. According to this explanation, sentient beings would make better decisions and will be selected (“better”, from an evolutionary point of view).

But we can also consider that it is possible that we are sentient robots, but without will, that we simply do what we have been programmed for, even though we have the feeling that we make free decisions, so that sentience really does not play any role in the evolution in form of motivation.

So, is sentience useful or inevitable?

My best intuition is that sentience is probably inevitable when certain conditions are met. So, sentience would be inevitable. Not useful. But let’s assume for a moment that sentience is useful. If sentience were useful, then sentience must incorporate some element that goes beyond classical physics, to be really useful. For example, related to quantum physics or the multiverse.

Why?

Because if sentience had a positive effect (in the form of motivation) on survival, in some way that can be explained by classical chemistry and physics, for example, thinking faster, taking better decisions, or being able to escape running faster than a predator, this behavior, that would be evolutionarily selected, would have to compete with another behavior that would also be evolutionarily selected, which is to do exactly the same, following the laws of chemistry and classical physics, but without the sentience.

I will give an example to try to illustrate all this.

Suppose we have a DNA chain that “reproduces as much as possible” and that follows the laws of classical physics. This chain does not feel.

By the way, when I say that the chain “reproduces as much as possible” I am not assigning agency, but summarizing in that phrase what is happening on a physical level. That chain that “reproduces as much as possible” is simply matter following the laws of physics. The phrase “reproduces as much as possible” is a summary way of describing what is happening.

We also have a second strand of DNA also formed by physical particles and obviously also that “reproduces as much as possible.” However, this DNA chain does feel: it feels pleasure every time it reproduces and frustration if it can not. Which motivates it to reproduce as much as possible.

This second strand of DNA is motivated to reproduce, but in what physical way would it be able to do it better than the chain that does not feel, and therefore is not “motivated”?

Whichever way we imagine that this second chain can do something better than the first chain, if it is following the laws of physics, it is something that chains like the first one could also perform. That is, evolution could always create chains that do not feel, like the first one, and that would have that characteristic of being more efficient, like the second one. Then both types of chain could exist: those that feel and those that do not feel. Motivation would not have any differential advantage.

If instead of DNA chains we think about complete individuals like us, the example works the same.

Obviously, if we consider that from a certain level of complexity or when certain functions appear, all the chains (or individuals) feel, then it would seem that sentience plays a role in evolution, but simply what would be happening is that sentience is a byproduct of something else. And it is that other thing (complexity, function) the thing that is being selected, not sentience. Sentience would not be useful: it would be inevitable.

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The importance of phenomenal binding, by David Pearce

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We normally assume a fundamental distinction between conscious and non-conscious systems. Instead, I explore the possibility that what makes animals special isn’t consciousness per se, but phenomenal binding. Unless spooky “strong” emergence is true, then a termite colony, or the enteric nervous system, or a classical digital computer, or the population of the United States is not a unified subject of experience.

So how is phenomenal binding possible in the CNS? Why aren’t we micro-experiential zombies too?

I explore a quantum-theoretic version of the intrinsic nature argument for non-materialist physicalism. In recent years, the intrinsic nature argument has undergone a revival. See Phil Goff’s “Galileo’s Error” (cf. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/27/galileos-error-by-philip-goff-review) for an accessible introduction. According to the intrinsic nature argument, experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, the mysterious “fire” in the equations.

The biggest technical obstacle faced by the intrinsic nature argument is often reckoned the phenomenal binding / combination problem: https://www.quora.com/How-should-we-categorize-the-binding-problem-in-the-context-of-easy-and-hard-problem-of-consciousness

However, I argue that _if_ the intrinsic nature argument is sound, and _if_ unitary-only quantum mechanics is correct, then we already have a built-in solution to the binding problem: https://www.quora.com/Do-our-brains-work-at-the-quantum-level-Is-the-brain-itself-a-quantum-machine

Stepping back, a lot of researchers assume that we face a stark choice: scientific materialism versus mysticism/dualism.

Not so. I assume that monistic physicalism is true.

But I’ve no idea how to reconcile subjective experience with materialism:
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-philosophy-that-can-overcome-materialism

Text by David Pearce

The Physical and Consciousness: One World Conforming to Different Descriptions, by Magnus Vinding

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Panpsychism is the doctrine that the world’s fundamental physical stuff also has primitive experiential properties. Unlike the physicalistic idealism explored here, panpsychism doesn’t claim that the world’s fundamental physical stuff is experiential. Panpsychism is best treated as a form of property-dualism.

How, one may wonder, is Pearce’s view different from panpsychism, and from property dualist views more generally? This is something I myself have struggled a lot to understand, and inquired him about repeatedly. And my understanding is the following: according to Pearce, there is only consciousness, and its dynamics conform to physical description. Property dualist views, in contrast, view the world as having two properties: the stuff of the world has insentient physical properties to which separate, experiential properties are somehow attached.

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