Well, that's a bold claim, and it doesn't really say anything substantial, in my opinion. What does it mean to see yourself? Are the electrical impulses of your brain somehow registering themselves and then reflecting them to yet another part of the brain which.. does what exactly?
Believing that consciousness can be explained in terms of material processes is certainly a valid belief, but it is just that: a belief. Believing that a certain configuration of atoms, no matter how involved, can give rise to subjective experience is not far from believing in some kind of magic.
And before you retort that a lot of phenomena in nature are 'emergent', I will say:all those phenomena are ultimately explicable in terms of their basic atomic constituents. Consciousness is qualitatively different. You cannot start with the experience of being hungry and then somehow explain the whole process from your stomach being empty to that qualitative experience and how it feels for you.
> Believing that consciousness can be explained in terms of material processes is certainly a valid belief, but it is just that: a belief.
It's a belief, true, but it's kind of a privileged one, since it's so successful at explaining literally every other thing we observe about the universe. Why brains would be different?
> Believing that a certain configuration of atoms, no matter how involved, can give rise to subjective experience is not far from believing in some kind of magic.
This argument would be stronger 500 years ago, but I don't know how one can consider this "not far from believing in magic" after seeing a computer. Or, after observing brains of different animals - from insects to simians. Or, after discovering circuit-bending and realizing how similar it is to prodding a brain. There's ample evidence against the hypothesis that the human brain is the only magical object in the universe and that it somehow transcends physics.
> And before you retort that a lot of phenomena in nature are 'emergent', I will say:all those phenomena are ultimately explicable in terms of their basic atomic constituents. Consciousness is qualitatively different. You cannot start with the experience of being hungry and then somehow explain the whole process from your stomach being empty to that qualitative experience and how it feels for you.
Why? If I gave you a device that could trace the state of every molecule and charge in my brain to the extent allowed by uncertainty principle, would you still be confident in believing that? Just because we don't have a device like this doesn't mean consciousness is magic.
> It's a belief, true, but it's kind of a privileged one, since it's so successful at explaining literally every other thing we observe about the universe. Why brains would be different?
It's successful at explaining everything that can be explained in material terms, yes! Science is really good at it.
>This argument would be stronger 500 years ago, but I don't know how one can consider this "not far from believing in magic" after seeing a computer. Or, after observing brains of different animals - from insects to simians. Or, after discovering circuit-bending and realizing how similar it is to prodding a brain. There's ample evidence against the hypothesis that the human brain is the only magical object in the universe and that it somehow transcends physics.
I cannot see how any one of those things you mentioned have to do with the utter strangeness that is subjective experience? I'm not saying a brain cannot perform computations, if that's what you're getting out of this. Why you mention a computer I don't know - there is nothing that indicates a computer has subjective experience and nothing about a computer makes me believe that creating subjective states is something that can be done with atoms alone. And that is what is 'magical' about this line of reasoning.
>Why? If I gave you a device that could trace the state of every molecule and charge in my brain to the extent allowed by uncertainty principle, would you still be confident in believing that? Just because we don't have a device like this doesn't mean consciousness is magic.
See above. Even if you were to trace every molecule in my brain, you would be no closer to really explaining a subjective experience. You would be able to show correlations, yes! 'Now he's angry, look at this cluster of atoms'. But that's not an explanation of the experience as such. That's the unbridgeable gap I'm talking about.
> See above. Even if you were to trace every molecule in my brain, you would be no closer to really explaining a subjective experience. You would be able to show correlations, yes! 'Now he's angry, look at this cluster of atoms'. But that's not an explanation of the experience as such. That's the unbridgeable gap I'm talking about.
Personally, I don't see a basis to believe there's something more to it. I'd look at the cluster of atoms in your brain and say this is anger. This is the computational process that is anger in your brain. I don't see a meaningful difference between this and doing the same to a computer - I could point at a cluster of atoms and EM fields in the CPU and say, "this is factorization of numbers; this is how the cryptographic routine this CPU executes manifests". Why would there be anything else here?
I see this kind of debate between people often. I think the crucial point is the "feeling" that is the subjective experience.
Some people feel there is no way for such a "feeling" to form spontaneously out of the cold, dead matter. Since some matter doesn't experience this feeling, how does it spontaneously form, out of no-feeling, at some threshold configuration? What is this threshold exactly? These people think it must special, since we can imagine (in principle) a clump of matter interacting physically in time to simulate the external appearance of a human mind, yet remain no-feeling on the inside.
Other people don't seem to grasp what the problem the first people are posing might possibly be. The "feeling" is simply a property of the universe which arises in some physical configurations. Computers can have subjective experience and even today's computers might have it in some form. There is no discrete, magical step required.
I find myself continually switching teams on this matter. The second position might be more believable after we find some laws governing the relationship between physical configurations and the nature of the resulting experience. But since subjective experience is necessarily... subjective, it seems very hard (impossible?) to test.
The problem with that line of reasoning is you're assuming the brain is a computer, or that it merely computes.
But that's just an assumption and there are many reasons a person, let alone a brain, is not a machine or a computer or an algorithm. That it is like it? Sure, in some insignificant ways, we have the ability to compute things. But is it an algorithm? No.
The idea that consciousness is an algorithm or a computer or a machine is an assumption that is extremely popular among people in the tech industry because it confirms their assumptions, and it makes them feel like they have extremely transferable knowledge. "I know about computers. Let's assume the brain is a computer and consciousness is an algorithm. I can now comment on the brain and consciousness."
> The problem with that line of reasoning is you're assuming the brain is a computer, or that it merely computes.
The brain can compute. That's extraordinary. I say one type of thing does that, computers. You say no, two things, computers and then also brains. But when pressed to explain what is a brain if not a computer you'll just sputter (probably at length) without offering any substance.
In a sense that's the wrong way up to explain it. Church-Turing intuitively defines computation (the things computers can do) in terms of what our brains can do, so the match is not a coincidence but it also isn't there for the reason you probably expect. Because it's an intuition Church-Turing isn't provable, but you may notice that we subsequently built an _entire world-changing industry_ upon it in a lifetime.
You pointed to a review, others have written entire books, always they can be summarised as simply arguments from incredulity. "What? Nonsense, the brain can't be a computer, I simply won't believe that". It's unfortunate that we have woken such people from their daydreaming, I have no doubt that if similarly aroused they'd give the mathematicians what for too, "What? Nonsense, how can there be numbers which aren't ratios of whole numbers, I simply won't believe it".
You'll see in my comment and your quote that I don't say the brain can't compute. I agree, the brain can compute. But that doesn't mean it is a computer, because computing is an ability. People can do many other things aside from computing, none of which rely on computation, for instance they can imagine, which is the ability to think new thoughts. Computers can't imagine because all they do is compute: that's their programming. No amount of programming can produce imagination. Computation and imagination are categorically distinct as different intellectual powers and abilities.
You are conflating an ability with ontology. We know what a brain is. It's a collection of fatty material with neurons that do not explicitly fire exactly like a computer. Key word there is like. Church-Turing built a model of computational logic off of intuitions about the brain and formal mathematical logic. That's it's not provable doesn't prove your point; it removes any distinction between it being right or wrong: because it is a model (lets make something like the brain).
That an industry was built on computation doesn't prove anything. We know computation is an ability. For instance it's also something we can do with abacuses. We could have built an enormous industry on building elaborate abacuses. We built computers do be extremely fast at computation. We didn't build computers to be brains.
You'll notice, if you read the review, that the author of the review repeatedly cites cognitive neuroscientists, even evangelists of the singularity, philosophers, psychologists, and zoologists, who have published at length on this topic and repeatedly critcise and disrupt the simple idea that the brain is a computer or an algorithm or even a machine. An entire branch of philosophy developed off of Ludwig Wittgenstein to counter the computational model of consciousness. Numerous books in the Philosophy of Mind argue that the assumption that the brain is a computer is not just unsupported, it is logically nonsensical.
"No amount of programming can produce imagination" is a very bold statement to make.
The brain exists in a physical universe, made out of matter/energy, and its behaviours are entirely dictated by the laws of physics; that's a fairly accepted truth unless you have solid evidence otherwise.
The laws of physics are mathematical and can be computed by their very nature, and we are already pretty good at simulating physical interactions to a quantum level, and this ability improves over time.
At some point in time, unless there is "magic" or missing physics, a sufficiently powerful computer with a physically accurate simulation of a brain would produce virtually identical results to a real brain.
So either there must be new physics involved, or, the notion that a sufficiently advanced computer simulation can't produce imagination must be abandoned.
A team of scientists able to sufficiently model the physics of the brain (and presumably the entire central nervous system, I imagine a disembodied brain simulation would experience a horrific form of locked-in syndrome) would not need to be concerned about emergent properties of the simulation such as a sense of consciousness, or thought, or imagination. Those things will just happen once the simulation is perfected.
Indeed the cognitive neuroscience folk, etc, would be invaluable to actually understanding, training, interpreting and caring for the brain simulation, and figuring out if its behaviours and interactions constitute consciousness etc, so I do not think this has to even be framed as programmers pretending to know about brain stuff vs brain people who dismiss any notion of computationally recreating consciousness. It would be a team effort that works both ways, but is already doomed to fail if half the team thinks it's impossible from the get-go.
It's not a remotely bold statement. Think about what imagination is, and then think about whether computers can imagine. Computers can't imagine. Computers can't come up with new things because they are programmed. Programming prescribes the outputs to the same limitations as the inputs: it's a closed deterministic system.
You'll see in my comment above this one that I agree that the brain is a physical thing. But abilities and powers are not physical. That's not voodoo magic. That's what abilities are. Think about horsepower. The horsepower of a car does not reside in any one physical thing, not the carburetor, or the intake manifold, or the piston, or the wheels; it's an ability of the car: it is able to go at such and such horsepower. That is what horsepower is.
The same applies to computation. Computing something is an ability, but we have many more intellectual and cognitive abilities beside computing things.
As a result
> a sufficiently powerful computer with a physically accurate simulation of a brain would produce virtually identical results to a real brain.
is just you are assuming that it will work, but nothing about computers supports that in the slightest. That's just a guess.
> A team of scientists able to sufficiently model the physics of the brain (and presumably the entire central nervous system, I imagine a disembodied brain simulation would experience a horrific form of locked-in syndrome) would not need to be concerned about emergent properties of the simulation such as a sense of consciousness, or thought, or imagination. Those things will just happen once the simulation is perfected.
All of this is still an assumption.
Again, that doesn't mean you are right or wrong: it means its an assumption. You have to accept the limitations of your assumption and the limitations of modelling the brain on a computer are large and glaring.
> Indeed the cognitive neuroscience folk, etc, would be invaluable to actually understanding, training, interpreting and caring for the brain simulation, and figuring out if its behaviours and interactions constitute consciousness etc, so I do not think this has to even be framed as programmers pretending to know about brain stuff vs brain people who dismiss any notion of computationally recreating consciousness. It would be a team effort that works both ways, but is already doomed to fail if half the team thinks it's impossible from the get-go.
You are assuming here that only the programmers are heading down the right path. But you don't know that. It's entirely reasonable (and I would say much more supportable) to say that the programmers are heading down the wrong path: their path will lead to nothing at all. That's because the programmers have fallen to a category error.
You think they need to model the brain on a computer for it to make sense. But there is actually very little if anything to support that.
Brains are brains. Computers are computers. That computer science can be fuzzily applied to the study of brains around the ability to compute does not mean the study of brains is computer science or that brains are computers.
This is not a decent response to a thoughtful comment - or more importantly, it's the kind of response people make when they have nothing constructive to add but can't bring themselves to be gracious.
Reputable scientists – most notably Roger Penrose and his colleague Stuart Hammeroff [1] – dispute the notion that human-like consciousness can be developed in computers.
People can and will continue to debate and research this, and in the meantime it's pointless for non-experts like me to spend any amount of time arguing about it.
But it's valid for your parent commenter to point out that your position relies on assumptions rather than being proven fact.
They were respectful enough to take time to explain their point of view in great depth. More of that and less of the rude responses is what we like on HN.
Not so extraordinary. What's extraordinary isn't that brains can compute, it's that anything else can. Brains computing is ordinary. What's extraordinary about the brain isn't that it can compute. What's extraordinary about the brain is that it can be rational and self-aware, things that computers cannot do. Computers can only be deterministic. Brains can be deterministic, but they can also be non-deterministic
Computers can become non-deterministic in practice as soon as you botch your random number handling, or hook your input up to environmental noise. Is there anything suggesting the brain is non-deterministic in a theoretical way, not just the way computers are?
Deterministic means that given the same input, the system gives the same output. Computers would be useless if they were not deterministic. Hooking up random input to a deterministic process will give random output. Garbage in, garbage out.
What you're asking is for computers to be rational. That given garbage input, it will produce intelligible output. Computers cannot do this unless you program them to.
Human minds are non-deterministic in many, many, many ways. Hand the same input to the same mind and you'll get a different output every single time, unless the mind willed itself to act rationally. But they are deterministic enough that you can study their behavior. Other brains are not as non-deterministic, so their behavior is easier to study.
Look at it from a thermodynamic standpoint. Biological systems arose to conserve order against entropy. A fully-deterministic system will shed order, it's only through non-deterministic means that biological systems can conserve order.
The mind is the most complex system nature has devised that can not only slow the aggregation of entropy, but also create order! It's not breaking the laws of physics, but yet it can create all kinds of order.
Conway's Game of Life is an excellent illustration of the concept. You have to work hard and study the domain in order to find stable systems. Otherwise they just drop to equilibrium fast.
Thermodynamics is defined in a deterministic universe. It's only through sheer amount of states any interesting system could be in that entropy arises. Chaotic systems (as studied in mathematics) are deterministic too. Conway's Game of Life is indeed an excellent illustration of the concept - of how chaotic and "surprising" behavior can arise in a fully deterministic system.
> Human minds are non-deterministic in many, many, many ways. Hand the same input to the same mind and you'll get a different output every single time
That's not non-deterministic. That's simply stateful. Most human-made systems you interact with daily are stateful, so it's not exactly surprising.
When I say "deterministic in practice" vs. "deterministic in theory" I mean this: a system is deterministic in practice if you can actually predict its outputs based on its inputs with reasonable amount of effort. A LED hooked up to a switch and a battery is deterministic in practice. So is a program computing GCD on 32-bit integers. A system is deterministic in theory if it's deterministic, but actually predicting its outputs requires absurd amount of computation. Lorenz system and weather are two examples. So is protein folding and turbulent flow. I see no reason why a fly brain, a mouse brain, or a human brain wouldn't be such systems either. The entire universe could be one, if you subscribe to many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
> I mean this: a system is deterministic in practice if you can actually predict its outputs based on its inputs with reasonable amount of effort.
You're changing the meaning of determinism and bringing it closer to rationalism. Your introduction of the element of theory to the mix is a violation of Occam's Razor. We already have philosophy and a word that covers what you want it to cover. Theory is a component of rationalism, not of determinism. If you need theory to understand a system, then it already has elements of non-determinism. Theory is what you need to make sense of the non-deterministic. Because theory deals with uncertainty, you wouldn't need any validation of your hypotheses if the system was truly deterministic. One observation would be enough to ascertain the whole thing.
A considered study of history would reveal where you're going wrong here. The Greeks invented empiricism and philosophy and science while the Egyptians never got there despite only being a tiny distance away. They wanted to distance themselves from theological frames. Despite all this, the Egyptians built pyramids. They understood determinism. They could not understand science. Determinism made them good engineers. Engineering is not science.
> A system is deterministic in theory if it's deterministic, but actually predicting its outputs requires absurd amount of computation.
Now you're starting to dip into computational complexity territory. Predicting outputs is the domain that the halting problem puts a backstop to.
To prove to you that a brain is better than a computer, all I have to do is state the obvious, humans make algorithms, not the other way around. Sure, there are programs that will devise algorithms, but humans have to understand the domain before they can make computers do their work for them.
Your examples of Lorenz systems and weather do not change things at all. Humans have a better understanding of weather than computers do. In fact, humans have an entire body of theory that attempts to make sense of why such things have difficult-to-determine causation, chaos theory. Humans devised it, not computers. And they devised it using the tools of epistemology, working out the details of justification of knowledge via seeking rigor, not in the scientific method of dreaming up hypotheses based on empirical analysis and testing them. Chaos theory is more math than science.
In other real ways, humans outclass other mammals, even though we largely share the same macro brain structures. We keep monkeys in cages, monkeys do not keep us in cages.
I'm not sure how much more I have to state the obvious here. You seem to be the one seeking out a special domain in which the rules don't apply, one in which computers are wholly analogous to brains. It may, and this is speculation, be true in degree rather than kind.
But the halting problem itself illustrates a domain in which humans are able to reason past, whereas we cannot possibly program a computer to do it. Computers cannot program themselves to find gradations of the halting problem. Humans have to write algo-generating algos. The pace of comp-sci progress at the moment is fully dictated by human ingenuity, and if you think about it, any change in this means that the singularity is upon us.
I suspect that we'll never be able to get computers to fully take the place of brains. There will always be domains where brains are better than algos. Prove me wrong. Humans are capable of wanting things, even the best machine learning algos at the moment struggle with finding purpose. Finding purpose is something even the most basic virus can achieve. And we can't even determine whether virii are alive or not.
And that's super basic. How much more self-awareness do you think algos can find before running into hard physical limits? The computational and memory concerns are huge. I predict the hard limit of engineered systems will be well below full self-awareness. Instead we'll have to create biological systems to carry on progress. Dogs will get smarter, mice will get smarter, apes will eventually start doing things that humans do now, once we can fit our ethics around it.
>Hand the same input to the same mind and you'll get a different output every single time, unless the mind willed itself to act rationally.
Are you sure? Remember that memory also counts as an input if it's used in a computation; it seems to me that this applies to both humans and computers.
For a harrowing account of what a mind may do when exposed to very nearly the same inputs, you may be interested in one segment from this Radiolab episode: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/radiolab-loops
It describes a patient with transient global amnesia who has a looping conversation with her daughter. (There's a link to a video of the conversation on that page as well.) Under normal circumstances this wouldn't happen, as once you've had a conversation you also have memories of having that conversation. But if you're unable to form memories...
> The idea that consciousness is an algorithm or a computer or a machine is an assumption that is extremely popular among people in the tech industry because it confirms their assumptions
No, it's not because of that. It's because it is effectively a computer. Not in the vague sense of "it has stuffs connected to stuffs and there's electricity involved", but in the more specific sense that it takes inputs, produces complex outputs, has clearly identifiable hardware and indirectly identifiable software. It even has internal structure we're only beginning to understand, but that we know enough about to reasonably infer what computations happen where. There's little reason to assume there's some metaphysical mystery here, as exactly zero other things in the universe that we studied since the dawn of humanity turned out to be magic.
TL;DR: what else could it be? And before someone says "antenna", I don't buy it. "Computer" is a simpler explanation for all known facts than remote consciousness being received by the brain. See my take on this before[0]. See also: Occam's razor.
> "I know about computers. Let's assume the brain is a computer and consciousness is an algorithm. I can now comment on the brain and consciousness."
Yeah, well, sure. If I know the limit of applicability of my computer knowledge, I sure can comment on brain and consciousness. Like, I wouldn't say "it's vulnerable to SQL injection" because that would be an idiotic statement. But I could say "it implements visual processing, audio processing, collects other telemetry, and does sensor fusion in real-time in under 20 Watts, with power to spare". Because that's observation, physics, and modelling reality along a particular perspective of interest.
> It's because it is effectively a computer. Not in the vague sense of "it has stuffs connected to stuffs and there's electricity involved", but in the more specific sense that it takes inputs, produces complex outputs, has clearly identifiable hardware and indirectly identifiable software. It even has internal structure we're only beginning to understand, but that we know enough about to reasonably infer what computations happen where. There's little reason to assume there's some metaphysical mystery here, as exactly zero other things in the universe that we studied since the dawn of humanity turned out to be magic.
You're conflating the ability to compute with ontology. Computers compute. That's all they do. They're programmed to do only that. Humans have other abilities, such as imagination, that are not computational. Computers cannot imagine, not because of limited hardware or software; they can't imagine because they only compute. Imagination isn't computational. All throughout your response you are using the terminology of computers and software as if they are completely intuitive, but we have other terminology to define those things: medical terms define parts as the brain as parts of the brain not as hardware because that's a metaphor; the cerebelum is like this part of the computer. What they are is not the same as what they can do. That's not some magical mystery, or even obscure metaphysics. A car's horsepower is not in its carburetor, or its gas, or its manifold, because the horsepower of a car is what it can do, its an ability, a power. In the same sense the brain can compute, but that doesn't mean it is a computer.
What else could it be? A brain. Animals have them. They are not computers. But they can compute. The field of computer science and software development only slightly aligns with studying the brain.
> If I know the limit of applicability of my computer knowledge, I sure can comment on brain and consciousness.
Yes and when it is no longer applicable it is no longer right or wrong: it's just assumption. That you can fuzzily attach assumptions to arguments about the brain does not mean the brain is a computer. It means you can fuzzily model the brain on a computer, but that model will have glaring gaps. You can build from your assumptions but you have to accept the limitations of that assumption. Assuming the brain is a computer comes with glaring limitations.
> A car's horsepower is not in its carburetor, or its gas, or its manifold, because the horsepower of a car is what it can do, its an ability, a power. In the same sense the brain can compute, but that doesn't mean it is a computer.
A car's horsepower is in the engine. That's what an engine does. Burns fuel, provides work over time. Work over time is denominated in horsepower - or, in saner company, in watts. Categories like "engine" or "computer" are not excluding. That thing in the car can be "an engine", "a hunk of metal" and "an expensive paperweight" at the same time. Similarly, if brain can compute, it is a computer. It's also an organ.
> Humans have other abilities, such as imagination, that are not computational.
Evidence needed. Why would it not be computational? We can, and do, easily build imagination-like computations. A fuzzy search on a graph. A series of simulations with relaxed constraints and somewhat randomized initial states. They all resemble aspects of imagination; it's not a big leap to conclude that imagination is nothing but a more complex variant of such computations.
> It means you can fuzzily model the brain on a computer, but that model will have glaring gaps.
Models exist on a map, not in the territory. So do brains and computers. The territory is made of whatever sub-quark substrate the reality is made of. When you say "brain", what you're really referring to is a model, and a pretty black-boxy one. Viewing the brain as a computer is an attempt to apply a model that's little more transparent (and therefore more useful); as long as it matches observable evidence (and it does), it's the right thing to do.
Sorry, I didn't see that you'd replied to my comment until today.
> A car's horsepower is in the engine.
Where is it in the engine? The engine can go 180hp. But the engine does not contain 180 hp. That's what the concept of an ability or a power is. A broken engine cannot go 180 hp. But, if as you say, it is in the engine, then that distinction would be irrelevant. We would still say a broken engine can go 180 hp. But we don't.
> Similarly, if brain can compute, it is a computer. It's also an organ.
Right, you'll see I have never said the brain can't compute. But that doesn't mean it is simply a computer. If the assumption that the brain is a computer is to stand then the abilities of a computer should be compared to the abilities of a brain, or a person. There are those that match. We agree on that. But there are those that do not. And that means the assumption that the brain simply is a computer is flawed. It is an organ that can compute. But to extend from that that it is a computer is eliding the crucial difference between the two. That is your assumption.
> Evidence needed. Why would it [imagination] not be computational?
Let's ignore that the premise you are making: that imagination is computational, requires you to support it as well;
> imagination-like computations
> A fuzzy search on a graph
> A series of simulations with relaxed constraints and somewhat randomized initial states
All require you to posit things that are -like, or somewhat like imagination. But computers are programmed. They can't think new thoughts. They are closed deterministic systems. That their output seems imaginative or novel does not mean the computer has the ability to imagine, it means the computational output was unexpected to you or the people who wrote the code. The idea that imagination is computational is a category error.
> not a big leap to conclude that imagination is nothing but a more complex variant of such computations
This is actually an enormous leap. Can computers imagine? You will find zero agreement in that regard. That doesn't prove your point. You'll need to provide evidence that computers can actually violate their programming, cannot just compute and instead imagine. But that's not what computers do. Computers compute. That they can do things that seem like imagination to you does not mean they can imagine.
>> It means you can fuzzily model the brain on a computer, but that model will have glaring gaps.
> Models exist on a map, not in the territory. So do brains and computers. The territory is made of whatever sub-quark substrate the reality is made of. When you say "brain", what you're really referring to is a model, and a pretty black-boxy one. Viewing the brain as a computer is an attempt to apply a model that's little more transparent (and therefore more useful); as long as it matches observable evidence (and it does), it's the right thing to do.
Excuse my original words, I meant "fuzzily model the brain as a computer
Again, I don't think applying the computer as a model is completely invalid. But it has limitations. You can't just brush off those limitations when you talk about the brain as a computer. They fundamentally mean the comparison is less useful. Supposing it is 1 to 1, which you are doing leads you to build on assumptions that are unsupported. You have to accept that the assumption that the brain is a computer has serious criticisms brought against it. And you have to defend that assumption. You can't simply ignore them and argue that you are right.
For instance viewing the brain as computer frequently does not match the observable evidence. We can imagine. Computers cannot. That is observable. So how do you support the assumption that the brain is a computer in spite of that?
Computers "imagine" things all the time. The fact that we do not use the word "imagine" to describe it is immaterial. Words to not dictate the behavior.
> as exactly zero other things in the universe that we studied since the dawn of humanity turned out to be magic.
Rather, the things that seem somehow magical to us we either explain scientifically, or we ignore. I don't know about you, but several of my acquaintances have reported phenomena and experiences that I have no reason to doubt, that are not solely 'in their mind' (because of the external consequences of what happened), and that cannot be explained by mechanistic laws because they involve 'backwards' transfer of information and so on. These are datapoints, they're just unfortunately not datapoints that can be used for scientific inquiry. But then again, there is no a priori reason to believe science can answer all questions we have.
Regardless of this, there is a reason to assume a big metaphysical mystery, simply because consciousness and subjectivity is unlike anything else in the world and bridging the qualitative gap between subjective experience and the mechanistical world is a completely different task than explaining, say, what makes a stone roll the way it does.
> I don't know about you, but several of my acquaintances have reported phenomena and experiences that I have no reason to doubt, that are not solely 'in their mind' (because of the external consequences of what happened), and that cannot be explained by mechanistic laws because they involve 'backwards' transfer of information and so on.
I have those too, and no offense to you personally, but I call bullshit on both mine and your acquaintances. In case of people I know, there was not one situation for which I couldn't find a more plausible explanation - which usually boils down to that for enough trials, even the rare coincidences sometimes happen.
> there is no a priori reason to believe science can answer all questions we have.
There is this one reason that it's literally the job of science. Science isn't a bunch of fixed methods from a holy book, it's the aggregation of everything that reliably works for extracting information about observable reality. And to be clear - I'm not saying that as someone who has Faith in Science (as opposed to religion). It's just that the sentence "science can't ever answer a question about reality" is a category error - it's saying "the set of ways you can answer questions about reality with can't be used to answer a question about reality". Nonsense.
> consciousness and subjectivity is unlike anything else in the world and bridging the qualitative gap between subjective experience and the mechanistical world is a completely different task than explaining, say, what makes a stone roll the way it does
But is it? The hint is given by the fact that there's more than one thinking human in existence. You may feel that answers about your subjective experiences are out of reach of science, but to the extent subjective experiences have any impact on reality, you can use science to study my subjective experiences (as expressed by me), and I can do the same to you.
> Science isn't a bunch of fixed methods from a holy book, it's the aggregation of everything that reliably works for extracting information about observable reality.
This isn't true. The word is often used to describe that. But science is first and foremost a method. It's not the knowledge itself. It's not the techniques. There are other techniques besides scientific ones that we use to obtain information about the world. Math, for instance, isn't science. Statistical methods are not scientific methods.
Science concerns itself with obtaining empirical basis for causation. Studying the physical world does not provide insight into every problem we have. You don't try to debug your software problem by hooking up a multimeter to your CPU! We need to use alternative methodologies than scientific ones.
To lump them all under one word is wrong. Your categories are off, which makes your following statement:
> It's just that the sentence "science can't ever answer a question about reality" is a category error - it's saying "the set of ways you can answer questions about reality with can't be used to answer a question about reality". Nonsense."
... even more wrong.
Science is closer to a bunch of fixed methods from a holy book than it is to your assertion. You're using the word science to describe what epistemology calls justification. In epistemological terms, knowledge is a justified true belief. Science is a form of justification. There are other forms.
Since science is empirical, relying on the material world, then the assertion starts to carry water if and only if you can first prove physicalism. I personally am fully on board with materialism, but will rebel very hard against physicalism. Calling math a form of science feels very wrong. I'm on the fence about positivism, I need to think more about it.
> I have those too, and no offense to you personally, but I call bullshit on both mine and your acquaintances. In case of people I know, there was not one situation for which I couldn't find a more plausible explanation - which usually boils down to that for enough trials, even the rare coincidences sometimes happen.
Fair enough - this 'statistical argument' is a convenient explanation that can always be invoked, but in this case I don't really consider it to be very satisfactory as an explanation of the phenomena I have been told about (I would put the likelihood for something like those phenomena to happen 'by chance' to be so abysmally low that it seems impossible).
> There is this one reason that it's literally the job of science. Science isn't a bunch of fixed methods from a holy book, it's the aggregation of everything that reliably works for extracting information about observable reality.
I disagree. "Science (from the Latin word scientia, meaning "knowledge") is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.". This is far from saying 'science can answer any question'. But again, you're free to believe that science can do that. I just don't happen to believe it can.
> But is it? The hint is given by the fact that there's more than one thinking human in existence. You may feel that answers about your subjective experiences are out of reach of science, but to the extent subjective experiences have any impact on reality, you can use science to study my subjective experiences (as expressed by me), and I can do the same to you.
I think your answer to the other thread makes it clear that we have some insurmountable philosophical differences here. If you believe that showing the correlation between a configuration of atoms and the subjective experience that accompanies that configuration to be 'an explanation' of that subjective experience, we have very different expectations of what constitutes an explanation.
I have a hard time following. I don't feel well read on the topic, but your argument seems to boil down to "our thinking is so awesome, it must be magical". This strongly reminds me of creation myths where humans desperately tried to separate themselves from all other nature. But in case I'm missing something, I'd be thankful for you answering the following few questions to get me back on track:
- Do you believe that there are laws of physics we can not perceive and understand?
- If no: Why? How does it interact with usual matter and physics? Is this the unexplainable magic?
- If we can perceive and thus hopefully one day understand all laws of physics, can we simulate them?
- If, in the future, we are able to simulate all physics, what stops us from simulating the life of a human? (though likely significantly slower)
- This simulated human should react undistinguishable form a real human. Would you call this simulated human conscious?
- If yes, then where does this consciousness come from except the simulation state?
- If no, how do we know if some other being except ourself is conscious?
- Can there be two similar beings demonstrating the same behavior, but with only one of them being conscious?
In order:
There certainly could be. How would we know? What if the universe isn't deterministic? Certainly it's more pragmatic to assume that only what we can experience is real, but that doesn't make it true.
The belief that there could exist parts of reality that the scientific method can't explain does not require having specific examples.
Even if all of reality can be understood by physics, that doesn't mean it can be simulated.
If physical reality can be simulated, then you could simulate the physical reality that makes up a person.
There is no guarantee that your simulation of the physical reality of a person would respond identically to an actual person.
There's a large body of philosophy on this, but basically it comes down to life working out better if we all assume everyone else is conscious.
There probably can be two similar beings demonstrating identical behavior with only one being conscious. Depends on what you define consciousness as I imagine.
I happen to lean towards believing Science can explain reality and that consciousness is a physical phenomenon, but to claim that things categorically must be that way is unfounded.
I have no problem with seeing myself 'part of nature' - in fact, I have for the longest time believed that consciousness can be explained in terms of the material universe revealed by science alone. But I see no way in which this gap can be bridged in terms of what we currently know about the physical universe.
As for your questions:
- There seems to be aspects of the universe that are related to 'meaning' rather than to 'mechanics'. How that is related to the physical universe I certainly have no theory that hasn't been thought of before. Perhaps the physical world is the 'shadow' of the world of 'meaning'/spirit? I don't really know.
- We can certainly simulate all laws of physics as detectable by science. Whether that's all there is, however, is something I don't believe.
- Leaving the debate of free will aside, I certainly don't think we'll be able to simulate the life of a human in its completeness (unless we're somehow given some insight into how subjectiveness can exist in this universe) - i.e. including the subjective dimension of that human's life.
- Thus, I wouldn't call that human conscious, no.
- We can't :) Our own conscious experience is all we can be completely sure of (which is why I also find it so extremely odd to prefer the 'mechanistic worldview' when that involves disregarding our own conscious experience, which is the only thing we really have to start from!)
- In principle, I think so, yes, but only by somehow pre-programming that unconscious being to act in exactly the same way (this relates to the concept of free will).
As you can see, I don't have a clear theory of consciousness - mine is mostly a negative position in the sense that I don't believe matter, as described by the laws of physics, can give a coherent explanation of the phenomenon of consciousness. Where to go from there is not clear, but there are a lot of philosophers of mind thinking about the issue :)
(Also, again, I don't consider this position more 'magical' than believing that arranging atoms in a given configuration will 'somehow' give rise to subjective experience).
I don't see how this is relevant? I don't have a strong need to believe there is more in the universe than matter. In fact, as mentioned earlier I believed for a long time everything could be explained in that way.
But after further reflection I have arrived at a different conclusion.
Throwing out allegations of wishful thinking in a debate should at least be substantiated. Otherwise I can equally validly say it's wishful thinking on your part to believe consciousness can be explained in material terms.
Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. I claim that the processes of “thinking“ and “being conscious“ can be simulated on the reasonably powerful computer. Your claim that there’s something “more” were supported by you claiming “you seeing no way” for “more” not existing.
Now if you would claim there’s a teapot orbiting Neptune I would also not be able to disprove your claim. But based on what I know about the world, I wouldn’t expect a teapot being there. So from my perspective if you claim that it’s there, you must be in the “Subjective validation” state: “validating words, initials, statements, or signs as accurate because one is able to find them personally meaningful and significant.”
So my guess is that it deeply matters to you to believe that you are fundamentally different from all other animals. Which is a wishful thinking.
Specifically, humans as spices indeed developed the capability to talk about things, for which a kind of symbolic manipulation and processing is needed. Once the capability exists, inventing the names for the abstract concepts is also just a simple process. The names like “soul” etc.
>So my guess is that it deeply matters to you to believe that you are fundamentally different from all other animals. Which is a wishful thinking.
:) I urge you to read through this quote and then ask yourself who is making more assumptions and who are partaking in wishful thinking. I have already stated that I really don't have a problem with us being matter 'only' and yet you find this statement somehow so incredible that you have to claim that this 'deeply matters' to me, despite what I actually claim is the reason for my belief.
To me, the extraordinary claim is that matter arranged in a certain way can give rise to subjective experience. That is what requires extraordinary evidence, in the same way I would need evidence if you said that by putting sticks together to form a pentagram you were able to summon a demon.
Your teapot around neptune is neither here nor there as an argument, but since I have encountered it before I am guessing it's taken from some kind of 'sceptic's manual for discussion'. It has little relevance here, however, as I am not claiming something completely taken out of the blue, but rather something that is based on direct experience with the world, i. e. my own subjective experience.
So it's your "experience" is that you are simply "special" (based on a wishful thinking) or is there anything else? I don't think so, as you yourself write it's just your own belief: "mostly a negative position in the sense that I don't believe matter, as described by the laws of physics, can give a coherent explanation of the phenomenon of consciousness."
My belief is that you even don't want to understand it.
There are no "laws of physics" that have to be changed to make a computer that is as complex as a person's brain: it's just that our technology is inefficient: one human's brain has some 100 billion neurons, we have had a significant effort to simulate around 100 million times less:
The organic cells are simply extremely efficient in the tasks they are doing, compared to our technology.
But even that small order of magnitude of cells are enough to evolve a basic "self awareness": it's simply an evolutionary advantage for multicellular life forms not to treat their own parts of the body the same as the competition and the rest of the environment. Basically a need to treat distinctively "myself" "food" "a potential sex partner" and an "enemy" is built in in the complex life forms that move (i.e. all kinds of animals).
That "special feeling" of you "being special" that you are aware of is something that you share with most of the complex life, and it is not a surprise in any way.
I don't claim to be special - what I'm describing goes for all conscious beings, after all (and it could very well be that there are conscious animals). It seems to me you are trying really hard to make it seem like I'm uncomfortable on a personal or emotional level with the concept that consciousness can arise from matter only; please belive me when I say I am not. But on an intellectual and rational level I find the idea untenable. I don't understand why this is so hard to accept for you?
Your argument about the complexity of computers would have weight if I had been claiming that the reason consciousness cannot be found outside humans is because nothing can be as complex as the human brain; I am not claiming that. Hence you can make computers as complex as you want - you still haven't answered how subjective experience can arise from matter.
There is nothing about me in particular that is special, but every conscious being does possess a quality or is inhabited by a phenomenon that is unlike anything else in the universe that we know of. That makes it pretty damn special, yes.
But again, it's not the feeling of feeling special that I am talking about here. It is the phenomenon of subjective experience.
> It seems to me you are trying really hard to make it seem like I'm uncomfortable on a personal or emotional level with the concept that consciousness can arise from matter only; please belive me when I say I am not. But on an intellectual and rational level I find the idea untenable. I don't understand why this is so hard to accept for you?
Thanks for trying to explain your belief to me. If we concentrate on exactly your last post, maybe you can understand how I see it: I see again that you claim that you came to that conclusion "intellectually and rationally" but everything else contradicts that. I see the claim to uniqueness of conscious beings (and I still haven't heard from you if you consider only humans "conscious") as a "the phenomenon of subjective experience." That is, because you "subjectively experience" it, that means to me "not rationally" and I still conclude it's your "feeling of being special."
If you would really approach your claims "intellectually and rationally" you'd understand that that "subjective experience" which you see as something special is an emerging property. And the emerging properties are seldom "intuitive" and all appear to us "unlike anything else in the universe" until we simply use enough computation to reproduce them.
If you are aware of the history of human understanding of the movements of planets you would know that even these simple paths were before seen "unlike anything else in the universe": we didn't know how anything can continue to move so, and before Galileo we didn't even know that anything could not circle the Earth -- note the Earth being completely "special" in that understanding. Then, only better measurements helped us see the truth: Galileo discovering moons circling around other planets (making our Moon not special) and proving that the circular motion around other planets exists. Tycho Brache more accurately measuring the movements of the planets, and Kepler recognizing that all the paths can be seen as ellipsoid once we accept Earth's non-uniqueness, but that it actually moves around the Sun. Note: only to come to that conclusion, Kepler needed the huge amount of precise measurements that nobody before him had! And he had to perform for that time immense number of calculations, something that was certainly out of reach to 99.9999999999% (I'm not sure about the number of nines) of the human population at that moment, especially out of reach even to those who were rich enough and knowledgeable enough to perform them, but who would still not be even willing to spend so much time of their life on that topic unless they were ready to accept that the Earth doesn't have to be special in being a center of the universe.
And finally, even after that unique amount of measurements and calculations, it was still not answerable to anybody what is moving the planets in that ellipsoid paths, that is how anything like that can "arise" from anything we "subjectively knew." That is, anybody could claim exactly what you claim now.
But then came Newton, being lucky to invent a new way to speed up the calculations: the infinitesimal calculus. It was effectively a new "language" that allowed immensely more concise description of the calculations involved, which allowed him to being able to describe the movements of the planets and moons as, up until then completely different from anything anybody "subjectively knew", the continuous free fall toward the object around which they rotate.
Note: unless you studied physics, you most probably don't even know that the planets are really continuously in the "free fall" or even that exactly that is the reason why the humans, being inside of the International Space Station orbiting only 250 mi above the Earth, still can "float" inside of it. The gravitational forces are quite strong only 250 mi above the Earth, but the cause of the stuff and humans floating is their "continuous free fall"! Both the emerging properties of a single simple law.
So was that anything of "subjective experience" before first human was in orbit? Either no, or yes, but proving the opposite, depending whom you'd ask. Is it today? Yes. It it "rationally obvious" even today? Actually no, unless you are definitely able to do the computations following the physics formulas, note, that capability is important to be able to be "rational" about that. Was it possible to calculate it 300 years ago? Yes, but made easier due to the "shortcut" of the infinitesimal calculus. What is that actually? An "emerging property" of just a simple law F = G m1 x m2 / r^2
Do all computations have some nice shortcuts? Depends, but for some emerging properties you actually have to perform all the steps! Take a Jula fractal: f(z) = z^2 + c is the whole formula, and we needed so fast computers like today's to produce this (emerging properties of calculating the formula):
Please watch it, to get an idea how much can emerge from something as simple as f(z) = z^2 + c The computations needed for video are immense, we're just at the moment that we have strong enough computers to do them, record the output and speed it up enough for you to watch it in only 10 minutes. Just 100 years ago nobody would have been able to produce that output in any form.
Note: before Newton, nobody could believe it is so simple: that all the complex (and they are complex) planetary motions are an emerging property of such a simple law.
Likewise, your "subjective experience" of being special being "conscious" is an emerging property. The underlying completely materialistic laws are simple, but simply a lot of computation is needed for the property to emerge, if you want to reproduce it with our current technology.
The nature reproduces it, of course, all the time, having much smaller "building blocks", and there is a physicist who wrote:
>Thanks for trying to explain your belief to me. If we concentrate on exactly your last post, maybe you can understand how I see it: I see again that you claim that you came to that conclusion "intellectually and rationally" but everything else contradicts that. I see the claim to uniqueness of conscious beings (and I still haven't heard from you if you consider only humans "conscious") as a "the phenomenon of subjective experience." That is, because you "subjectively experience" it, that means to me "not rationally" and I still conclude it's your "feeling of being special."
I think we already here have some deep reasons for disagreement: If I understand you correctly here, you're saying that no conclusion reached on 'subjective' grounds can be rational - maybe you would even go so far as to say that what is rational is identical to knowledge gained via the scientific method? If so, I would disagree with your definition of what is rational.
(I don't know whether animals are conscious in the same way we are - I would have no problems either way. As I said, it's not about humans (or myself) being special, it is that the phenomenon of consciousness is special).
> If you would really approach your claims "intellectually and rationally" you'd understand that that "subjective experience" which you see as something special is an emerging property.
This is a really bold claim, and it is indeed the locus of our disagreement, so again I'd have to say I disagree :) Emergence is not a magic wand you can wave and make every problem go away; for all phenomena where 'emergence' have been invoked as an explanation, we are really just talking about very complex phenomena that are very very hard to reduce to their base 'constituents' (elementary particles and their force transmitters), but which we can at least imagine can be reduced to these constituent parts - in other words, I can imagine starting from some basic building blocks of matter and, through some very complex patterns of organization, I can imagine moving from that starting point to the end result - conceptually, even if I cannot trace all the steps with my current understanding.
But this is not something I can imagine with the phenomenon of subjective experience. (An aside here: It seems you take me to say that 'because of my subjective experience that I cannot imagine this, this cannot be true' - what I am saying is that it is subjective experience itself that is what we're trying to explain here. So referring to earlier people not 'subjectively experiencing' an understanding of how e.g. planets can move is not really on target: My concern here is with the phenomenon of subjective experience itself).
What I mean is that in order to explain, say, my subjective experience of how an apple tastes, it's not just a matter of saying 'well, now your neurons are firing in this way and we know this is the taste center of your brain, so that's why you have a sensation of taste'. That is showing a correlation. What I'm saying is that this is not an explanation, and to me it shows that it will be impossible to move from a purely materialistic account of this experience to my actual subjective experience of the thing. How can we ever translate the firing of the neurons in my brain into the subjective world my consciousness inhabits? How can atoms, no matter how sophisticately arranged, give rise to this type of phenomenon?
Let me try to say it in another way: You could measure the activity of the brain and give an 'objective' account of what happens to a person: Now they're angry, now they're cold, now they're slightly hungry, etc. But it stops there! How will you move from this objective description to the actual experience of these feelings and states of mind?
Sean Carroll is a great physicist, and it's great that he engages with these questions, but he is mainly a physicist, not a philosopher of mind, and he does exhibit the same hubris that many of our ilk (yes, I'm a physicist too) have when it comes to other fields. The question I'm raising here is far from being unanimously agreed upon, and when Carroll writes stuff like "To persuade anyone otherwise, you would have to point to something the brain does that is in apparent conflict with the Standard Model or general relativity.", it's either disingenous or just a bit lazy. Giving a materialistic account of consciousness is non-trivial no matter whether the brain violates SM or GR or not, and whether it does or not will have little bearing on this problem.
If you're interested in reading more, and indeed seeing that I'm not the only one who sees this as a big problem of a materialistic account of the universe, here is a book I can recommend: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1851683763
> How will you move from this objective description to the actual experience of these feelings and states of mind?
I'm sorry, but that question still sounds to me exactly the same like "how many fairies can dance on the top of the needle." It's a thing of your imagination: for me, you just imagine that there is anything more than the electrical and chemical reactions, and there isn't anything. You are just using empty words that mean something to you, but not to me. Just like fairies don't exist, but many believed.
And I've already written enough how I consider that, what you believe is "something special" just an emerging property of these electrical and chemical reactions, produced in the humans by the evolutionary forces, not different to what any other animal has in order to function. Including the worms.
I know too much math, computing and physics, that I do believe that I can actually write a program that can give exactly the same answers like you do here relatively easily, because you give that little actual arguments. Moreover, I know too much math, computing and physics and have too much experience that you can't convince me that something like that is not possible, as I saw how with my own hands I can replicate a lot of "emerging properties" that were just "uniquely human" only some decades ago, and now there are programs that do that, today. So the computation can explain everything, no need to invoke anything beyond that. Everything is information, which can be stored and processed in many different ways. The physical laws are completely consistent with and sufficient for all the computation needed for all the emerging properties that we observe.
If somebody would believe you, he would have to consider impossible most of what we already produced since we have the computers. Including the, simple as it is:
which is, as you can see: "undecidable, which means that given an initial pattern and a later pattern, no algorithm exists that can tell whether the later pattern is ever going to appear." That means that there is no shortcut for it, you have to compute it to see what happens in some future moment. What your claim boils down to is that "you know" that "what happens in the future of Conway's Game of Life can't be explained by the statement 'you just have to compute it'." Which is obviously false. So for me you are just confused by the fact that some emerging property is undecidable, and attribute that property to something coming from "outside."
Ok, I think we either have some communication issues or philosophical differences (if I understand you correctly, you're saying that subjective experience is an illusion? Which to me just shows the absurd lengths one has to go to in order to rule out any question that cannot be answered by science. Your own subjective experience is literally the starting point for any investigative endeavor you might attempt in this world, so I'd be careful with claiming it is only your imagination) or a combination of both, so maybe we should recognize this and leave it here.
You have provided ample examples of emergent properties, which are interesting in their own right for sure, but if you really imagine that Conway's game of life and the unknowable future of that game is analogous to the phenomenon of subjective experience, we either are miscommunicating or there is a quite insurmountable barrier of understanding between us.
> if you really imagine that Conway's game of life and the unknowable future of that game is analogous to the phenomenon of subjective experience
No. Convay's Game of Life does not include all the physical rules that govern the physical world. The actual rules are much, much more complex, but even they can be condensed to a single equation:
Conway's game is just a minuscule subset of those, but it is, just like the fractal formulas are, completely enough to demonstrate that the emerging properties are never "intuitive" by looking at the rules themselves, and that for the outcomes of most of the rules there are no "shortcuts" -- you have to calculate all the steps, not skipping anything.
So I see your claim of "uniqueness" of your "subjective experience" nothing more than a claim that you are unable or not willing to accept that the given rules can produce such emerging properties (and additionally being confused by that property of the rule's application being undecidable for any interesting set of rules and outcomes). As I see it, it's completely obvious, from many examples I've given which show that the emerging properties produced by the application of much more minimal rules were absolutely beyond what people were able to accept. But the "non-intuitive" emerging properties do exist, and the property of undecidability effectively guarantees that nobody can predict them in advance, or imagine an easy "shortcut" to some outcome, and also that you can't claim what you claim (that the outcome you "experience" is impossible) and remain intellectually honest, now after you were made aware of how the emerging properties actually work and what are the properties of most of the applications of the rules. More precisely, to remain intellectually honest, you must admit that the emerging properties you consider "unique" can be the result of the given rules. Your only consistent claim can then be "even if they can, I don't like to think about them as such." Nothing more.
On the other side, we can, once we calculate enough, be certain that the application of the rules is enough for any property we observe in any such experiment. Which is what we did with all the simple examples I've demonstrated. But like I've said, there's no shortcut for many steps (for some subsets we do have some, like Newton's laws for exactly two bodies, but see what happens with three already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem -- "Unlike two-body problems, no closed-form solution exists for all sets of initial conditions, and numerical methods are generally required" meaning, again, you have to do all the calculation steps to know what is going to happen), so you not being able to find one shortcut exactly where you'd like is also completely normal and trivial, and can not support any claim. It's the property of how the rules work.
I don't (or at least didn't mean to) claim that the emerging properties of, say, Conway's game of life are intuitive. What I am claiming is that there is a qualitative difference between the outcomes of Conway and other physical emerging phenomena and the phenomenon of consciousness (and frankly, I have run out of ways to try to illustrate just how qualitatively different these things are). Just because both actual emergent phenomena and the phenomenon of consciousness are non-intuitive does not mean that they must necessarily be explainable in the same way any more than describing 'fog' and 'thoughts' to both be nebulous terms must mean anything beyond that.
Basically your claim is that everything we see in this world must be explicable in terms of physical laws or 'emergence' simply because emergence has shown to be correct when it comes to unimaginable things before. That, of course, does not logically follow. Of course, you're free to believe that, but then your only consistent claim can be "even if it's not logically true, I don't like to think that science cannot tell us everything.". Nothing more.
But you have already said that what I consider subjective experience is just 'my imagination' (the more I think of it, the more of an empty statement it seems to be. If consciousness is an illusion, then there must still be something that is 'being tricked', and then the question becomes how that phenomenon can happen. It's turtles all the way down.) If this is your stance, why are you still trying to convince me that subjective experience is something that will somehow be shown to be an 'emergent' property? Is it illusory or not?
> you have already said that what I consider subjective experience is just 'my imagination'
Subjective experience is an emerging property. Your imagination is "just" the "uniqueness" of it, that is, that belief of yours that subjective experience doesn't emerge from effectively computational processing of all the rules which directly follow from the initial conditions (matter and energy existing) and the physical laws (the rules that govern how matter and energy react to each other).
> why are you still trying to convince me that subjective experience is something that will somehow be shown to be an 'emergent' property? Is it illusory or not?
The illusion is the "uniqueness" of it -- you personally have an illusion of subjective experience as not being an emerging property, just like a traveler across the hot sand would see in the distance what would appear to him as a small lake, only to turn into a hot sand the closer he gets to that point. The existence of a human who thinks he sees the water is real, his thoughts are real, an in that specific example, even the picture formed in his eye is real (these phenomena can be photographed https://nikhilerigila.wordpress.com/tag/mirage/ ) just the existence of the water itself is a complete illusion.
> I have run out of ways to try to illustrate just how qualitatively different these things are
That's what you believe, but I can't remember to have read anything more then your claim that you "see/experience that it's different" which is what I tried to show you is not surprising at all, it's completely logical to happen as an emergent property in animals that move, eat or are being eaten and reproduce sexually.
Moreover, it will be possible to "teach" the computer to "experience that" just like humans experience it now. Because how we think about the world is a product of what we learn and the physical inputs we become while growing and living. As our thinking is effectively just a result of 1) processing of the information we get 2) the internal state of our body and 3) external inputs; eventually we will be able to construct a machine that will be able to process enough information, to the point of "thinking" in the same symbols (language) as we do, which has big enough internal state (memory) and which has enough of external inputs to behave, for us, surprisingly humane, even to the point of that computer claiming having a "subjective experience" which would also appear to the computer as "unique."
So is "subjective experience" illusory or not you ask? It exists, just like the mentioned human on the hot sand (or on the hot road) sees "water" in the distance and just like, similarly, the belief in gods exists among a lot of humans. But that belief is not something from the outside world: the gods were also invented by humans and there's nothing mysterious about that too:
The processes involved in such emerging properties appearing aren't mysterious but quite trivial. The rules are simple, the pure immense scale of the conditions and the parallel processing results in all we see.
> then there must still be something that is 'being tricked'
Yes, correct. You are being tricked that your "experience" is something special. It's not.
> then the question becomes how that phenomenon can happen.
Trivially. At the end, it's always that simple rules applied on enough particles in parallel produce the emerging properties that aren't simple. In between is people inventing the beliefs in gods or in the "uniqueness" of their "experience" but where every particle of them still behaved according to the rules. Emerging properties.
See the animations: http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Spaceship these objects move and keep moving. You have to play the game to see how this happens in front of your eyes, from the input you make, and from just four immensely simpler rules than the all which exist in nature (for the start, the game happens in only two dimensions an the time). If you know how to program you can make your own program from the scratch. Nothing mysterious.
- Any "live" cell with fewer than two "live" neighbours "dies".
- Any "live" cell with more than three "live" neighbours dies
- Any "live" cell with two or three live neighbours "lives", unchanged, to the next generation.
- Any "dead" cell with exactly three "live" neighbours will "come to life".
Note "live", the term used by the players of the game, actually just means "the cell is black" "dead" means "the cell is white." "Dies" means "becomes white" and "comes to life" means "becomes black." Also note that it's the humans who invented the names of "lives" "dies" for the change of the color property of the cell. That's how humans invent their beliefs. By using language (symbolical processing) to describe the properties. That symbolical processing produces false results when the use of some symbols for some phenomena is deeply wrong, even if it appears "natural" to those who use them, like here when the players of the game talk about the cells that "live." They are just black or white. But teach some children that that is the meaning of the word "live" and leave them alone and they can believe until they die (physically) that that what happens in the game is also "a life." To them it would be undeniable.
Let me quote what you said when I asked how we can move from the objective facts of a thing to my subjective experience of that thing: "It's a thing of your imagination: for me, you just imagine that there is anything more than the electrical and chemical reactions, and there isn't anything." I take this to mean that you're saying the subjective experience is imaginary. If you now claim that subjective experience is an emergent property, then let me pose the question one more time: If subjective experience is an emergent phenomenon, we should ultimately be able to explain a given state of that phenomenon in terms of the material world (just like we're able to, ultimately, explain for example a state of Conway's game of life through the rules that govern that game). So, light of wavelenghts that we associate with the color yellow hit my eye and the signals eventually reach my brain. How can we go from that (objective) description of a signal entering my brain to my subjective experience of the color yellow? How can we infer from the configuration of neurons in my brain what the experience of that color is 'like'?
Also, when you say "you personally have an illusion of subjective experience as not being an emerging property, just like a traveler across the hot sand would see in the distance what would appear to him as a small lake, only to turn into a hot sand the closer he gets to that point." this is a very strange statement. I thought, up until now, that you were arguing that it was the subjective experience itself that was the illusion, but if I understand you correctly you're claiming that it is my belief in its uniqueness that is the illusion? If that is what you claim, then there is really not much to say to you, because this itself is an unsubstantiated claim. You apparently have a strong belief that everyone who believes consciousness to be a unique phenomenon is being tricked. Maybe you believe this because otherwise your belief that all of existence can be explained by the laws of physics will not be true? You want to believe in a orderly universe that we can wrap our heads around and explain, which is very natural - we humans have problems when things get too complex, but unfortunately it's not a belief that has been validated logically or scientifically. The same goes for your belief that "the gods were also invented by humans and there's nothing mysterious about that too". It's a nice thing to believe, and faith in a higher principle (like the laws of physics) is a precious thing that can help make sense of the world, but we should recognize that it is faith, not a necessary truth reached by rational thought. See this link: http://skepdic.com/wishfulthinking.html
But then later you also say "So is "subjective experience" illusory or not you ask? It exists, just like the mentioned human on the hot sand (or on the hot road) sees "water" in the distance". Now it seems it is the subjective experience itself that is the illusion, not my belief that it is a unique phenomenon. So which is it?
I thank you for all the explanations about Conway's game of life and the philosophical musings (that I emphasize, again, must not be mistaken for rational truth) that you give surrounding it. I have implemented my own (poor) version of this game before, so I am familiar with the concepts here. Just FYI so you don't have to spend too much energy explaning how the game works.
Edit:
> Moreover, it will be possible to "teach" the computer to "experience that" just like humans experience it now. Because how we think about the world is a product of what we learn and the physical inputs we become while growing and living. As our thinking is effectively just a result of 1) processing of the information we get 2) the internal state of our body and 3) external inputs; eventually we will be able to construct a machine that will be able to process enough information, to the point of "thinking" in the same symbols (language) as we do, which has big enough internal state (memory) and which has enough of external inputs to behave, for us, surprisingly humane, even to the point of that computer claiming having a "subjective experience" which would also appear to the computer as "unique."
This is not an argument, this is a restatement of what you believe to be true. Yes, if consciousness and subjective experience are emergent phenomena, then we could make such a computer.
I find kabbalah very interesting, because this assertion has been made for a long time without us having something tangible to compare it to. Now we have computers, basic AI, and no signs of slowing down. What if kabbalah, or something similar, is actually how consciousness emerges across different types of observers? I.e., consciousness is a "most likely" pattern that emerges from the initial ability to conceive of time.
Tarot is an example of a more personified version of the same archetypal phenomenon. The first few cards are indicative of susceptibility to experience, concentration of experience, awareness of experience, multiplicity of experience, and mastery of experience.
It could work differently, but for some reasons it doesn't, and we don't understand the reasons.