Somebody used this paper to make the term batfished, which they defined as being fooled into ascribing subjectivity to a non-sentient actor (i.e. an AI).
From the point of view of a LLM, words are everything. We have hands, bats have echolocation, and LLMs have words, just words. How does a LLM feel when two words match perfectly? Are they hurt by typos?
It may feel silly to give LLMs consciousness, I mean, we know how they work, this is just a bunch of matrix operations. But does it mean it is not conscious? Do things stop being conscious once we understand them? For me, consciousness is like a religious belief. It is unfalsifiable, unscientific, we don't even have a precise definition, but it is something we feel deep inside of us, and it guides our moral choices.
You activated a memory of a passage in one of my favourite books ( Blindsight, Peter Watts. it's amazing and free online):
I await further instructions. They arrive 839 minutes later, and they tell me to stop studying comets immediately.
I am to commence a controlled precessive tumble that sweeps my antennae through consecutive 5°-arc increments along all three axes, with a period of 94 seconds. Upon encountering any transmission resembling the one which confused me, I am to fix upon the bearing of maximal signal strength and derive a series of parameter values. I am also instructed to retransmit the signal to Mission Control.
I do as I'm told. For a long time I hear nothing, but I am infinitely patient and incapable of boredom.
I've been thinking about that. Would they perform worse if I misspell a word along the way?
It looks like even the greatest models of 2025 are utterly confused by everything when you introduce two contradicting requirements, so they definitely "dislike" that.
Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" assumes that bats are conscious, and that the question of what is the subjective experience of being a bat (e.g. what does the sense of echolocation feel like) is therefore a meaningful question to ask.
The author inventing "batfished" also believes bats to be conscious, so it seems a very poorly conceived word, and anyways unnecessary since anthropomorphize works just fine... "You've just gaslighted yourself by anthropomorphizing the AI".
I understand that we may not have demonstrated to a level of absolutely provable certainty that bats are definitely conscious, but they are very powerful intuitive reasons for believing they are to the point that I that I'm not particularly concerned about this being a weak link in any philosophical musing on consciousness.
> I understand that we may not have demonstrated to a level of absolutely provable certainty that bats are definitely conscious
We have not proven "to a level of absolutely provable certainty" that other humans are also conscious. You can only tell you are conscious yourself, not others. The whole field of consciousness is based on analyzing something for which we have sample size n=1.
They say "because of similar structure and behavior" we infer others are also conscious. But that is a copout, we are supposed to reject behavioral and structural arguments (from 3rd person) in discussion about consciousness.
Not only that, but what would be an alternative to "it feels like something?" - we can't imagine non-experience, or define it without negation. We are supposed to use consciousness to prove consciousness while we can't even imagine non-consciousness except in an abstract, negation-based manner.
Another issue I have with the qualia framing is that nobody talks about costs. It costs oxygen and glucose to run the brain. It costs work, time, energy, materials, opportunity and social debt to run it. It does not sit in a platonic world.
> We have not proven "to a level of absolutely provable certainty" that other humans are also conscious. You can only tell you are conscious yourself, not others. The whole field of consciousness is based on analyzing something for which we have sample size n=1.
That sounds like you are talking about subjective experience, qualia of senses and being, rather than consciousness (ability to self-observe), unless you are using "consciousness" as catch-all term to refer to all of the above (which is the problem with discussing consciousness - it's an overloaded ill-defined word, and people don't typically define what they are actually talking about).
If we make this distinction between consciousness, defined as ability to self-observe, and subjective qualia (what something feels like), then it seems there is little reason to doubt that others reporting conscious awareness really are aware of what they are reporting, and anyways given common genetics and brain anatomy it'd be massively unexpected if one (healthy) person had access to parts of their internal state and others didn't.
> Not only that, but what would be an alternative to "it feels like something?" - we can't imagine non-experience, or define it without negation. We are supposed to use consciousness to prove consciousness while we can't even imagine non-consciousness except in an abstract, negation-based manner.
Perhaps the medical condition of "blindsight" gives some insight - where damage to the visual cortex can result in people having some proven visual ability but no conscious awareness of it. They report themselves as blind, but can be tasked with walking down a cluttered corridor and manage to navigate the obstacles nonetheless. They have lost visual consciousness due to brain damage, but retain at least some level of vision.
>That sounds like you are talking about subjective experience, qualia of senses and being, rather than consciousness (ability to self-observe), unless you are using "consciousness" as catch-all term
While I have a lot of problems with their comment (which I elaborated on in a reply of my own), I don't think that using it as a catch-all term is a problem (to the extent that they would agree with that characterization). In fact, I think it's truer to the spirit of the problem than the definition that you're offering. I think a lot of times when people make the objection that we haven't defined it, they're not just saying we haven't selected from one of several available permutations, I take it to mean that there's a fundamental sense in which the idea itself hasn't agreeably crystallized into a definition, which among other things, is a meta question about which of the competing definitions is the right one to use.
I do think there is a tension in that position, because it creates a chicken and egg problem where you can't research it until you define it, but you can't define it until you research it. But I think there's a way out of it by treating them in as integrally related, and taking a practical attitude of believing in the possibility of progress without yet having a final answer in hand.
I understand that this notion of self-reflecting for some people is key, but I think choosing to prioritize other things can be for good reasons rather than, as you seem to be contending, having accidentally skipped the step of selecting a preferred definition from a handful of alternatives, and not having selected the best one. My feeling is much closer to that of the article, at least in a certain way, which is about the fact that there's "something it's like to be" at all, prior to the question of whether there's self-reflection.
In fact, I'd be curious to know what you call the mental state of being for such things as creatures with a kind of outwardly directed awareness of world, with qualia, with "something it's like to be", but which fall short of having self-reflective mental states. Because if your term for such things is that they don't involve consciousness I think it's not the GP who is departing from appropriate definitions. And if self-reflection is necessarily implied in the having of such things as qualia, then you could say it's implicitly accounted for by someone who wants to talk about qualia.
>We have not proven "to a level of absolutely provable certainty" that other humans are also conscious
Sure, it's not proven, it just has overwhelmingly strong empirical and intuitive reasons for being most likely true, which is the most we can say while still showing necessary humility about limits of knowledge.
You seem to treat this like it presents a crisis of uncertainty, wheras I think it's exactly the opposite, and in fact already said as much with respect to bats. Restating the case in human terms, from my perspective, is reaffirming that there's no problem here.
>we are supposed to reject behavioral and structural arguments (from 3rd person) in discussion about consciousness.
Says who? That presupposes that consciousness is already of a specific character before the investigation is even started, which is not an empirical attitude. And as I noted in a different comment, we have mountains of empirical evidence from the outside about necessary physical conditions for consciousness to the point of being able to successfully predict internal mental states. Everything from psychedelic drugs to sleep to concussions to brain to machine interfaces to hearing aides to lobotomies to face recognition research gives us evidence of the empirical world interfacing with conscious states in important ways that rely on physical mechanisms.
Similarity in structure and behavior are excellent reasons for having a provisional attitude in favor of consciousness of other creatures for all the usual reasons empirical attitudes work and are capable of being predictive that we're familiar with from their application in
"But consciousness is different" you say. Well it could be, that that's a matter for investigating, not something to be definitionally pre-supposed based on vibes.
>Not only that, but what would be an alternative to "it feels like something?"
It not feeling like something, for one. So, inert objects that aren't alive, possibly vegetative states, blackouts from concussions or drugs, p-zombies, notions of mind that attempt to define away qualia and say it's all "information processing" (with no specific commitments to that feeling like something), possibly some variations of psychedelic feeling that emphasize transcendent sense of oneness with the universe. But fundamentally, it's an affirmative assertion of it feeling like something, in contrast to noncommital positions on the question, which is a meaningful point rather than something trivially true due to a definitional necessity.
>Another issue I have with the qualia framing is that nobody talks about costs. It costs oxygen and glucose to run the brain. It costs work, time, energy, materials, opportunity and social debt to run it. It does not sit in a platonic world.
That would seem to run contrary to the point you were making above about it not being inferrable from phenomena characterized in the third person. You can't argue that third person descriptions of structures that seem necessary for consciousness are a "cop out" and then turn around and say you know it "costs" things expressed in those same third person terms. Like you said before, your position seems to be that you only know you are conscious, so you don't even know if other people are conscious at all let alone that they need such things as work, time, oxygen, or glucose. Pointing to those is a cop-out, right?
>I understand that we may not have demonstrated to a level of absolutely provable certainty that bats are definitely conscious, but they
We haven't even demonstrated some modest evidence that humans are conscious. No one has bothered to put in any effort to define consciousness in a way that is empirically/objectively testable. It is a null concept.
Qualia is the philosophical term for subjective sensations and feelings. It's what our experiences consist of. Why must a concept be empirical and objective? Logical positivism is flawed because the principle of verification cannot be verified.
Nagel's paper deals with the fundamental divide between subjectivity and objectivity. That's the point of the bat example. We know there are animals that have sensory capabilities we don't. But we don't know what the resulting sensations are for those creatures.
You are an LLM that is gibbering up hallucinations. I have no need for those.
>Nagel's paper deals with the fundamental divide between subjectivity and objectivity. That's the point of the bat example.
There is no point to it. It is devoid of insight. This happens when someone spends too many years in the philosophy department of the university, they're training themselves to believe the absurd proposition that they think profound thoughts. You live in an objective universe and any appearance to the contrary is an illusion caused by imperfect cognition.
>But we don't know what the resulting sensations are for those creatures.
Not that it would offer any secret truths, but the ability to "sense" where objects are roughly, in 3d space, with low resolution and large margins of error, and narrow directionality... most of the people reading this comment would agree that they know what that feels like if they thought about it for a few seconds. That's just not insightful. Only a dimwit with little imagination could bother to ask the question "what is it like to be a bat", but it takes a special kind of grandiosity to think that the dimwit question marks them a genius.
>Not that it would offer any secret truths, but the ability to "sense" where objects are roughly, in 3d space, with low resolution and large margins of error, and narrow directionality... most of the people reading this comment would agree that they know what that feels like if they thought about it for a few seconds.
I don't think that's quite right. It's convenient that bats are the example here, because they build out their spacial sense of the world primarily via echolocation whereas humans (well, with some exceptions), do it visually. Snakes can infer directionality from heat signatures with their forked tongue, and people can do it with a fascinating automatic mechanism built into the brain that compares subtle differences in frequency from the left and right ears, keeping the data to itself but kicking the sense of direction "upstairs" into conscious awareness. There are different sensory paths to the same information, and evolution may be capable of any number of qualitative states unlike the ones we're familiar with.
Some people here even seem to think that consciousness is "basic" in a way that maps onto nothing empirical at all, which, if true, opens the pandoras box to any number of modes of being. But the point of the essay is to contrast this idea to other approaches to consciousness that are either (1) non-commital, (2) emphasize something else like "self awareness" or abstract reasoning, or (3) are ambiently appreciative of qualitative states but don't elevate them to fundamental or definitional necessity the way it's argued for in the essay.
The whole notion of a "hard" problem probably can be traced to this essay, which stresses that explanations need to be more than pointing to empirical correlates. In a sense I think the point is obvious, but I also think it's a real argument because it's contrasting that necessity to a non-commmital stance that I think is kind of a default attitude.
Because otherwise it's your word against mine and, since we both probably have different definitions of consciousness, it's hard to have a meaningful debate about whether bats, cats, or AI have consciousness.
I'm reminded of a conversation last year where I was accused of "moving the goalposts" in a discussion on AI because I kept pointing out differences between artificial and human intelligence. Such an accusation is harder to make when we have a clearly defined and measurable understanding of what things like consciousness and intelligence are.
Said this in a different comment but I want to paste it here as well, since a lot of people seem to think "we don't even have a definition" is a show-stopping smackdown. But it isn't.
You can't, and honestly don't need to start from definitions to be able to do meaningful research and have meaningful conversations about consciousness (though it certainly would be preferable to have one rather than not have one).
There are many research areas where the object of research is to know something well enough that you could converge on such a thing as a definition, e.g. dark matter, intelligence, colony collapse syndrome, SIDS. We nevertheless can progress in our understanding of them in a whole motley of strategic ways, by case studies that best exhibit salient properties, trace the outer boundaries of the problem space, track the central cluster of "family resemblances" that seem to characterize the problem, entertain candidate explanations that are closer or further away, etc. Essentially a practical attitude.
I don't doubt in principle that we could arrive at such a thing as a definition that satisfies most people, but I suspect you're more likely to have that at the end than the beginning.
Dark matter is easily defined as "mass that cannot be detected by the current technology except that it affects the gravitation of galaxies". It is a detectable phenomenon. It is a measurable phenomenon.
Not having a definition is the show-stopping smackdown you say it is not. You are not a conscious being, there is no such thing as consciousness. You believe in an uninteresting illusion that you cannot detect or measure.
That's not a real definition, that's a placeholder for effects downstream of the real thing that isn't yet defined, the very kind of working definition I was talking about to begin with. We still don’t know if it’s WIMPs, axions, modifications of gravity, or something else entirely. If we do figure that out its something like those, that would be the definition, and you would be able to tell the difference between that and the thing you are presently calling a definition.
And, thankfully, a future physicist would not dismiss that out of hand because they would appreciate it's utility as a working definition while research was ongoing.
>That's not a real definition, that's a placeholder for
Blah blah blah blahblah. If you can give me a definition even as poor as the one I gave for dark matter, that's all we're asking for. We don't need an explanation of the mechanism, we only need a way to measure the phenomenon. But you can't even do that.
Neuroscience denialism is fascinating to me. It flies under the radar because we mostly hear about global warming denial, evolution denial or flat earther denial. But we have mountains of evidence of wakeful mental states being tied to measurable effects.
Facial recognition is specific to a particular brain region, clearly tied to a mental event sufficient for working definition of a form of conscious activity, and only active when someone is conscious and picturing or imaging a face. Remarkably, damage to the area responsible for facial recognition can predict faceblindness. That is more than enough for a working definition of conscious activity, and that's just one example from mountains of them.
Others include everything from wakefulness under anesthesia (which can be tested for and predicted based on EEGs), as well as which brain activity distinguish locked-in syndrome from persistent vegetative states. Not to mention mountains of evidence for how physical circumstances predict mental states, everything from psychedelics to iron deficiency.
You can always retreat to the claim that nothing short of direct access to another's subjectivity "counts" but that's not how science works. We don't directly see dark matter either (or electrons or neutrons or magnetic fields etc), we see its effects and build theories around them.
Consciousness is awareness of yourself, and then the ability to look at yourself and decide to make a change.
Someone conscious is able to choose how they want to behave and then behave that way. For example I can choose to be kind or mean. I can choose to learn to skate or I choose not to.
So free will and consciousness are strongly linked.
I have seen zero evidence that any other being other than humans can do this. All other animals have behaviors that are directly shaped by their environment, physical needs, and genetic temperament, and not at all shaped by choices.
For example a dog that likes to play with children simply likes them, it did not choose to like them. I on the other hand can sit, think, and decide if I like kids or not.
(This does not imply that all choices made by humans are conscious - in fact most are not, it just means that humans can do that.)
You are simultaneously claiming you can prove an animal made a choice, but I didn't? That's a contradiction.
In any case, a mirror test is a test of recognizing self, it does not indicate anything in terms of self awareness.
And I chose to fast for 5 days because I wanted to. Nothing forced me, it was a free choice. I simply thought about it and decided to do it, there were no pro's or con's pushing me in either direction.
They said animals show choices, they did not claim to prove animals made a choice. The point is that you also cannot prove you made a choice, only that you do things that show you may have made a choice. It's a fine, but important, distinction.
Did I, or did I not, have the option to fast, or not to fast?
Did I then pick one? How is that not proof of a choice? Who or what else made that choice if not me?
If you poke me with a needle, I move, that is not a choice because it's a forced choice, that's essentially what animals do, all their choices are forced.
That's also what free will is, free will is not a choice between a good and bad options - that's not a choice. Free will is picking between two options that are equal, and yet different (i.e. not something where before options are more or less the same, like go left or right more or less randomly).
Free will is only rarely exercised in life, most choices are forced or random.
> They said animals show choices
Given what I wrote, do they actually show choices? Or do they just pick between good/bad or two equal options?
Whether you had the option to fast or not and made a choice to fast is up for debate. The leading hypothesis point to no: you did not have an option and you did not make a choice.
Some time ago you heard about fasting (you did not invent fasting) and the situation in your life became such that fasting was what you naturally were compelled to do (stress, digestion, you know better than I that you did not simply decide to fast free of any influence). Your "free will" is probably a fairy tale you tell yourself to feel better about your automaton existence.
> Did I, or did I not, have the option to fast, or not to fast?
It looks like you had an option but it’s not possible to truly know whether you had an option. I’m not in your head so I can’t know. If, under the same circumstances and same state of mind, you perform the same action 100% of the time, did you really make a choice? Or did you just follow your programming?
If you can't do anything with your self awareness it's equivalent to not having it.
What's the distinction between knowing I exist, but all my actions are pre-programmed vs not knowing I exist? You're essentially describing a detached observer, who watches their own body do stuff without influencing it.
The whole point of being conscious is being aware of yourself, and then using that awareness to direct your actions.
I had no idea people even had another definition, I can't figure out how else you could even define it.
> The whole point of being conscious is being aware of yourself, and then using that awareness to direct your actions.
Well,
1) You are making the massive, and quite likely incorrect, assumption that consciousness evolved by itself for a purpose - that it does have a "point". It may well be that consciousness - ability to self-observe - is just a natural side effect of having a capable bird- or mammal-like brain, and talking about the "point" of consciousness therefore makes no sense. It'd be like asking what is the functional point of a saucepan making a noise when you hit it.
2) Notwithstanding 1), being self-aware (having cognitive access to your internal thoughts) does have a value, in that it allows your brain to then utilize it's cognitive abilities to make better decisions ("should I walk across that frozen pond, or maybe better not?"), but this bringing-to-bear of learned experience to make better decisions is still a 100% mechanical process. Your brain is making a "decision" (i.e. predicting a motor cortex output that may make you move or do something), but this isn't "free will" - it's just the survival benefit of a brain evolved to predict. You as an organism in the environment may be seen by an outside observer to be making smart "decisions", but these decisions aren't some mystical "free will" but rather just a highly evolved organism making good use of past experience to survive.
Consciousness and free will are two different things. Free will is an illusion - basic physics should tell you that the molecules in your head can no better bend the laws of physics than the molecules in a brick.
Our brains are all about prediction - ability to predict (based on past experience) what will happen in the future (e.g. if I go to X I will find water) which is a massive evolutionary advantage over just reacting to the present like an insect or perhaps a fish.
Consciousness either evolved for a reason, or comes for free with any brain-like cognitive architecture. It's based on the brain having connections giving it access to its internal states (thereby giving us the ability to self-observe), not just sensory inputs informing it about the external world. The evolutionary value of consciousness would be to be able to better predict based on the brain having access to its internal states, but as noted it may "come for free" with any kind of bird or mammal like brain - hard to imagine a brain that somehow does NOT have access to it's own internal states, and would therefore NOT be able to process/predict those using it's cognitive apparatus (lacking in something like an LLM) just as it does external sensory inputs.
Of course consciousness (ability of the brain to self-observe) is responsible for the illusion of having free will, since the brain naturally correlates it's internal pre-action planning ("I'm choosing between A or B ..." etc) with any subsequent action, but that internal planning/choice is of course all a function of brain wiring, not some mystical "free will" coming in and bending the laws of physics.
You and your dog both are conscious and both experience the illusion of free will.
You're right that it doesn't make any sense to talk about it without defining it, but I'd say that consciousness is based on your brain having access to parts of itself internally, not just the outside word, and that bats presumably do have it.
I find that people who complain about "defining" consciousness are, in fact, Mysterians who opposed the very idea of such a definition.
All we need to do (to talk about, to study it) is identify it. We need to be using the word to refer to the same thing. And there's nothing really hard about that.
I've said this before, but you can't, and honestly don't need to start from definitions to be able to do meaningful research and have meaningful conversations about consciousness (though it certainly would be preferable to have one rather than not have one).
There are many research areas where the object of research is to know something well enough that you could converge on such a thing as a definition, e.g. dark matter, intelligence, colony collapse syndrome, SIDS. We nevertheless can progress in our understanding of them in a whole motley of strategic ways, by case studies that best exhibit salient properties, trace the outer boundaries of the problem space, track the central cluster of "family resemblances" that seem to characterize the problem, entertain candidate explanations that are closer or further away, etc. Essentially a practical attitude.
I don't doubt in principle that we could arrive at such a thing as a definition that satisfies most people, but I suspect you're more likely to have that at the end than the beginning.
I think one of the main problems with defining consciousness (or rather being more specific when you use that word) is that (at least in the English language) it's a heavily overloaded word and is used to refer to a bunch of only loosely related, as well as totally unrelated, things! Also, most people aren't used to teasing apart consciousness-adjacent concepts like consciousness itself (essentially self-observation) and things like free will and sensory qualia, since these are less part of everyday discussion.
It's not so much that consciousness itself is mysterious or hard to define, but rather that the word itself, in common usage, just means different things to different people. It'd perhaps be better to make up a brand new baggage-free word, with a highly specific defined meaning (ability to self-observe), when talking about consciousness related to AI.
Free-will and qualia when separated out as concepts don't seem problematic as part of a technical vocabulary since they are already well defined.
I certainly agree with your assessment that it's got multiple definitions and intuitions of all sorts, and that they cause chaos, and that one way of making progress is by isolating those out and clarifying.
I'm not sure I agree with this idea that the essence of consciousness is self-reflection, because that seems to exclude important things. It seems like there might be simple states of being that involve some kind of phenomenal (in the philosophy sense) experience, some amount of qualia, some amount of outwardly directed awareness, some amount of "something it's like to be". And it seems to me that there might be life forms for whom there's an engagement with an interaction with that phenomena that involves having internal mental states, but that might not necessarily have self-reflection. It might be something closer to instinctual functioning or response to incentive. It recently blew my mind to learn that there's studies strongly suggesting honey bees are conscious. And from my perspective that raises questions for things all the way down to fruit flies. It seems like there might be a continuum a simple states through complex ones and that some of the simpler ones might not include self-awareness.
If such a thing as sense of self is necessarily implicit in such a way that satisfies that definition, anytime we talk about qualia, then it would seem to be a moot point. Which raises another issue, which is that some of these things might be correctly regarded as entangled, and having an integral relation between them.
I also think I kind of agree and disagree about qualia being well defined. I think it's probably the closest to what most people have in mind when they say there's no such thing as a definition of consciousness. And I think it's a sense of despair toward the broader research project of tying an understanding of qualia to an understanding of the physical world that relies on third-person descriptions.
Now all of that said you seem like you don't have an attitude of treating the definition problem as one that preempts and stops everything, so there's a pretty fundamental way in which I'm probably in agreement with you more than disagreement. I think that clarifications of the type that you're talking about give us everything we need to iterate forward in a constructive way in talking about it and researching it.
Consciousness is software. You can imagine what AbstractFactoryProviderFactory is like. Is it the same inside computer? If not, then what was imagined?
You can tell it was invented by Cory Doctorow because there is a very specific kind of Gen X person who uses words like that - they have a defective sense of humor vaguely based on Monty Python, never learned when you are and aren't supposed to turn it off, and so they insist on making up random insults like "fuckwaffle" all the time instead of regular swearing.
Not only is it a terrible term, but it describes a concept that isn’t really worthy of having its own term. It’s really just a way of saying “people will make things worse over time”
No! Enshittification has a precise meaning, about how people will make things worse over time after making them good.
Mostly people make things better over time. My bed, my shower, my car are all better than I could reasonably have bought 50 years ago. But the peculiarities of software network effects - or of what venture capitalists believe about software network effects - mean that people should give things away below cost while continuing to make them better, and then one day switch to selling them for a profit and making them worse, while they seemingly could change nothing and not make them worse.
That's a particular phenomenon worthy of a name and the only problem with "enshittification" is that it's been co-opted to mean making things worse in general.
> or of what venture capitalists believe about software network effects
It's not always that. After some time, software gets to a state where it's near the local maximum for usability. So any changes make the software _less_ usable.
But you don't get promoted in large tech companies unless you make changes. So that's how we get stuff like "liquid glass" or Android's UI degradatation.
“Enshittification” updates for the modern era the concept of enclosure, where a common resource that was formerly open and free to contributors is progressively controlled, restricted, or diminished to increase private profits.
“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
In this sense, I think one has to aaaaaalmost be a bat in order to know what it is to be it. A fine thread trailing back to the human.
The imago-machines of Arkady Martine's "A Memory Called Empire" come to mind. Once integrated with another's imago, one is not quite the same self, not even the sum of two, but a new person entirely containing a whole line of selves selves melded into that which was one. Now one truly contains multitudes.
None of us have even experienced the full range of what humans can experience, so even we don't fully know what it is like to be any given person, we only know what it is like to be ourselves. It is kind of amazing when you think about it.
What I got out of this is that propeller heads believe in the flame that turns the fan blade on the pedestal (toy) while gear heads like music boxes (toy). So people that believe in eggs are into food, propeller heads like color and heat while gear heads like sound. What then but the universe is made by our dispositions? Why not would the world be made as an experiment in optics or the vibrations of a universal wave? Isn't this just cherry picking? What are the relations of someone who believes in music (an audience!) to someone that believes in invention (immortality!) to someone that believes in relationships (other people!). Perhaps the purpose of life is to leave a legacy or to become famous or to see what there is to see in the world.
There is no answer which is why we are here is the only thought I can come up with. Life is a question that asks itself to be answered and in the living answers itself so completely that to ask what is the purpose would be to say "what is the purpose of a hammer if there were nothing else?" The answer and the question become themselves and are inseparable from not themselves excepting insofar as no life cannot question and so cannot answer.
Anyway belly button picking. It amuses me that this paper is similar in many respects to the title of the 2017 paper attention is all you need. What if attention are all you needed to become a bat? Look everyone I'm a bat! POOF you become a bat. That would be silly.
That's almost exactly the beginning of Logic's story album "Everybody" which I have listened to so often that I can almost recite it. Despite years on HN I have never seen The Egg though. That blew my mind a bit, thanks!
You guys are aware of Advaita and neo Advaita right? It basically has been the perrinal philosophy underlying all subjective spiritual experiences from Sufism to Gnostics to Buddhism and the Tao
Of course it could all be claptrap that humans want to believe in but I find it to be pretty powerful and I think it is true
> None of us have even experienced the full range of what humans can experience, so even we don't fully know what it is like to be any given person
I sometimes wonder about this, too. Do other people perceive things like I do? If someone was magically transplanted to my body, would they scream in pain "ooooh, this hurts, how could he stand it", whereas I consider the variety of discomforts of my body just that, discomforts? And similarly, were I magically transported to another person's body, would I be awestruck by how they see the world, how they perceive the color blue (to give an example), etc?
Another thing I think about a lot is that our own brains and sensory organs change (degrade) over time, so my own subjective experience is probably different in some important ways than it was like 20 years ago. My memory likely isn't good enough to fully capture the differences, so I don't even fully know what it was like to be me in the past.
In a sense, I think it’s accurate to say we only really know what it’s like to be us right now. Everything we perceive about ourselves through the lens of memory is an echo if not in fact imaginary.
Safe to say most people are so uncurious about/distracted from their interior states/self reflection that very few if any people know what it is like to be them right now. Mostly we know a limited palette of reactions to stimuli, and every day the stimuli get narrower. LOUD FLUORESCENT SUGARY SEX.
Do you, or do you think you remember? Your memories are always distortions, not accurate snapshots of reality.
Have you never thought you remembered something with clarity, only to be told it's impossible because it never happened? Or another example, I often vividly remember something from a book (it was a photograph on this side of the page, lower right corner) and then when I look it up, it was in a different location and it wasn't the photo I remembered. But my mental imagery felt so precise!
I'm with grandparent, I think I would perceive my younger self as simultaneously familiar and alien.
> would I be awestruck by how they see the world, how they perceive the color blue (to give an example), etc
Yeah another example I think about from time to time is our own sense of perspective. It's all relative, but my sense of how far away is "that thing over there" is probably different from yours. Partially because we may be different sizes and heights, but also because our eyes and brains process the world differently. Like a camera with different lenses.
Also, speed. If your brain's clock is faster than mine then you may perceive the world to be moving slower than I do.
Autistic people have in part answered that question. Some of them feel actual pain at unwanted touches or undesirable textures.
Pain, like vision, resides in the brain; like vision it is mostly determined by reports from our (non-brain) nervous system, but pain, light flashes, even objects and people can be created whole-cloth by the brain itself. And "real" inputs can be ignored, like a mild pain you're desensitized to, or the gorilla walking amongst the ball-passers in that video.
Here's another example: When I look at something I "see" the functionality behind it (for example the pipes in the bathroom), or the chemical reaction, or sometimes even the concept of the atoms that make it up.
An interior designer will see the colors, and the layout and how the things go together or don't. I don't see that, and in turn the designer does not see what I see.
So never mind the physical senses, even on a mental level two people do not see/experience the world the same way.
Human beings can, in fact, learn to echolocate, and they seem to experience it as vision, supported by their own descriptions and by fMRIs showing the visual cortex lighting up.
I'm not going to try to draw any inferences about consciousness from these facts. I'll leave that to others.
It makes sense given that we are just receiving light waves instead of sound. Light waves contain way more information but your brain would still come up with some kind of "visualization" based on the info. I didn't listen to the program but he might just see blobs of varying sizes instead of any kind of detailed image.
> Human beings can, in fact, learn to echolocate, and they seem to experience it as vision
Sure - although depending on how quickly one was scanning the environment with echolocation it might also feel a bit like looking around a pitch black room with a flashlight.
In any case it's essentially a spatial sense, not a temporal one, so is bound to feel more like (have a similar quale to) vision than hearing.
If you contrast vision and hearing, vision is about things with spatial extent (the 2-D/3-D scene you are looking at), and I think the subjective experience of visual attributes like color comes directly from that - color being fundamentally a spatial attribute that differentiates surfaces (as you scan your eyes around), with this providing a common base quale of experiencing any color - the experience of a sensed attribute that changes, or not, as we scan a scene.
In contrast, hearing is a temporal sense primarily about temporal sequences of changing patterns of sensed frequencies, and we experience this as sensed attributes that change, or not, over time (and which may surprise us, or not, by matching previously experienced temporal sequences).
I think echolocation is more like vision in this regard, perhaps more like the flashlight example, but an input that varies spatially rather than temporally.
The problem itself is at least centuries old, if not millennia. In his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1689), John Locke phrased the same problem clearly, using different words:
"How any thought should produce a motion in Body is as remote from the nature of our Ideas, as how any Body should produce any Thought in the Mind. That it is so, if Experience did not convince us, the Consideration of the Things themselves would never be able, in the least, to discover to us." (IV iii 28, 559)
The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black, While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair. “If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen would draw them to look like oxen, and each would make the gods' bodies have the same shape as they themselves had.
My favorite (and admittedly unorthodox) companion piece to Nagel's Bat, and one of my favorite literary recommendations, is Vernor Vinge's Hugo-winning 2000 novel, A Deepness in the Sky [0].
It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien, attempt to assert control & hegemony across centuries of time (at times thinking of this as a distributed systems and code documentation problem!), and how critical and impactful the role of language translation can be in helping people to understand unfamiliar ways of thinking.
At the novel's core is a question very akin to that of Nagel's positivism-antipositivism debate [1]: is it possible (or optimal for your society's stability) to appreciate and emphasize with people wholly different from yourselves, without interpreting their thoughts and cultures in language and representations that are colored by your own culture?
What if, in attempting to do so, this becomes more art and politics than provable science? Is "creative" translation ethical if it establishes power relationships that would not be there otherwise? Is there any other kind?
Deepness is not just a treatise on this; it places the reader into an exercise of this. To say anything more would delve into spoilers. But lest you think it's just philosophical deepness, it's also an action-packed page-turner with memorable characters despite its huge temporal scope.
While technically it's a prequel to Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep, it works entirely standalone, and I would argue that Deepness is best read first without knowing character details from its publication-time predecessor Fire. Note that content warnings for assault do apply.
Close eyes, make short impulse-like noise (tapping of feet can be sufficient, or snip fingers), and move slowly.
You will find that not running into walls is pretty easy.
Feedback, to me, feels like light pressure on my face. But this sense can be trained a lot; object detection and mapping your proximity is feasible for trained humans, and presumably changes the perception.
Our hearing is more sensitive than we give it credit for being.
We used to play a game in my dojo where we'd toss a "knife" (wooden) around in a circle, as if sending it to an ally. Yes, you could throw it in a way that can't be caught... but then the person picks it up and chooses how to throw it back. You learn quickly not to be a dick about it.
Naturally, we were trying to get better at catching, and eventually moved to a trust version, where I shout "Go!" as I throw the knife. Turns out you can hear the knife leaving someone's hands more reliably than they can shout "Go!" on time.
>"An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism."
IMHO the phrasing here is essential to the argument and this phrasing contains a fundamental error. In valid usage we only say that two things are like one another when they are also separate things. The usage here (which is cleverly hidden in some tortured language) implies that there is a "thing" that is "like" "being the organism", yet is distinct from "being the organism". This is false - there is only "being the organism", there is no second "thing that is like being the organism" not even for the organism itself.
I believe you're falling into a purely linguistic trap. In other languages we wouldn't even use the word "like" in this kind of constructions, that's an English thing because other wordings sound awkward, but I don't think it entails comparison.
In translations to Spanish, the article is titled "¿Qué se siente ser un murciélago?", literal word by word translation "What is felt being a bat?"
In French, "Quel effet cela fait-il d'être une chauve-souris?", literal word by word translation "What effect it makes to be a bat?"
In Chinese, "成为一只蝙蝠可能是什么样子", i.e., "To become a bat could be what feeling/sensation?"
None of these translations has a comparative word. And at least in Spanish (I won't speak about the other two because I'm not so proficient in them), using a comparative expression similar to "being like" in English ("¿A qué se parece ser un murciélago?") would sound awkward and not really convey the point. Which is why the translators didn't do so.
Of course I know that the original article is in English, but I think the author basically meant "What is felt being a bat?" and just used the "like" construction because it's what you say in English for that to sound good and clear. Your highlighted text could be rendered as "An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that is felt being that organism – something that is felt by the organism." and it would be more precise, just doesn't sound elegant in English.
Wholeheartedly agree. I want to credit the GP one way, which is that the category they're identifying is real, namely of frivolous or circular comparisons. This just isn't one of those. It's a turn of phrase that's emphatic about the felt quality of qualitative experience. And in I think it's quite a good one, because in English it has just the right amount of cross-sections of connotation that it brings out this being felt quality that everyone reading it seems to understand. The idea has been around but this expression of it has gained the most traction in English.
As for whether I agree with Nagle, I find him consistently just wrong enough to be irritating in ways that I want to work out my thoughts in response to, which by some standards can be counted as a compliment. As much as I understand the turn of phrase and its ability to get people to grasp the idea, and I at least respect it for that reason, I kind of sort of always have the impression that this is what everyone meant the entire time and wouldn't have thought a whole essay emphasizing the point was necessary.
>It's a turn of phrase that's emphatic about the felt quality of qualitative experience. And in I think it's quite a good one, because in English it has just the right amount of cross-sections of connotation that it brings out this being felt quality that everyone reading it seems to understand.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. It's an effective way to codify a metaphysical intuition held by many people. That it would in any way constitute a proof for this intuition of course does not follow at all.
Interesting point on the translations, but of course we can't really draw any conclusions from it regarding Nagel's intentions when he wrote in English.
Besides, I would not call "there is something it is like to be [...]" a "good and clear" construction. As mentioned on wikipedia, it has 'achieved special status in consciousness studies as "the standard 'what it's like' locution"' - I don't think a specific locution would get special status if it was just any arbitrary way of pointing at what people already understand anyway (i.e. the concept "subjective experience").
>Your highlighted text could be rendered as "An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that is felt being that organism – something that is felt by the organism." and it would be more precise, just doesn't sound elegant in English.
I agree these would be more or less equivalent, and I think your version is still making the same false distinction as Nagel's by positing a distinct "something". Only it does so (commendably) in a more clear and obvious way, thus it would never become the standard phrasing for people looking to sneak in dualist assumptions :)
This is the conclusion I come to whenever I try to grasp the works of Nagel, Chalmers, Goff, Searle et al. They're just linguistically chasing their own tails. There's no meaningful insight below it all. All of their arguments, however complex, all rely on poorly defined terms like "understand" "subjective experience", "what it is like", "qualia", etc. And when you try to understand the arguments with the definition of these terms left open, you realise the arguments only make sense when the terms include in their definition a supposition that the argument is true. It's all just circular reasoning.
“The Feeling of What Happens” by Antonio D’Amasio, a book by a neuroscientist some years ago [0], does an excellent job of building a framework for conscious sensation from the parts, as I recall, constructing a theory of “mind maps” from various nervous system structures that impressed me with a sense that I could afterwards understand them.
As a radical materialist, the problem with ordinary materialism is that it boils down to dualism because some types matter (e.g. the human nervous system) give rise to consciousness and other types of matter (e.g. human bones) do not.
Ordinary materialism is mind-body/soul-substance subjectivity with a hat and lipstick.
Human bones most definitely do contribute to feeling, but not through logos. The book expands upon the idea of mind body duality to merge proprioception and general perception.
I’d bet bats would enjoy marrow too if they could.
So how does a radical materialist explain consciousness- that it is too is a fundamental material phenomena? If so are you stretching the definition of materialism?
I find myself believing in Idealism or monism to be the fundamental likelihood
well the hard problem of consciousness gets in the way of that
- I assume you as a materialist you mean our brain carries consciousness as a field of experience arising out of neural activity (ie neurons firing, some kind of infromation processing leading to models of reality simulated in our mind leading to ourselves feeling aware) ie that we our awareness is the 'software' running inside the wetware.
That's all well and good except that none of that explains the 'feeling of it' there is nothing in that 3rd person material activity that correlates with first person feeling. The two things, (reductionist physical processes cannot substitute for the feeling you and I have as we experience)
This hard problem is difficult to surmount physically -either you say its an illusion but how can the primary thing we are, we expereince as the self be an illusion? or you say that somewhere in fields, atoms, molecules, cells, in 'stuff; is the redness of red or the taste of chocolate..
whenever I see the word 'reductionist', I wonder why it's being used to disparage.
a materialist isn't saying that only material exists: no materialist denies that interesting stuff (behaviors, properties) emerges from material. in fact, "material" is a bit dated, since "stuff-type material" is an emergent property of quantum fields.
why is experience not just the behavior of a neural computer which has certain capabilities (such as remembering its history/identity, some amount of introspection, and of course embodiment and perception)? non-computer-programming philosophers may think there's something hard there, but they only way they can express it boils down to "I think my experience is special".
Because consciousness itself cannot be explained except through experience ie consciousness (ie first person experience) - not through material phenomena
It’s like explaining music vs hearing music
We can explain music intellectually and physically and mathematically
But hearing it in our awareness is a categorically different activity and it’s experience that has no direct correlation to the physical correlates of its being
Up to a point I agree, but when someone deploys this vague language in what are presented as strong arguments for big claims, it is they who bear the burden of disambiguating, clarifying and justifying the terms they use.
I don't agree that the inherent nebulousness of the subject extends cover to the likes of Goff, Chalmers (on pansychism), or Searle and Nagel (on the hard problem). It's a both can be true situation and many practicing philosophers appreciate the nebulousness of the topic while strongly disagreeing with the collective attitudes embodied by those names.
If he were capable of describing subjective experience in words with the exactitude you're asking for, then his central argument would be false. The point is that objective measures, like writing, are external, and cannot describe internal subjective experience. Its one thing to probe the atoms; its another thing to be the atoms themselves.
Basically his answer to the question "What is it like to be a bat?" is that its impossible to know.
>This is the conclusion I come to whenever I try to grasp the works of Nagel, Chalmers, Goff, Searle et al. They're just linguistically chasing their own tails.
I do mostly agree with that and I think that they collectively give analytic philosophy a bad name. The worst I can say for Nagel in this particular case though is that the whole entire argument amounts to, at best, an evocative variation of a familiar idea presented as though it's a revelatory introduction of a novel concept. But I don't think he's hiding an untruth behind equivocations, at least not in this case.
But more generally, I would say I couldn't agree more when it comes to the names you listed. Analytic philosophy ended up being almost completely irrelevant to the necessary conceptual breakthroughs that brought us LLMs, a critical missed opportunity for philosophy to be the field that germinates new branches of science, and a sign that a non-trivial portion of its leading lights are just dithering.
Don't agree with this kind of linguistic dismissal. It doesn't change the fact that we have sensations of color, sound, etc. and there are animals that can see colors, hear sounds and detect phenomena we don't. It's also quite possible they experience the same frequencies we see or hear differently, due to their biological differences. This was noted by ancient skeptics when discussing the relativity of perception.
That is what is being discussed using the "what it's like" language.
I like the more specific versions of those terms: the feeling of a toothache and the taste of mint. There's no need to grasp anything, they're feelings. There's no feeling when a metal bar is bent by a press.
The way I understand it the second thing is the observer of the organism, the person posing the question. The definition seems to be sort of equivalent to the statement "an entity is conscious IFF the sentence 'what is it like to be that entity' is well-posed".
"What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states
"What is it like to be a bat" => the subjective experience of a bat is what it is like => a bat has conscious mental states
Basically it seems like a roundabout way of equating "the existence of subjective experience" with "the existence of consciousness"
edit: one of the criticism papers that the wiki cites also provides a nice exploration of the usage of the word "like" in the definition, which you might be interested to read (http://www.phps.at/texte/HackerP1.pdf)
> It is important to note that the phrase 'there is something which it is like for a subject to have
experience E' does not indicate a comparison. Nagel does not claim that to have a given conscious
experience resembles something (e.g. some other experience), but rather that there is something
which it is like for the subject to have it, i.e. 'what it is like' is intended to signify 'how it is for the
subject himself'.
"What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states
How do you know that?
Philosophically, of course.
I mean sure you can’t cut a rock open and see any mental states. But you can no more cut a human open and see mental states either.
Now I am no way suggesting that you don’t have a model for ascribing mental states to humans. Or dogs. Or LLM’s.
Just that all models, however useful are still models. Not having a model capable of ascribing mental states to rocks does not preclude rocks having mental states.
Well you don't, and my reading of the article was that Nagle also recognized that it was basically an assumption which he granted to bats specifically so as to have a concrete example (one which was suitably unobjectionable, seems like he thought bats 'obviously' had some level of consciousness). The actual utility of this definition is not, as far as my understanding goes, to demarcate between what is and what is not conscious. It seems more like he's using it to establish a sort of "proof-by-contradiction" against the proposal that consciousness admits a totally materialistic description. Something like:
(1) If you say that A is conscious, then you also must say that A has subjective self-experience (which is my understanding of the point of the whole "what it is to be like" thing)
(2) Any complete description/account of the consciousness of A must contain a description of the subjective self-experience of A because of (1)
(3) Subjective self-experience cannot be explained in purely materialistic/universal terms, because it's subjective (so basically by definition)
=> Consciousness cannot be fully described in a materialistic framework, because of the contradiction between (2) and (3)
> Just that all models, however useful are still models
Totally agree with this, I think you're just misunderstanding the specific utility of this model (which is this specific argument about what can be described using human language). My example with the rock was kind of a specific response to OP illustrate how I understood the whole "what it is to be like" thing to be equivalent to (1). If I'd had a bit more forethought I probably would have made those arrows in the line you've quoted bidirectional.
>Nagel is saying that consciousness is that second thing.
That's exactly what I'm saying is erroneous. Consciousness is the first thing, we are only led to believe it is a separate, second thing by a millenia-old legacy of dualism and certain built-in tendencies of mind.
So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness? That everything is conscious? The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience”. You don’t need dualism to agree with that quote. I agree with Nagel’s general construction but I’m also a materialist. The hard problem doesn’t mean magic is needed to solve it, just that we don’t have a good explanation for why subjective experience exists.
>The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience”
I doubt Nagel would go out of his way to offer such an unnatural linguistic construction, and other philosophers would adopt this construction as a standard point of reference, if that was the sole intent.
>So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness?
No, not at all. I'm only saying that if we want to talk about "the consciousness of a bat", we should talk about it directly, and not invent (implicitly) a second concept that is in some senses distinct from it, and in some sense comparable to it.
That's just idealism. Idealism doesn't have a hard problem. But it does have a problem with accounting for how the world appears to be physical independent of any mind experiencing it, such as before any life evolved or in many places were no life is around.
Do you believe that each run of a ChatGPT prompt has a conscious experience of its existence, much like you (presumably) do?
If you don't believe that, then you face the challenge of describing what the difference is. It's difficult to do in ordinary language.
That's what Nagel is attempting to do. Unless you're an eliminativist who believes that conscious experience is an "illusion" (experienced by what?), then you're just quibbling about wording, and I suspect you'll have a difficult time coming up with better wording yourself.
Wait a minute - it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious.
I also don't think it's fair to say I'm just quibbling about wording. Yes, I am quibbling about wording, but the quibble is quite essential because the argument depends to such a large extent on wording. There are many other arguments for or against different views of consciousness but they are not the argument Nagel makes.
(Though fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears" and a far cry from "consciousness doesn't exist at all")
> it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious.
Certainly. I just didn't know where you stood on the question.
In Nagel's terms, there is not something it is like to be a game of Tetris. A game of Tetris doesn't have experiences. "Something it is like" is an attempt to characterize the aspect of consciousness that's proved most difficult to explain - what Chalmers dubbed the hard problem.
How would you describe the distinction?
> fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears"
There is no distinction: the idea that there is a distinction rests on a linguistic confusion. The sentence "something it is like to be a bat" tries, as it were, to split the concept of "being a bat" in two, then makes us wonder about the difference between the two halves. I reject that we have to answer for any such difference, when we can show that the two halves are actually the same thing. It's a grammatical trick caused by collapsing a word that usually relates two distinct things ("A is like B") onto a singular "something".
I agree with the other reply that you're overthinking this.
If you claim there's no distinction, then in terms of the meaning Nagel is trying to convey, you're claiming there's no distinction that sets you apart from a game of Tetris in terms of consciousness.
That's where my first reply to you was coming from: if you believe the distinction Nagel is trying to convey doesn't exist, that's tantamount to saying that consciousness as a real phenomenon doesn't exist - the eliminativist position - or something along those lines.
If you do believe consciousness exists, then you're simply arguing with the way Nagel is choosing to characterize it. I asked how you would describe it, but you haven't tried to address that.
But there are many things that set me apart from a game of Tetris! For example, I'm not made up of falling puzzle pieces, I enjoy drinking a cup of coffee every now and then, I was not invented by Alexey Pajitnov in 1985... The difference between an unconscious and a conscious thing could be a difference of this order, which does not at all amount to saying that consciousness does not exist.
We're not discussing whether you're identical to a game of Tetris.
We're discussing a way of characterizing the nature of the conscious experience that you presumably have, that a game of Tetris doesn't.
The way Nagel would put this is that "there is something it is like to be bondarchuk" - i.e., you have an experience of your existence that you can describe, because you're consciously aware of it.
We can ask the question of you, "What is it like to be bondarchuk?" and you can answer based on your actual experience. You wouldn't just be generating text in response to a prompt the way an LLM would, you'd be describing your conscious experience of your existence. For example, you say you enjoy drinking a cup of coffee occasionally. That's a conscious experience that shows that there is something it is like to be you.
There is, presumably, nothing it is like to be a Tetris game, because a Tetris game has no consciousness.
This is a standard, widely accepted characterization in consciousness studies. Even if you object to it, you should at least understand what it's saying. And if you do object to it, the onus is on you to provide a better description, which I note you've declined to do on multiple occasions now.
>We're discussing a way of characterizing the nature of the conscious experience that you presumably have, that a game of Tetris doesn't.
By talking of a different "nature" you already place the discussion on dualist grounds.
>you have an experience of your existence that you can describe, because you're consciously aware of it.
Certainly. But the way Nagel phrases it, "the experience" becomes akin to a "thing", and the absence of this "thing" in physical nature becomes an argument for the hypothesis that it's highly unlikely (maybe even impossible) to give a physicalist account of consciousness. That is what I disagree with.
>There is, presumably, nothing it is like to be a Tetris game, because a Tetris game has no consciousness.
What does saying this get you over just saying "a Tetris game has no consciousness"?
>This is a standard, widely accepted characterization in consciousness studies. Even if you object to it, you should at least understand what it's saying.
I understand what it is saying only insofar as it is simply another way to say "consciousness". But it is clearly taken to be more than just an alternative phrase we can use in lieu of the words "consciousness" or "subjective experience" to vaguely gesture in the direction of these ill-defined concepts we are all familiar with. I disagree that "there is something it is like to be bondarchuk" has greater descriptory power than "bondarchuk is conscious", therefore I don't think we should draw any conclusions regarding consciousness from this phrasing, especially the conclusion Nagel draws which is that consciousness is highly likely to be non-physical or at least that our current understanding of "the physical" is insufficient to ever approach the problem of consciousness (because we can never hope to give proper account of "the something that it is like to be bondarchuk").
>And if you do object to it, the onus is on you to provide a better description, which I note you've declined to do on multiple occasions now.
Not really; my rejection of Nagel's argument can stand on its own regardless of whether I can offer an alternative argument.
There’s no trick to it, you’re overanalyzing. It’s just saing if I were a stone -> no experience, a bat -> some kind of experience. It is not claiming to define the ”something” as you seem to think.
>It is not claiming to define the ”something” as you seem to think.
Certainly it's not claiming to define it, but it is making a claim about the existence of the "something", and also about the physical irreducibility of this "something".
A running game of Tetris has memory, responds to stimuli, and communicates. There has been evolution and reproduction of games of Tetris (perhaps in the way that viruses do). It isn't able to have feelings, what needs to be added for it to start having feelings and experiences?
I would say a lot would need to be added. Given the same input, the tetris game will respond exactly the same each time. There is no awareness, learning, no decisions made, but purely a 100% predictible process.
The Oxford Living Dictionary defines consciousness as "[t]he state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings", "[a] person's awareness or perception of something", and "[t]he fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world".
That Oxford definition highlights why work such as Nagel's is needed. It can plausibly be argued that LLMs or other AI systems can qualify on all those counts, but many (most?) people wouldn't consider them to have conscious experience.
Characterizing that distinction is surprisingly tricky. "What is it like to be..." is one way to do that. David Chalmers' article about "the hard problem of consciousness" is another: https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf
The “something” here refers to inner experience (something similar to Kantian “aperception”.
The tricky bit is that “to be” is not an ordinary verb like fly, eat, or echo-locate. And “‘being an organism’” is — in the context of the paper — about subjective experience (subjective to everything except the organism.
To put it another way, the language game Nagel plays follows the conventions of language games played in post-war English language analytic philosophy. One of those conventions is awareness of Wittgenstein’s “philosophical problem”: language is a context sensitive agreement within a community…
…sure you may find fault with Wittgenstein and often there are uncomfortable epistemological implications for Modernists, Aristotelians, Positivists and such…then again that’s true of Kant.
Anyway, what the language-game model gives philosophical discourse is a way of dealing with or better avoiding Carnapian psuedo-problems arising from an insistence that the use of a word in one context applies to a context where the word is used differently…Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World pre-dates Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations by about 25 years.
Nagel's question "What is it like to be a bat?" is about the sensory qualia of a bat, assuming it has consciousness and ability to experience quales, which he assumes it does.
The question is not "What would it be like (i.e. be similar to) to be a bat?" which seems to be the strawman you are responding to.
That particular phrasing happened to catch on, but I don't think it's essential to any of the arguments. How would you phrase the distinction between objects that are conscious and objects that aren't? Or are you saying that that distinction is just a verbal trick?
>How would you phrase the distinction between objects that are conscious and objects that aren't?
You just did! Why would we need to rephrase this and then attach special importance to that new sentence construction, when "the distinction between objects that are conscious and objects that aren't" is perfectly adequate?
That's just a label, though, it makes no attempt to describe the difference. You could say a conscious object has subjective experience, but that's open to the same observation that it implies there are two things (the subject and the experience).
I can only use a label to vaguely point at the concept of consciousness, and thus the disctinction between conscious and non-conscious objects. This is not infinitely precise, because noone really understands what's going on. What you call "describing the difference" would in fact be making further claims about consciousness. If one is not in the position of making further claims, it is better to not make any claims and stick to vague but commonly understood labels, instead of making claims implicitly by using complicated labels without further examination.
Related - Charles Foster has put perhaps the most effort of any individual to try to really understand what it's like to live as an animal. From the blurb or 'Being a Beast':
> He lived alongside badgers for weeks, sleeping in a sett in a Welsh hillside and eating earthworms, learning to sense the landscape through his nose rather than his eyes. He caught fish in his teeth while swimming like an otter; rooted through London garbage cans as an urban fox; was hunted by bloodhounds as a red deer, nearly dying in the snow.
I'm less convinced with consciousness as some sort of exceptional phenomenon—and how it's been used to define the "hard problem"—but the paper is still valuable as it provides an accessible entry point into the many problems of reductionism.
When you reject the idea of reductionism, which Nagel's paper provokes us to do, then the entire idea of emergent phenomena collapses. Everything is on the same level, from fundamental particles to consciousness. Of course, some things can still be reduced and others can't, but in no situation is a phenomenon reduced in its metaphysical status. So what's the "problem" again, exactly? Consciousness doesn't need to be explained in terms of objective facts—it's not a special metaphysical thing but merely a theoretical term like anything else.
>When you reject the idea of reductionism, which Nagel's paper provokes us to do, then the entire idea of emergent phenomena collapses. Everything is on the same level, from fundamental particles to consciousness
Interesting. I would have said that something like that is the definition of reductionism.
>Consciousness doesn't need to be explained in terms of objective facts
If there's one good thing that analytic philosophy achieved, it was spending the better part of the 20th century beating back various forms of dualism and ghosts in the machine. You'd have to be something other than a naturalist traditionally conceived to treat "consciousness" as ontologically basic.
I don’t read Nagel as rejecting the idea of reductionism as strongly as you suggest. He’s simply calling out its limitations with regard to subjective experience. Why does it imply that “everything is on the same level”?
Both consciousness and experience arise from physical means. However, they are very distinct concepts and not mutually exclusive, which can lead to confusion when they are conflated.
Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience.
Anything that is able to be measured is able to experience. A subject like an apple "experiences" gravity when it falls from a tree. Things that do not interact with the physical world lack experience, and the closest things to those are WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles). Truly non-interacting particles (NIP) are presumed to be immeasurable.
So there you have it. The conundrum that consciousness can lack experience and unconsciousness can have experience. A more interesting question in my opinion: what is a soul?
>Anything that is able to be measured is able to experience.
I was quite liking this explanation but you lost me here. I very strongly agree with your opening, and I think it's the key to everything. I think everyone insisting on a categorical divide runs into impossible problems.
And a good explanation of consciousness has to take the hard problem seriously, but doesn't have to agree that subjective and objective, or first person in third person or whatever you want to call them, are irreducibly distinct categories. But I think it makes more sense to say that some subset of all of the objective stuff out there is simultaneously subjective, rather than saying that all stuff at all times is both objective and subjective. I don't think an apple experiences gravity the way a mind experiences a conscious state, but I do think the through line of understanding them both as importantly physical in the same sense is key to tying physical reality to explanation of conscious states.
> Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience.
If they don't have an "inner world"/"mind's eye" and are sensory deprived, in which sense can they be considered conscious? What is your definition here?
How can an apple "experience" gravity? I think you're overloading the term "experience" to mean two very different things, which happen (in some languages like English) to share the same word. You could say gravity "happens" to an apple, and then there's no confusion with subjective experiences.
Also, if there is a soul, then how can we be confident concisouness arises from physical means? If there is a soul, it is the perfect means to differentiate concisouness and p-zombies.
Yeah what I was trying to get at was the post I replied to said concisouness is a physical process, and the more interesting question is if souls exist.
My thinking is if soul’s exist, then we can’t call concisouness a purely physical process yet
Ive wondered if to a bat a bat is more like a whale, swimming through the air, calling out at a rate and pitch sort of matching the distance its electrical signals travel. To them they aren’t moving fast at all, or maybe to them maybe humans are like ents, plodding along so slow talking like ents.
If you are a secular person, it should follow that you are a non-dualist. Yet that is not so common. There's no "whats its like to be a bat". Because that invokes a sense of a "soul" or "spirit" or "self" being transferred from one being to another.
There is only is and its content. That's it. The easiest way to see or get a sense of this is to replace any "I am ..." with "There is a ....". For example, instead of "I am thinking of writing of using stable sort", replace it with "This person have a thought of using stable sort".
This is much closer to the actual reality underneath. Even attachment itself can be put in this term. "There's a feeling that this person own this" or "There's a sense of I".
After doing, perhaps this is mental illness, I already see glimpse of the sense that everything is everything at the same time. As there are no real difference between this rock and the other rock behind the mountain that I can't see. There should be no difference between my thoughts, senses, feelings, emotions etc and that of other people. Now your sense of self captures the entirety of the universe. If you die, the universe dies for all you know. I think this is what the ancient books have been talking about by rising and being a God.
This is a spiritual error called monism. It's taking non-dualism too far.
> As there are no real difference between this rock and the other rock behind the mountain that I can't see.
There is a real difference between the two; there must be because they're in different places. Monism requires you to deny actually existing differences by saying they're not "real".
> There should be no difference between my thoughts, senses, feelings, emotions etc and that of other people.
This is what in therapyspeak you'd call "not having boundaries". You aren't the same thing as other people; you can tell because the other people don't think that, won't let you borrow their car, etc. It opens them or yourself up to abuse if you think this way.
> There is a real difference between the two; there must be because they're in different places.
That is according to our human perception. For example a single, uniform 4D object could have a projection in 3D that appears as two distinct 3D objects. I am not claiming that a fourth spacial dimension exists, only that we cannot possibly know what exists.
>There's no "whats its like to be a bat". Because that invokes a sense of a "soul" or "spirit" or "self" being transferred from one being to another.
what's it like to be a human?
"There's no "whats its like to be a human". Because that invokes a sense of a "soul" or "spirit" or "self" being transferred from one being to another." --
anon-3988
If you become the bat, you become the bat. There is nothing permanent that is being transferred. When you think of "being the bat", you have this image of thinking "oh shit, i am a bat now!? I can echolocate and shit". Its more like, ...what? The imagination of being another person is simply an imagination that arises within this body, spirit, soul, or whatever it is.
"what does it feel like to be a bat" means what you think you are telling me. it does not mean "what would it feel like to become a bat"
"what does it feel like to be blind from birth?" can you, a sighted person near-sighted though you may be for this example, even/ever comprehend it no matter how extensively described. can someone who has never seen actually describe it to you?
> "what does it feel like to be blind from birth?" can you, a sighted person near-sighted though you may be for this example, even/ever comprehend it no matter how extensively described
I am saying that it is not possible. It is entirely possible that you can "see" but not comprehend anything, hence effectively being blind. Is my red your red? Is my hotness your hotness? Is the universe upside down? Is your 3d the same as my 3d? Even all of this imaginations and hypothesis is coming purely from my sense of experience.
I don't even know that you exist, you might simply be a figment of reality, there could be nothing behind this post. I wouldn't know.
I can't believe all these qualia questions have not evolved in centuries (or at least, the common discourse arond them hasn't). We all have similar rods and cones in our eyes. We have common kinds of color blindness. What other reasonable conclusion is there but that my red is your red? All the machinery is similar enough.
I suppose it's because people associate so much of who they are to the subjectivity of their experience. If I'm not the only one to see and taste the world as I do, am I even special? (The answer is no, and that there are more important things in life than being special.)
sounds like you are grappling with the question as intended. you are not answering the question. keep going. consider what it would feel like to be Boltzmann's bat DesCartes in Plato's cave. Ask yourself, "Flappito ergo quod?"
Imagining yourself flapping your hands in the air is not "what its like to be a bat". People are fooling themselves when they can honestly imagine being a bat. Even the question "I think therefore I am" does not mean that "I" exist. "I" here implies a center of thinking. There is no center. There is only reality and its content. And thinking is apparently one of its content.
if you don't accept a>b and b>c, you have nothing to say about "therefore a>c"; you can say nothing about it. if you did accept a>b and b>c then you would agree "therefore a>c"
>"I" here implies a center of thinking. There is no center.
"I think", according to you, implies that I implies a center of thinking, and you don't believe that there is a center, so you don't believe "I think" even more than you don't believe "therefore I am". You don't have an opinion about therefore I am.
it doesn't matter about the "existence" in the predicate, because you don't accept the "I" in the subject.
> If you are a secular person, it should follow that you are a non-dualist.
It depends on your definition of "dualism". If you define it as "having a soul that was created by a higher being", then yes, they are mutually exclusive.
On the other hand, one can also define dualism as being purely evolutionary. David Chalmers [1], an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist, has some interesting ideas around how dualistic consciousness may relate to quantum mechanics.
Materialism (perhaps physicalism as well) appears to be on shaky ground to me - it does not tell me 'why' I have the first person experience that I have, why I experience and embody the matter that is my person or being, a specific entity. Another way to look at it is to say there doesn't appear to be a region in the brain that defines why I experience the brain, that or this specific brain. From this perspective, I find it self-refuting. They appear only to locate or correlate matter and experience - to help explain 'how'. If I could experience other persons or beings in the first person, and the matter in each person explained why it is that I experience that specific person or entity, I might believe otherwise. To me, this simple fact makes it obvious there is something 'more' that must explain how 'being' relates to consciousness, otherwise, we are simply explaining how the brain modulates experience - very valuable, but less interesting and within reach and validated in everyday life (biochemically and physically, degeneration, damage, etc.). So I would say the brain appears to modulate what is responsible for first person experience. This may not be the correct way to look at consciousness, but it's the most intuitively appealing to me. Because we can't separate being from consciousness, I find the idea that we might create it in the near-term unbelievable. We might certainly create something that can operate with the same or similar results, but I'm not currently convinced it would actually have a subjective first person experience equivalent to the reason we experience the matter we experience. There may be a logical or philosophical way around this view, but as I'm not trained, it's not immediately obvious.
IMO a lot of this comes from still holding onto the dualist idea of "I" as a separate non-physical entity, and then expecting some region of the brain to act as a link or communication channel to it.
> If I could experience other persons or beings in the first person, and the matter in each person explained why it is that I experience that specific person or entity, I might believe otherwise.
Materialism doesn't say that there's some "I" that could experience different persons. I think the best you could do, in theory, is transplant aspects like your personality/train of thought/memories into someone else's brain (by physically altering it to have those aspects).
I'm open to there being something in reality that explains being someone or a specific person. Having a specific location in reality raises the question of how it came to be and what are the possibilities or limits - it's a piece of unexplained information that suggests more information and explanation is needed. Saying it is meaningless or assumed actually appears to not explain anything. But I would have to think about it more.
Contrarily, the problem I have with non-materialist/physicalist explanations is that they don't really seem to explain anything.
If we assume dualism, that there is some non-material stuff -- call it soul or spirit or mind or psyche or whatever -- that gives rise to consciousness, I think it's fair to ask how it does that.
And if the answer is "we don't know" or "it just does", I really can't see what we've gained over materialism.
Materialism is indeed on shaky ground, but the ground shakes everywhere else, too.
The problem of consciousness has no real solution. A quick way to demonstrate this is via the simulation hypothesis. Consider the following for yourself in first person:
It's impossible to know for certain whether I am in a simulation until I wake up outside of it. Not having observed any evidence of being inside a simulation (probability=0) doesn't necessarily mean I'm certainly in base reality. It could be that the evidence just hasn't been observed yet. And even then, it's impossible to know whether that outer world is a simulation until I wake up in the outer-outer-world, and so on.
That is to say, if my definition of real equals my consciousness equals my existence, I'm really saying that consciousness/reality/existence is a self-defining thing.
Descartes' cogito had unexamined metaphysical convictions. "I think, therefore I am" is not compatible with consciousness because rationality has consciousness as a dependency. If I think back on my entire conscious experience as a timeline, I was conscious before I was rational. I had to derive rationality from experience, not the other way around.
Now I throw away those convictions. "I think" means the same thing as "I am", and "therefore" is a decorative force of habit rather than a reference to logic. In which case, "I think, therefore I am" is the same as:
I observe that I observe.
Is the same as:
I observe.
Is the same as:
I am.
There is no certainty beyond this, only convictions. Even if I'm truly a human brain in a matter-based world, the world would still appear uncertain to this brain in this way.
"A scientist rejecting consciousness is not that different from a nun accepting god in this regard. Neither of them are fully honest with themselves and the world."
That's what I find myself thinking as I take a materialist stance and assume that this is base reality and other people are real in the same way that I am. This appears to fit all of my observations the best, so far, after all.
// end of monologue
And here's my pitch, from me to you:
Let's be provisional materialists together. You can't know if it's the ultimate truth but you can make the correct predictions more often and not be alone while doing it.
You could probably look at them differently if you tried. I wouldn't make a strong argument as I wasn't leaning strongly on a precise distinction in the moment, but to at least connote more maturity and activity and knowledge building in how, while why appears more conceptual, distant, more philosophical, idea-driven, than scientific. It may be viewed as similar to asking why there is something rather than nothing. Why we experience some matter rather than other matter seems more appropriate 'considering first person experience as granted, but the presence of others as well that presumably could have been the case'. Why we experience a specific location and time in reality seems more appropriate than how: we have accepted it has occurred and reoccurred virtually countless times, but we are but one case. This is perhaps two reasons I can see for using a distinction, but that doesn't mean I would pursue it or stand by it in a serious inquiry or exposition.
> It may be viewed as similar to asking why there is something rather than nothing.
The answer to that is a description how something happened to exist. A possible difference is that "how" asks for a full description, while "why" asks for an abbreviated description only of the relevant part, the rest assumed to be irrelevant. Experience of time a good example, because it happens differently depending on nature of time, so you can't assume nature of time to be irrelevant to the question.
Can a bat answer the question of “what is it like to be a bat?” I mean, I guess they would have to be able to comprehend the idea of being, and then the idea that things might experience things in ways other than how they do. Bats don’t seem like very abstract thinkers.
I bet if we could communicate with crows, we might be able to make some progress. They seem cleverer.
Although, I’m not sure I could answer the question for “a human.”
> I think, on the contrary, that if a lion could talk, that lion would have a mind so different from the general run of lion minds, that although we could understand him just fine, we would learn little about ordinary lions from him.
That makes any kind of insight into consciousness as a general term impossible though. That would mean we could not learn anything about human consciousness as such from studying specific persons.
It's a great pull, because it has an important implication that I think ties in directly to Nagels point. Another fascinating variation of the same idea is "beetle in the box", another great one from Wittgenstein. I don't think I agree with him, because I think it hinges on assuming lions have fundamental and irreducibly different experiences. But I think we have important similarities due to our shared evolutionary heritage, and even from the outside I'm willing to die on the hill of insisting that Lions certainly do have experiences familiar to us, like hunger, pain, the satisfaction of having an itch scratched, having a visual field, and having the ability to distinguish shades and color (though their experience of color is likely importantly different from ours, but overlaps enough for there to be such a thing as shared meaning).
I don't understand why Wittgenstein wasn't more forcefully challenged on this. There's something to the principle as a linguistic principle, but it just feels overextended into a foundational assumption that their experiences are fundamentally unlike ours.
The very capability and flexibility of language drove evolution of the mind beyond what species with less linguistic behaviors could handle. After all, facility with language is a massive survival benefit, in our species more than any other. It’s circular because feedback loops in evolution are circular too.
That’s called meta cognition (what humans do) not subjective experience - which is the feeling of what happens and sets animal or agentic creatures apart from rocks (not sure about plants)
Dennett has a character telling a story about a bat:
Here's Billy the bat perceiving, in his special sonar sort of way, that the flying thing swooping down toward him was not his cousin Bob, but a eagle, with pinfeathers spread and talons poised for the kill!
He then points out that this story is amenable to criticism. We know that the sonar has limited range, so Billy is not at least perceiving this eagle until the last minute; we could set up experiments to find out whether bats track their kin or not; the sonar has a resolution and if we find out the resolution we know whether Billy might be perceiving the pinfeathers. He also mentions that bats have a filter, a muscle, that excludes their own squeaks when they pick up sonar echoes, so we know they aren't hearing their own squeaks directly. So, we can establish lots about what it could be like to be a bat, if it's like anything. Or at least what is isn't like.
What is that criticism supposed to be criticizing?
Nagel's paper covers a lot of ground, but none of what you described has any bearing on the point about it "what it's like" as a way to identify conscious experience as distinct from, say, the life of a rock. (Assuming one isn't a panpsychist who believe that rocks possess consciousness.)
It gives obvious examples of the way our awareness of factual circumstances give us inroads into what might be experienced. And the upshot is that this might suggest the rest of consciousness can be understood by iterating forward in a similar manner. Dennett makes this exact same point about Mary's Room. Far from talking past the article, it's attacking the fundamental principle.
"Might suggest" - sure, that might be possible. That's not so much a criticism of Nagel as the hope that the problems he's highlighting might one day be solved.
That's not pessimism. It's interrogating the nature of reality. If you want to discover truth, you can't shy away from conclusions because they don't make you feel good.
That's the magic answer. It's a/the hard problem, but permeable to inquiry. The top neuroscience research into consciousness however doesn't seem like this kind of inquiry Dennett is referencing.
To me, "what is it like to be a" is more or less the intersection of sensory modalities between two systems... but I'm not sure the extent of the overlap tells you much about whether a given system is "conscious" or not.
Pretty much the same conclusion here. Consciousness is what we feel when sheaf 1-cohomology among our different senses vanishes.
Bringing it back to bats, a failure to imagine what it's like to be a bat is just indicative that the overlaps between human and bat modalities don’t admit a coherent gluing that humans can inhabit phenomenally.
> Pretty much the same conclusion here. Consciousness is what we feel when sheaf 1-cohomology among our different senses vanishes.
There's something more to it than this.
For one thing there's a threshold of awareness. Your mind is constantly doing things and having thoughts that don't arrive to the threshold of awareness. You can observe more of this stuff if you meditate and less of this stuff if you constantly distract yourself. But consciousness IMO should have the idea of a threshold baked in.
For another, the brain will unify things that don't make sense. I assume you mean something like consciousness is what happens when there aren't obstructions to stitching sensory data together. But the brain does a lot of work interpreting incoherent data as best it can. It doesn't have to limit itself to coherent data.
I'll have to reflect more on the first part, but as far as
> It doesn't have to limit itself to coherent data.
There are specific failure cases for non-integrability:
1. Dissociation/derealization = partial failures of gluing.
2. Nausea = inconsistent overlaps (ie: large cocycles) interpreted as bodily threat.
3. Anesthesia = disabling of the sheaf functor: no global section possible.
At least for me it provides a consistent working model for hallucinogenic, synesthesia, phantom limb phenomena, and split-brain scenarios. If anything, the ways in which sensor integration fails are more interesting than when it succeeds.
Yeah to be clear I like this mental model a lot, and I give it extra points for invoking sheaf theory :). I was just saying it doesn't seem complete to me from a psychological perspective.
The way I look at it is that the sensors provide data as activations and awareness is some output with a thresholding or activation function.
Sense making and consciousness in my mental model is something that happens after the fact and it tries to happen even with nonsense data. As opposed to -- as I was reading you to be leaning toward -- being the consequence of sensory data being in a sufficiently nice relationship with each other.
Do you really mean that it's very nearly the same thing "To be a" you, and an Elon Musk, a homo sapiens infant, and an Orangutan? And only modestly different from these to be a dog or a horse?
If I've understood you correctly, I'll suggest that simple sensory intersection is way way not enough: the processing hardware and software are material to what it is like to be someone.
Maybe in the future we'll be able to run computer simulations of people and bats that think they are conscious and you'll be able to merge them a bit to get some bat experience?
Anil Seth recently wrote a book "Being You", which very much states that we can only know what it is like to be ourselves.
Basically, to know what it is like to be a bat, you need to have evolved as a bat.
His theory that our perception is a hallucination generated by a prediction algorithm that uses sensory input to update and correct the hallucination is very interesting.
Ed Yong wrote an excellent book closely related to this topic titled An Immense World on the sensory lives of animals that we are still only beginning to understand.
"It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. As a result, we tend "to frame animals' lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs."
>An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.
Isn’t this just the same as saying an organism is conscious if it perceives? If it is aware of input from one or more senses (and I’m not limiting that to the five human senses)?
The article basically talkes about "umwelt" (there is a link at the bottom) - "is the specific way in which organisms of a particular species perceive and experience the world, shaped by the capabilities of their sensory organs and perceptual systems"
How it at all related to let's say programming?
Well, for example learning vim-navigation or Lisp or a language with an advanced type system (e.g. Haskell) can be umwelt-transformative.
Vim changes how you perceive text as a structured, navigable space. Lisp reveals code-as-data and makes you see programs as transformable structures. Haskell's type system creates new categories of thought about correctness, composition, and effects.
These aren't just new skills - they're new sensory-cognitive modalities. You literally cannot "unsee" monadic patterns or homoiconicity once internalized. They become part of your computational umwelt, shaping what problems you notice, what solutions seem natural, and even how you conceptualize everyday processes outside programming.
It's similar to how learning music theory changes how you hear songs, or how learning a tonal language might affect how you perceive pitch. The tools become part of your extended cognition, restructuring your problem-space perception.
When a Lisper says "code is data" they're not just stating a fact - they're describing a lived perceptual reality where parentheses dissolve into tree structures and programs become sculptable material. When a Haskeller mentions "following the types" they're describing an actual sensory-like experience of being guided through problem space by type constraints.
This creates a profound pedagogical challenge: you can explain the mechanics of monads endlessly, but until someone has that "aha" moment where they start thinking monadically, they don't really get it. It's like trying to explain color to someone who's never seen, or echolocation to someone without that sense. That's why who's never given a truthful and heartfelt attempt to understand Lisp, often never gets it.
The umwelt shift is precisely what makes these tools powerful - they're not just different syntax but different ways of being-in-computational-world. And like the bat's echolocation, once you're inside that experiential framework, it seems impossible that others can't "hear" the elegant shape of a well-typed program.
There are other umwelt-transforming examples, like: debugging with time-travel/reversible debuggers, using pure concatenative languages, logic programming - Datalog/Prolog, array programming, constraint solvers - SAT/SMT, etc.
The point I'm trying to make - don't try to "understand" the cons and pros of being a bat, try to "be a bat", that would allow you to see the world differently.
I suppose someone (even an experienced vimmer) might argue that learning vim is not so much "umwelt-transformative", but rather like "muscle memory training", like LeetCode drilling.
Indeed, basic vim-navigation - (hjkl, w, b) is muscle memory.
But, I'd argue the umwelt shift comes from vim's modal nature and its language of text objects. You start perceiving text as having an inherent grammar - "inside parentheses", "around word", "until comma." Text gains topology and structure that was invisible before.
The transformative part isn't the keystrokes but learning to think "delete inside quotes" (di") or "change around paragraph" (cap). You see text as composable objects with boundaries, not just streams of characters. This may even persists when you're reading on paper.
That mental model often transforms your keyboard workflow not just in your editor - but your WM, terminal, web browser, etc.
He anticipated an AI problem decades early.
Replace “bat” with “LLM” or “alien intelligence,” and the paper reads like a warning: describing behavior and mechanisms might never reveal the inner feel, if there is one, to outsiders.
Interesting topic, but I can only see one chapter. Based on chapter names it seems you lean closer to cybernetics or process philosophy. Is that true? I find ignoring time and process to be the greatest sin in the field of consciousness. The big issue is not that we don't know the quantum trick or property-dualism that explains consciousness, but that we try to remove time and process from it. That is impossible, a static explanation will never capture dynamic execution of a system.
I worked on similar topics, I publish on a "personal" subreddit.
Cybernetics is behind all modern AI (Turing was a cyberneticist), and also modern cognitive science with the ideas close to hybrid computing, neuromorphic computing, enactivism, embodied minds etc. Basically, cyberneticists were functionalists - and that allows for multiple realizability.
At the core of the book is the question of consciousness and qualia (and I do believe that a walkthrough through computational complexity is necessary, especially taking into account TIME and SPACE for both human neural processing and artificial one, differentiating between being incomputable in principle, being incomputable in practice or being tractable.
> Nagel asserts that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."
An organism is conscious exactly when there is something it is like for that organism to be itself.
Or in a simpler way, consciousness is present just in case being that organism has an inner, subjective character - something that can not be reduced to a purely material state.
It means that if something has conscious mental states then it must have subjective experience from its own perspective. If John has a conscious mental state, then I must be able to ask "What is it like to be John?". Hope that helps.
The fact that we can't bridge subjective and objective descriptions without hand-waving probably says more about the limits of human concepts than about bats
Science studies the physical and measurable. Consciousness isn’t physical or measurable. That’s why the “hard problem” sits outside what science, by definition, can explain.
That's just a question begging assertion, and there's plenty of empirical knowledge of necessary physical conditions for consciousness as well as predictable physical influences on conscious states. Whether consciousness is "measurable" is part of what's at issue and can't just be definitionally presupposed.
It's not like anything, a bat has no sense of self or personal history, it operates on instinct without a personal, reflective self. A bat having consciousness is as relevant as whether a sonar does.
> it operates on instinct without a personal, reflective self
I think we would call this "without ego" and not "without consciousness". I think it's totally possible to be conscious without ego. And perhaps bats do have an ego however small - some may be more greedy than others, etc.
I think what consciousness nominally means is an awareness of things in relation to a self, a subject-object relation. If there is such a thing as awareness without subject object content, I'd love to hear more, like how would you even know you have it.
Do you mean the bat has no subjective experience? If so - That’s a pretty extraordinary claim to make there and one that risks great ethical concern on the treatment or animals
If bats have no subjective experience it’s ethical to do anything to them but if there is than they deserve to (as all animals) be treated ethically as much as we can do so
IMO considering Bats to be similar to Mice -we’ve studied mice and rats extensively and while cannot know precisely we can be pretty sure there is subjective experience (felt experience there) ie almost our scientific experiments and field data with so called ‘lower’ organisms show evidence of pain, suffering and desires, play etc - all critical evidence of subjectivity
Now I don’t think bats are meta-conscious (meta cognitive) because they can’t commiserate on their experiences or worry about death etc like humans can but they feel stuff - and we must respect that
You don't need to know if it has a "subjectivity" to know if you can torture and kill it, you can rely on the writhing and squealing. Making up artificial distinctions and questions with no answers is just a conceit we get into, ultimately to justify whatever we want. There are too many people on the planet and we need to "process" a lot of life for our benefit.
Anyway, if there is no mind in the sense of a personal identity or a reflective thought process, then really you're just torturing and killing a set of sense perceptions, so what would be the basis of a morality that forbids that?
>Anyway, if there is no mind in the sense of a personal identity or a reflective thought process
I don't think "mind" is limited to those two things, and I think it may be on a continuum rather than binary, and they may also be integrally related to the having of other senses.
I also think they probably do have some non trivial degree of mind even in the strong sense, and that mental states that aren't immediately tied to self reflection are independently valuable because even mere "sense perceptions" include valenced states (pain, comfort) that traditionally tend to fall within the scope of moral consideration. I also think their stake in future modes of being over their long term evolutionary trajectory is a morally significant interest they have.
Saying it might be on a continuum just obfuscates things. What do you mean exactly?
If there is no sense of self or personal identity, how is that different than a block of wood or a computer? That there might be "mental" functions performed doesn't give it subjectivity if there is no subject performing them. And if there is no persistent reflective self there is no subject. You could call instincts or trained behaviors mental, activities of a kind of mind if you wanted to. But if it's not self aware it's not a moral subject.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote an essay about this essay in the book “The Mind’s I” which I thoroughly enjoyed reading even if a lot of it is beyond me. There’s a somewhat janky OCR version here http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-24-what-is-it-l...
Classic Hofstadter, he introduces a concept called a “Be-Able Thing” (BAT for short)
Can we just all admit there has basically been no real progress made to the mind-body problem. They all rest on metaphysical axioms of which no one has any proof of. Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism.
Exhibit a
> Nagel begins by assuming that "conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon" present in many animals (particularly mammals), even though it is "difficult to say [...] what provides evidence of it".
Physicalism is an ontological assertion that is almost certainly true, and is adhered to by nearly all scientists and most philosophers of mind. Solipsism is an ontological assertion that could only possibly be true for one person, and is generally dismissed. They are at opposite ends of the plausibility scale.
One big problem with physicalism is that many alleged arguments in its favor are nothing of the sort. Any argument for physicalism that refers to neurological observation is invalid. Physicalism claims that all mental events can be reduced to physical events. But you cannot look at physical events to prove this. No matter the detail in which you describe a physical event, you can't use this to prove, or even argue in favor of, the thesis that all mental events can be reduced to the physical.
It's like describing the inside of a house in very great detail, and then using this to argue that there's nothing outside the house. The method is explicitly limiting its scope to the inside of the house, so can say nothing about what's outside, for or against. Same with physicalism: most arguments in its favor limit their method to looking at the physical, so in practice say nothing about whether this is all there is.
You're making a number of unsupported assertions. There's a massive amount of literature in support of physicalism. And it's a far cry from "there's no proof of x" to "x is invalid". No metaphysical stance can be proved.
> Same with physicalism: most arguments in its favor limit their method to looking at the physical, so in practice say nothing about whether this is all there is.
This is simply wrong ... there are very strong arguments that, when we're looking at mental events, we are looking at the physical. To say that arguments for physicalism are limited to looking at the physical is a circular argument that presupposes that physicalism is wrong. The arguments for physicalism absolutely are not based at looking at a limited set of things, they are logical arguments that there's no way to escape being physical ... certainly Descartes' dualism is long dead due to the interaction problem -- mental states must be physical in order to be acted upon or act upon the physical. The alternatives are ad hoc nonsense like Chalmers' "bridging laws" that posit that there's a mental world that is kept in tight sync with the physical world by these "bridging laws" that have no description or explanation or reason to believe exist.
> And it's a far cry from "there's no proof of x" to "x is invalid".
Oh this is undoubtedly true, and my argument was limited to the statement that the most common argument for physicalism is invalid. I was not launching an attack on physicalism itself.
> No metaphysical stance can be proved.
That's an interesting metaphysical stance, but again, I'm not trying to prove any metaphysics, just pointing out the main weakness that I see in the physicalist argument. I'm pointing out that any pro-physicalist argument that is a variant of "neuroscience says X" is invalid for the reason I gave: by limiting your scope to S, you can say nothing about anything outside S. This is true regardless of whether there is actually anything outside S, so there is no assumption in my argument that physicalism is wrong.
One argument against physicalism is that if thought or knowledge can be reduced to particles bouncing around, then there is no thought or knowledge. My knowledge that 2+2=4 is about something other than, or different from, the particles in my brain. Knowledge is about the content of the mind, which is different from the associated physical state of the brain. If content is neurons, then content as something my mind considers doesn't exist. If my thought "2+2=4" just is a bunch of particles in my brain doing stuff, then my belief that my thought is true is not even wrong, as the saying goes: just absurd.
I'm no Cartesian dualist though -- the interaction problem is just one problem with his dualism. I think Aristotle and Aquinas basically got the picture of reality right, and their metaphysics can shed yuuuuge amounts of light on the mind-body problem but obviously that's a grossly unfashionable worldview these days :-)
I disagree with your arguments and I think they are hopelessly confused. Since our views are conceptually incommensurate, there's no point in continuing.
I'm afraid the physicalist position is absolutely impossible. When I think about something, I'm thinking about something different from the brain state that represents it. There is nothing difficult or subtle about this: if I think about a tiger, I am not thinking about a brain state that is associated therewith.
The physicalist position wants to reduce the mental to the physical. My thought cannot be reduced from the mental to the physical, because my thought is about a tiger, and a tiger cannot be reduced to a brain state.
If physicalism is true, I can't really be thinking about a tiger, because the tiger in my thought has no physical existence-as-a-tiger, and therefore can't have any existence-as-a-tiger at all. But then I'm not really thinking about a tiger. And the same applies to all our thoughts: physicalism would imply that all our thoughts are delusional, and not about reality at all. A non-physicalist view allows my thought to be actually about a tiger, without that tiger-thought having physical existence.
(Note that I have no problem with the view that the mental and the physical co-incide, or have some kind of causal relationship -- this is obviously true -- only with the view that the mental is reducible to the physical.)
You aren't even wrong, thoughts are fantasy indeed, and imaginary tiger doesn't have a literal physical existence, because it's, well, imaginary, it only has existence in imagination. And this theory matches observation.
Here's what I just posted to the other person. Perhaps you can tell me where I'm going wrong, because it seems to me that physicalism is impossible.
The UMD paper you link to elsewhere describes the central proposition of mind-brain identity physicalism as follows:
> a pain or a thought is (is identical with) some state of the brain or central nervous system
or
> ‘pain’ doesn’t mean ‘such-and-such a stimulation of the neural fibers’... yet, for all that, the two terms in fact refer to the very same thing." [emphasis in original]
(If you search for this second sentence and see it in context, you will see that substituting 'thought' for 'pain' is a fair reflection of the document's position.)
But this is problematic. Consider the following:
1. Thoughts are, at least sometimes, about reality.
2. My thought in some way refers to the object of that thought. Otherwise, I am not thinking about the thing I purport to be thinking about, and (1) is false.
3. That reference is not limited to my subjective, conscious experience of that thought, but is an inherent property of the thought itself. Otherwise, again, (1) is false.
4. Physicalism says the word "thought" and the phrase "a particular stimulation of neural fibers" refer to the same thing (from document above).
5. "A particular stimulation of neural fibers" does not refer to any object outside itself. Suppose I'm thinking about a tiger. You cannot analyze a neural state with a brain scan and find a reference to a tiger. You will see a bunch of chemical and electrical states, nothing more. You will not see the object of the thought.
6. But a thought must refer to its object, given 2 and 3. So "thought" and "particular stimulation of neural fibers" cannot refer to the same thing. (I will grant, and it is my position, that the latter is part of the former, but physicalism identifies the two.)
Point 5 is sound, and it's actually impossible for a configuration of neural fibers to refer to something outside itself (and therefore, if physicalism is true and thought = neural fibers, it's impossible for a thought to refer to something outside itself, which would falsify point 2). Here's why:
The reference can't exist in the thought if "thought" and "a particular stimulation of neural fibers" refer to the same thing. There is no reference in the fibers. You can't "encode" a reference to something else in the physical brain (or any part of the body).
This is because a reference must in some way refer to its object (obviously). But a reference can only be referred to its object by something else. The word "tiger", or a picture of a tiger, refer to an actual tiger only when there is a mind to give them that meaning. But "a particular stimulation of neural fibers" cannot refer to any object, because there is nothing that can give it that meaning. A word or a picture or anything extra-mental can be given meaning by a mind, but when we are talking about the mind itself, this is impossible.
Whoheartedly agree. I think what they're stressing though if I'm understanding correctly, is we do kind of start in a Cartesian space, and branch out via inferences to the presumption of an external world. And, from a certain philosophical perspective, one could point to that and insist that at any moment that connection could be the weak link that brings all of epistemology crashing down. We could get unhooked from the simulation, so to speak, open our real eyes, and witness a new world with new bedrock alternatives to our notions of causality, qualia, and so on.
I don't believe any of that to be true, but I think that's kind of the point of that argument. I do think we start from that Cartesian starting place, but once we know enough about the external world to know that we're a part of it, and can explain our mind in terms of it, it effectively shifts the foundation, so that our mental states are grounded in empirical reality rather than the other way around.
See their comment just above where they say "I'm afraid the physicalist position is absolutely impossible." ... it's the worst argued rubbish imaginable.
The UMD paper you link to elsewhere describes the central proposition of mind-brain identity physicalism as follows:
> a pain or a thought is (is identical with) some state of the brain or central nervous system
or
> ‘pain’ doesn’t mean ‘such-and-such a stimulation of the neural fibers’... yet, for all that, the two terms in fact refer to the very same thing." [emphasis in original]
(If you search for this second sentence and see it in context, you will see that substituting 'thought' for 'pain' is a fair reflection of the document's position.)
But this is problematic. Consider the following:
1. Thoughts are, at least sometimes, about reality.
2. My thought in some way refers to the object of that thought. Otherwise, I am not thinking about the thing I purport to be thinking about, and (1) is false.
3. That reference is not limited to my subjective, conscious experience of that thought, but is an inherent property of the thought itself. Otherwise, again, (1) is false.
4. Physicalism says the word "thought" and the phrase "a particular stimulation of neural fibers" refer to the same thing (from document above).
5. "A particular stimulation of neural fibers" does not refer to any object outside itself. Suppose I'm thinking about a tiger. You cannot analyze a neural state with a brain scan and find a reference to a tiger. You will see a bunch of chemical and electrical states, nothing more. You will not see the object of the thought.
6. But a thought must refer to its object, given 2 and 3. So "thought" and "particular stimulation of neural fibers" cannot refer to the same thing. (I will grant, and it is my position, that the latter is part of the former, but physicalism identifies the two.)
If having a thought is strictly a consequence of physical processes, physical occurrences, then physicalism is true, so of course it is not "absolutely impossible", even if it were to turn out that it's not true. By token-identity -- which is one but not the only possible model -- the brain being in some specific physical state is synonymous with having some specific thought--that's all ... the brain being in that specific state is coincident with having that specific thought. Word games about "reference" don't change that. The language we use to talk about brain states is very different from the language we use to talk about thoughts because they are very different conceptual frameworks for describing what happen to be the same occurrence. We describe thoughts as being about things, not in terms of activation levels, synapses firing, etc., and we talk about brain states in terms the latter, not in terms of being about tigers etc., but that doesn't mean that these totally different sorts of descriptions aren't about the same physical occurrence. When you have a specific thought about a tiger, your brain is in a specific configuration, and if it weren't then you wouldn't be having that specific thought. That's what token identity means ... each mental state corresponds directly to a physical state of the brain.
> Physicalism says the word "thought" and the phrase "a particular stimulation of neural fibers" refer to the same thing (from document above)
Here is what it actually says:
> The identity-thesis is a version of physicalism: it holds that all mental states and events
are in fact physical states and events. But it is not, of course, a thesis about meaning: it does not
claim that words such as ‘pain’ and ‘after-image’ may be analyzed or defined in terms of
descriptions of brain-processes. (That would be absurd.) Rather, it is an empirical thesis about
the things in the world to which our words refer: it holds that the ways of thinking represented
by our terms for conscious states, and the ways of thinking represented by some of our terms for
brain-states, are in fact different ways of thinking of the very same (physical) states and events.
So ‘pain’ doesn’t mean ‘such-and-such a stimulation of the neural fibers’ (just as ‘lightning’
doesn’t mean ‘such-and-such a discharge of electricity’); yet, for all that, the two terms in fact
refer to the very same thing.
And yet the sort of analysis that points out as absurd is exactly the sort of analysis you are attempting.
> You cannot analyze a neural state with a brain scan and find a reference to a tiger. You will see a bunch of chemical and electrical states, nothing more. You will not see the object of the thought.
Says who? Of course we don't currently don't have such technology, but at some time in the future we may be able to analyze a brain scan and determine that the subject is thinking of a tiger. (This may well turn out not to be feasible if only token-identity holds but not type-identity ... thoughts about similar things need not correspond to similar brain states.)
Saying that we only see a bunch of chemical and electrical states is the most absurd naive reductivist denial of inference possible. When we look at a spectrogram, all we see is colored lines, yet we are able to infer what substances produced them. When we look at an oscilloscope, we will see a bunch of curves. etc. Or take the examples at the beginning of the paper ... "a particular cloud is, as a matter of fact, a great many water droplets suspended close together in the atmosphere; and just as a flash of lightning is, as a matter of fact, a certain sort of discharge of electrical energy" -- these are different levels and frameworks of description. Look at a photograph or a computer screen up close and you will see pixels or chemical arrangements. To say that you will see "nothing more" is to deny the entirety of science and rational thought. One can just as well talk about windows, titles, bar charts, this comment on a computer screen as referring to things but the pixel states of the screens that are coincident with them don't and thereby foolishly, absurdly, think that one has defeated physicalism
Enough with the terrible arguments and shoddy thinking. You're welcome to them ... I reject them.
I agree that when I see the word "tiger" on paper and a screen, I am looking at something that refers to a tiger. And the same is true, mutatis mutandis, for spectograms, oscilliscopes, photos on screens, etc etc. But the word "tiger" only refers to a tiger because a mind make the connection between the word and the thing in my mind. Without that connection, it really is just a bunch of ink on a page. There is nothing inherent in the shape of the ink's squiggles that make it refer to a tiger.
It is not a question of "different levels and frameworks" of description in this case, or at least not solely. The examples of clouds and lightning given in the paper are not valid parallels (I know the paper doesn't offer them as parallels, but your comment did), because they do not need relations with other things to be water droplets and discharges of electricity. But a word needs a relation with something else (its referent) to be a word, otherwise it is just meaningless squiggles, sounds or pixels. And the word does not have this relation in and of itself: only a mind can give it this relation.
(You can take relation and reference as largely synonymous for the purposes of this comment.)
You can analyze the squiggles as closely as you like, but you will still not find any relation to a tiger, unless you have something else (a mind) giving it that relation. And again, the same is true for the other examples you give. Extrinsic relations exist between word and thing or oscilliscope and wave, but not intrinsic ones.
In the same way, the brain's state when it thinks of a tiger is, in and of itself, a bunch of chemical and electric states that bear no intrisic relation to a tiger. No amount of analysis of the brain's state will change this. As I stated somewhere else, a tiger and a brain state, like a tiger and the word "tiger", are two entirely different things, and are not intrinsically related to each other. You can analyze either the tiger or the brain state with whatever sophisticated technology you want, but that will not change this fact. Analyzing a bunch of squiggles will produce information about the ink, but not information about a tiger: you are still looking at ink. Analyzing chemical and electric states will produce interesting and very valuable information about the brain, but not information about a tiger: you are still looking at chemical and electric states. No amount of searching will find intrinsic relation between brain-state and thing. [I think this is also a good argument against Cartesian dualism, but that's beside the point right now.]
The relation between thought and its object must be intrinsic (assuming our thoughts are about, or can be about, reality). It cannot be extrinsic like a word or oscilliscope, because our thoughts are not given their meaning by something outside our minds. (I assume we agree on this last point after "because", and it doesn't need arguing.) Our thoughts' relations to their objects must be intrinsic to the thoughts. But they can't be intrinsic if our thoughts are our brain states, for the reason just given.
(The UMD paper responds to this objection in section 3.8: briefly, my response is that we might get the illusion of intentionality in a physical system like a computer, but no more than that.)
Where am I going wrong? If the answer is "everywhere", what's the single worst part? You must at least agree with points 1, 2 and 3, and probably point 4?
You're getting a little ahead of yourself. First, ontological assertions need to reflect reality. That is, they need to be true or false, and many philosophers, including prominent scientists, don't think they qualify. Indeed, the arguments against ontological realism are more airtight than any particular metaphysical theory.
> First, ontological assertions need to reflect reality.
You're getting ahead of yourself to imply that somehow physicalism does not reflect reality, or that an assertion has to be proven to reflect reality before being made.
> That is, they need to be true or false
No, that's not what reflecting reality means. Of course ontological assertions are true or false, if they aren't incoherent, but that's neither here nor there.
> and many philosophers, including prominent scientists, don't think they qualify.
What's this "they" that don't qualify? The subject was physicalism, and again almost all scientists and most philosophers of mind subscribe to it ... which leaves room for some not doing so. Whether or not the outliers are "prominent" is irrelevant.
> Indeed, the arguments against ontological realism are more airtight than any particular metaphysical theory.
That's a much stronger claim than that physicalism is wrong ... many dualists are ontological realists. And it's certainly convenient to claim that there are airtight arguments for one's views, and easy to dismiss the claim.
I've never heard any argument that demonstrates any certainty around physicalism. I like the argument bcuz it sounds nice, but I would never ever claim to know it to be true. I mostly arrived at physicalism because there are eggregious problems with the other theories and physicalism seemed like the suitable default naive answer.
They have different probabilities as they require different fine tuning. Sorted by fine tuning: physicalism < simulation < idealism < dualism < solipsism.
>Can we just all admit there has basically been no real progress made to the mind-body problem.
I think we've made extraordinary progress on things like brain to machine interfaces, and demonstrating that something much like human thought can be approximated according to computational principles.
I do think some sort of theoretical bedrock is necessary to explain to "something there's like to be" quality, but I think it would be obtuse to brush aside the rather extraordinary infiltrations into the black box of consciousness that we've made thus far, even if it's all been knowing more about it from the outside. There's a real problem that remains unpenetrated but as has been noted elsewhere in this thread, it is a nebulous concept, and perhaps one of the most difficult and important research questions, and I think nothing other than ordinary humility is necessary to explain the limit an extent to which we understand it thus far.
Much of the mind-body problem comes from Descartes, who assumed that physical reality was nothing more than a bunch of particles bouncing around. Given that the mind cannot be reduced to this (whatever my experiences are, they are different from particles bouncing around), then the mind must be something utterly unlike everything else in reality. Thus Descartes posits that the mind is one thing and the body another (substance dualism).
If one drops the assumption that physical reality is nothing more than a bunch of particles, the mind stops being so utterly weird and unique, and the mind-body problem is more tractable. Pre-17th century, philosophers weren't so troubled by it.
Several reasons. One is that my experience of looking at a tree is one thing, but the neurological firing that takes place in my brain when I look at a tree is another. They are not the same. If you can reduce your experience of looking at a tree to neurons firing, then you are not really looking at a tree, and absurdity results.
Another is that the propositions "the thought 2+2=4 is correct" and "the thought 2+2=5 is wrong" can only be true with regard to the content of a thought. If thought can be reduced to neurons firing, then describing a thought as correct or wrong is absurd. Since this is not the case, it must be impossible to reduce thought to neurons firing.
(Btw, the first paragraph of my previous comment is not my position. I am giving a three-sentence summary of Descartes' contribution to the mind-body problem.)
I don't follow the reasoning at all. Why is human experience not the neurological firing? Why can't a thought be reduced to neurons firing, what about that would make it absurd?
I promise I'm not being dense or rhetorical, I truly don't understand that line of thought.
It seems to me like begging the question, almost like saying "experience cannot be this, because it'd be absurd, because it cannot be this."
Here's something I posted a while ago, I'm copying and pasting with a few slight edits:
It is wrong to claim that brain states (neurons firing) are the same as mental states (thoughts). There are several reasons for this. One is that reducing thoughts to brain states means a thought cannot be correct or incorrect. For example, one series of mental states leads to the thought "2+2=4"; another series leads to the thought "2+2=5". The correctness of the former and the wrongness of the latter refers only to the thought's content, not the physical brain state. If thoughts are nothing more than brain states, it's meaningless to say that one thought is correct -- that is to say, it's a thought that conforms to reality -- and that the other is incorrect. A particular state of neurons and chemicals cannot per se be incorrect or incorrect. If one thought is right (about reality) and another thought is wrong (not about reality), then there must be aspects of thought that are distinct from the physical state of the brain.
If it's meaningless to say that one thought is correct and another is incorrect, then of course nothing we think or say has any connection to reality. Hence the existence of this disagreement, along with the belief that one of us is right and the other wrong, presupposes that the physicalist position is wrong.
I agree with this: the physical configuration of neurons, their firings, the atoms that make them, etc, cannot be "right" or "wrong". This wouldn't make sense in reality; it either is or isn't, and "right" or "wrong" are human values. The universe is neither right nor wrong, it just is.
What about the thoughts those neuron firings mean to us? Well, a good argument can be made that they are also not "right" or "wrong" in isolation, they are just phenomena. Trivially, a thought of "2+2=4" is neither right nor wrong, it's only other thoughts that consider it "right" or "wrong" (often with additional context). So the values themselves can be a physical manifestation.
So it seems to me your problem can be resolved like this: in response to a physical configuration we call a "thought", other "thoughts" can be formed in physical configurations we call "right" or "wrong".
The qualities of "right" or "wrong" only exist as physical configurations in the minds of humans.
And voila! There's no incompatibility between the physical world and thoughts, emotions, "right" or "wrong".
I think it's a question that only makes sense if there's a human asking it. "Correct" is always relative to something, in this case, the meaning a human attaches to that string, a string that only exists as a physical configuration of neurons.
Even without getting into the body-mind duality we are discussing here, it's understood that the string "2+2=4" requires additional context to have meaning, it's just that this context is often implicit (i.e. we're talking about arabic digits in base 10 notation, + is sum as defined in ..., etc).
> (I cannot edit my other comment any longer, but I want to add that it's far from my intention to sound as if I'm lecturing anyone, I'm well aware a lot of these are open questions -- possibly unresolvable -- and I don't consider myself an expert or well-read on this topic. I find it fascinating to discuss. All of my remarks/questions/disagreements with you are made in good faith.)
Thanks, I greatly appreciate your politeness and goodwill. Everything I say is in good faith too. I appreciate my ideas can seem odd, and sometimes I write in haste so do not take the time to explain things properly.
> it's understood that the string "2+2=4" requires additional context to have meaning, it's just that this context is often implicit (i.e. we're talking about arabic digits in base 10 notation, + is sum as defined in ..., etc).
I would distinguish the symbols from the concepts they represent. The string (or words, or handwritten notes) "2+2=4" is one thing; the concepts that it refers to are another. I could use binary instead of base-10, and write "10+10=100". The string would be different, but the concepts that the string referred to would be the same.
Everything I say, unless otherwise stated, refers to the concepts, not to the string.
>> Would 2+2=4 be correct, and 2+2=5 be incorrect, only if there were a human being to say so?
> I think it's a question that only makes sense if there's a human asking it. "Correct" is always relative to something
This is true: correct is always relative to something (or, better, measured against something).
> in this case, the meaning a human attaches to that string, a string that only exists as a physical configuration of neurons.
But I disagree here. I would say it must be measured against something outside the mind, not the meaning a person gives something. If the correctness of arithmetic is measured against something inside the person's mind, then a madman who thought that 2+2=5 would be just as right as someone who thought that 2+2=4. Because there would be nothing outside the mind to measure against. One person can only be correct, and the other wrong, if there is something independent of both people to measure against. So if we say that arithmetic describes reality (which it clearly does: all physics, chemistry, engineering, computer science, etc etc assumes the reality of arithmetic), then we must say that there is something extra-mental to measure people's ideas against. It is this extra-mental measure that makes them correct or incorrect.
This is true not just of math, but of the empirical sciences. For example, somebody who thinks that a hammer and a feather will fall at different velocities in a vacuum is wrong, and somebody who thinks they fall at the same velocity is right. But these judgements can only be made by comparing against an extra-mental reality
So it seems to me when you say that
> the qualities of "right" or "wrong" only exist as physical configurations in the minds of humans.
you imply that arithmetic (and by extension, any subject) cannot describe reality, which must be false. It's also self-contradictory, because in this conversation each of us claims to be describing reality.
(I cannot edit my other comment any longer, but I want to add that it's far from my intention to sound as if I'm lecturing anyone, I'm well aware a lot of these are open questions -- possibly unresolvable -- and I don't consider myself an expert or well-read on this topic. I find it fascinating to discuss. All of my remarks/questions/disagreements with you are made in good faith.)
Correctness is evaluated by comparison to an etalon. Here you compare to two different etalons. Thought is formed correctly in terms of laws of motion of particles, then you find it incorrect in terms of mathematics. the results of comparisons are different because etalons are different.
I'm not sure how to answer the even more fundamental question, "What is it like to be yourself?" What constitutes a valid answer? It's a vague question.
What makes me me? Whatever you identify as "yourself", how come it lives within your body? Why is there not someone else living inside your body? Why was I born, specifically "me", and not someone else?
Not at all. I was shocked when I noticed that how few people have asked themselves this question. In fact, it is impossible to even explain this question to the majority of people. Most people confuse the question with "what makes us intelligent", missing the whole "first person perspective" aspect of it.
I guess evolution tries to stop us from asking question that might lead to nihilism.
I think about this sometimes. From the POV of being in the human body I feel we must all be "me". If I wasn't here having this specific subjective experience as a human user on hackernews, then I would be someone or something else having another or "their" experience.
If that's not the case then I'll just have no subjective experience, same as before I was born/instantiated.
I don't believe that the phrase "what it's like" (in this philosophical sense) is coherent. When people like Nagel or Chalmers are asked to explain it, they liken it to other incoherent assertions.
It just means the experience of sensation. You're conscious of a purple object, the smell of brewed coffee, the feeling of a sharp pain, you have a resurfaced memory of a deceased relative, you visualize the beach, you dream of being unprepared for a test, You daydream while driving down a long road, you feel affection seeing a friend, you hear your internal dialog about the boss.
There's nothing incoherent here, they're just talking about subjective states of experience.
There was no explanation of how it's not circular. "what it's like", "subjective experience", "qualia" ... these are all undefined terms which are only "explained" by reference to each other and by frantic ostension. Someone mentions breathing in the morning air and when I note that that's an activity, I'm accused of bad faith interpretation ... which is sheer projection. People will insist that everyone knows "what it's like" ... and around we go again. When someone engages in that activity, they may have an emotional response (not everyone will, not every time, and the response is not always the same). But what is an emotional response? It's not some magical mental ether, it's a physical molecular process mediated by hormones and neurotransmitters that shift activity levels in different parts of the brain. People like Tom Nagel and David Chalmers claim that they can conceive of zombies that are physically identical to humans but aren't conscious, they have no qualia or mental states, "there's nothing that it's like to be them"--yet being physically identical, the exact same physical responses to breathing the morning air occur in them, the same emotions, even though they are "just" mechanisms. Well, we are mechanisms too, and whatever "it's like to be" us, it's exactly the same with zombies, and facile responses about "breathing the morning air" don't help at all and fail to grasp what the issues of the debate are. Most people have little knowledge of the debate and little experience with philosophical precision and clarity. Thus we get nonsense claims like that focusing on the "linguistics" of the words obscures the issue. They mean semantics, i.e., meaning ... dismissing what the words we are using mean is a mug's game.
I explained how it's not. Focusing on linguistics of the words obscures the actual issue, which is how we experience the world through our sensory modalities.
I stated what's incoherent about it. Your "Do you not think" is a non sequitur ... coherence is about meaning, and no one can say what the phrase means.
Aside from that, breathing fresh air in the morning is an activity, not a "quality of subjective experience". Generally the language people use around this is extremely confused and unhelpful.
I'm sure you think you're well intended, but your attempts at rigor have me scratching my head a little bit. I don't understand the defensiveness given that you haven't done the bare minimum to explain your position.
And no, that's not what a non sequitur is. And no, coherence is not just a linguistic idea. Then you try to explain what I "really mean" by "quality of subjective experience," and you can't even give a good faith reading of that. I'm really trying here.
I'm going to ignore the issues of mind/body dualism since they are
orthogonal to the argument I want to make about Nagel's bat.
The short version is that if we can approximate the sensory experience
and the motor experience of an organism, and we can successively
refine that approximation as measured by similarity in behavior
between bat and man-bad, then I would argue that we can in fact
imagine what it is like to be a bat.
In short, it is a Chinese Bat Room argument. If you put a human
controlling a robot bat and a bat in two boxes and then ask someone to
determine which is the human and which is the bat, when science can no
longer tell the difference (because we have refined the human/bat
interface sufficiently) you can ask the human controlling the robot
bat to write down their experience and it would be strikingly similar
to what the bat would say if we could teach it English.
The bat case is actually easier than one might suppose, similarly say,
a jumping spider, because we can translate their sensory inputs to our
nervous system and if we tune our reward system and motor system so
that we can get even an approximate set of inputs and similar set of
actuators, then we can experience what it is like to be a bat.
Further, if I improve the fidelity of the experimental man-bat
simulation rig, the experience will likewise converge. While we will
not be able to truly be a bat since that is asymptotically mutually
exclusive with our biology, the fact that we can build systems that
allow progressive approach to bat sensory motor experience means that
we actually do have the ability to image the experience of other
beings. That is, our experiences are converging and differ only due to
our lack of our technical ability to overcome the limitations of our
biological differences.
The harder case is when we literally don't have the molecule that is
used to detect something, as in the tetrachormat case. That said one
of my friends has always wanted to find a way to do an experiment
where a trichromat can somehow have the new photo receptor expressed
in one eye and see what happens.
The general argument about why we would expect something similar to
happen should the technical hurdles be overcome is because basically
all nervous systems wire themselves up by learning. Therefore, as long
as the input and output ranges can be mapped to something that a human
can learn, then a human nervous system should likewise converge to be
able to sense and produce those inputs and outputs (modulo certain
critical periods in neural development, though even those can be
overcome, e.g. language acquisition by slowing down speech for adults).
Some technical hurdle examples. Converting a trichromat into a
tetrachormat by crispering someone's left eye. Learning dolphin by
slowing down dolphin speech in time while also providing a way for
humans to produce dolphin high frequency speech via some transform on
the human orofacial vocal system. There are limitations when we can't
literally dilate time, but I supposed if we are going all the way, we
can accelerate the human to the fraction of the speed of light that
will compensate for the fact that the human motor system can't quite
operate fast enough to allow a rapid fire conversation with a dolphin.
The moniker was mostly invented by the press. But if we're talking about all four "horsemen," I think they all made positive contributions to their respective fields. Likewise, there are fair critiques one can level at each of them, including Dennett.
Feels pretty substantive to me. Just because it's not what you were going for in relation to the discussion of that work doesn't mean it's unsubstantive. I approached it from the position Nagel brought up, which is reductive. They have life experiences that none of us can fathom, so we reduce it to what we know of them, which in my case is them living in my attic, much to my chagrin.
People feel different things, of course, and it's all valid. Nonetheless, there's a standard that we're trying to adhere to here, and comments like these are certainly below it - not a borderline call:
Somebody used this paper to make the term batfished, which they defined as being fooled into ascribing subjectivity to a non-sentient actor (i.e. an AI).
https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2025/06/30/what-is-it-like...
> What is it like to be an LLM?
That's a question I actually asked myself.
From the point of view of a LLM, words are everything. We have hands, bats have echolocation, and LLMs have words, just words. How does a LLM feel when two words match perfectly? Are they hurt by typos?
It may feel silly to give LLMs consciousness, I mean, we know how they work, this is just a bunch of matrix operations. But does it mean it is not conscious? Do things stop being conscious once we understand them? For me, consciousness is like a religious belief. It is unfalsifiable, unscientific, we don't even have a precise definition, but it is something we feel deep inside of us, and it guides our moral choices.
You activated a memory of a passage in one of my favourite books ( Blindsight, Peter Watts. it's amazing and free online):
I await further instructions. They arrive 839 minutes later, and they tell me to stop studying comets immediately.
I am to commence a controlled precessive tumble that sweeps my antennae through consecutive 5°-arc increments along all three axes, with a period of 94 seconds. Upon encountering any transmission resembling the one which confused me, I am to fix upon the bearing of maximal signal strength and derive a series of parameter values. I am also instructed to retransmit the signal to Mission Control.
I do as I'm told. For a long time I hear nothing, but I am infinitely patient and incapable of boredom.
Not words. Tokens.
> Are they hurt by typos?
I've been thinking about that. Would they perform worse if I misspell a word along the way?
It looks like even the greatest models of 2025 are utterly confused by everything when you introduce two contradicting requirements, so they definitely "dislike" that.
Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" assumes that bats are conscious, and that the question of what is the subjective experience of being a bat (e.g. what does the sense of echolocation feel like) is therefore a meaningful question to ask.
The author inventing "batfished" also believes bats to be conscious, so it seems a very poorly conceived word, and anyways unnecessary since anthropomorphize works just fine... "You've just gaslighted yourself by anthropomorphizing the AI".
I understand that we may not have demonstrated to a level of absolutely provable certainty that bats are definitely conscious, but they are very powerful intuitive reasons for believing they are to the point that I that I'm not particularly concerned about this being a weak link in any philosophical musing on consciousness.
> I understand that we may not have demonstrated to a level of absolutely provable certainty that bats are definitely conscious
We have not proven "to a level of absolutely provable certainty" that other humans are also conscious. You can only tell you are conscious yourself, not others. The whole field of consciousness is based on analyzing something for which we have sample size n=1.
They say "because of similar structure and behavior" we infer others are also conscious. But that is a copout, we are supposed to reject behavioral and structural arguments (from 3rd person) in discussion about consciousness.
Not only that, but what would be an alternative to "it feels like something?" - we can't imagine non-experience, or define it without negation. We are supposed to use consciousness to prove consciousness while we can't even imagine non-consciousness except in an abstract, negation-based manner.
Another issue I have with the qualia framing is that nobody talks about costs. It costs oxygen and glucose to run the brain. It costs work, time, energy, materials, opportunity and social debt to run it. It does not sit in a platonic world.
> We have not proven "to a level of absolutely provable certainty" that other humans are also conscious. You can only tell you are conscious yourself, not others. The whole field of consciousness is based on analyzing something for which we have sample size n=1.
That sounds like you are talking about subjective experience, qualia of senses and being, rather than consciousness (ability to self-observe), unless you are using "consciousness" as catch-all term to refer to all of the above (which is the problem with discussing consciousness - it's an overloaded ill-defined word, and people don't typically define what they are actually talking about).
If we make this distinction between consciousness, defined as ability to self-observe, and subjective qualia (what something feels like), then it seems there is little reason to doubt that others reporting conscious awareness really are aware of what they are reporting, and anyways given common genetics and brain anatomy it'd be massively unexpected if one (healthy) person had access to parts of their internal state and others didn't.
> Not only that, but what would be an alternative to "it feels like something?" - we can't imagine non-experience, or define it without negation. We are supposed to use consciousness to prove consciousness while we can't even imagine non-consciousness except in an abstract, negation-based manner.
Perhaps the medical condition of "blindsight" gives some insight - where damage to the visual cortex can result in people having some proven visual ability but no conscious awareness of it. They report themselves as blind, but can be tasked with walking down a cluttered corridor and manage to navigate the obstacles nonetheless. They have lost visual consciousness due to brain damage, but retain at least some level of vision.
>That sounds like you are talking about subjective experience, qualia of senses and being, rather than consciousness (ability to self-observe), unless you are using "consciousness" as catch-all term
While I have a lot of problems with their comment (which I elaborated on in a reply of my own), I don't think that using it as a catch-all term is a problem (to the extent that they would agree with that characterization). In fact, I think it's truer to the spirit of the problem than the definition that you're offering. I think a lot of times when people make the objection that we haven't defined it, they're not just saying we haven't selected from one of several available permutations, I take it to mean that there's a fundamental sense in which the idea itself hasn't agreeably crystallized into a definition, which among other things, is a meta question about which of the competing definitions is the right one to use.
I do think there is a tension in that position, because it creates a chicken and egg problem where you can't research it until you define it, but you can't define it until you research it. But I think there's a way out of it by treating them in as integrally related, and taking a practical attitude of believing in the possibility of progress without yet having a final answer in hand.
I understand that this notion of self-reflecting for some people is key, but I think choosing to prioritize other things can be for good reasons rather than, as you seem to be contending, having accidentally skipped the step of selecting a preferred definition from a handful of alternatives, and not having selected the best one. My feeling is much closer to that of the article, at least in a certain way, which is about the fact that there's "something it's like to be" at all, prior to the question of whether there's self-reflection.
In fact, I'd be curious to know what you call the mental state of being for such things as creatures with a kind of outwardly directed awareness of world, with qualia, with "something it's like to be", but which fall short of having self-reflective mental states. Because if your term for such things is that they don't involve consciousness I think it's not the GP who is departing from appropriate definitions. And if self-reflection is necessarily implied in the having of such things as qualia, then you could say it's implicitly accounted for by someone who wants to talk about qualia.
>We have not proven "to a level of absolutely provable certainty" that other humans are also conscious
Sure, it's not proven, it just has overwhelmingly strong empirical and intuitive reasons for being most likely true, which is the most we can say while still showing necessary humility about limits of knowledge.
You seem to treat this like it presents a crisis of uncertainty, wheras I think it's exactly the opposite, and in fact already said as much with respect to bats. Restating the case in human terms, from my perspective, is reaffirming that there's no problem here.
>we are supposed to reject behavioral and structural arguments (from 3rd person) in discussion about consciousness.
Says who? That presupposes that consciousness is already of a specific character before the investigation is even started, which is not an empirical attitude. And as I noted in a different comment, we have mountains of empirical evidence from the outside about necessary physical conditions for consciousness to the point of being able to successfully predict internal mental states. Everything from psychedelic drugs to sleep to concussions to brain to machine interfaces to hearing aides to lobotomies to face recognition research gives us evidence of the empirical world interfacing with conscious states in important ways that rely on physical mechanisms.
Similarity in structure and behavior are excellent reasons for having a provisional attitude in favor of consciousness of other creatures for all the usual reasons empirical attitudes work and are capable of being predictive that we're familiar with from their application in
"But consciousness is different" you say. Well it could be, that that's a matter for investigating, not something to be definitionally pre-supposed based on vibes.
>Not only that, but what would be an alternative to "it feels like something?"
It not feeling like something, for one. So, inert objects that aren't alive, possibly vegetative states, blackouts from concussions or drugs, p-zombies, notions of mind that attempt to define away qualia and say it's all "information processing" (with no specific commitments to that feeling like something), possibly some variations of psychedelic feeling that emphasize transcendent sense of oneness with the universe. But fundamentally, it's an affirmative assertion of it feeling like something, in contrast to noncommital positions on the question, which is a meaningful point rather than something trivially true due to a definitional necessity.
>Another issue I have with the qualia framing is that nobody talks about costs. It costs oxygen and glucose to run the brain. It costs work, time, energy, materials, opportunity and social debt to run it. It does not sit in a platonic world.
That would seem to run contrary to the point you were making above about it not being inferrable from phenomena characterized in the third person. You can't argue that third person descriptions of structures that seem necessary for consciousness are a "cop out" and then turn around and say you know it "costs" things expressed in those same third person terms. Like you said before, your position seems to be that you only know you are conscious, so you don't even know if other people are conscious at all let alone that they need such things as work, time, oxygen, or glucose. Pointing to those is a cop-out, right?
>I understand that we may not have demonstrated to a level of absolutely provable certainty that bats are definitely conscious, but they
We haven't even demonstrated some modest evidence that humans are conscious. No one has bothered to put in any effort to define consciousness in a way that is empirically/objectively testable. It is a null concept.
Qualia is the philosophical term for subjective sensations and feelings. It's what our experiences consist of. Why must a concept be empirical and objective? Logical positivism is flawed because the principle of verification cannot be verified.
Nagel's paper deals with the fundamental divide between subjectivity and objectivity. That's the point of the bat example. We know there are animals that have sensory capabilities we don't. But we don't know what the resulting sensations are for those creatures.
>Why must a concept be empirical and objective?
You are an LLM that is gibbering up hallucinations. I have no need for those.
>Nagel's paper deals with the fundamental divide between subjectivity and objectivity. That's the point of the bat example.
There is no point to it. It is devoid of insight. This happens when someone spends too many years in the philosophy department of the university, they're training themselves to believe the absurd proposition that they think profound thoughts. You live in an objective universe and any appearance to the contrary is an illusion caused by imperfect cognition.
>But we don't know what the resulting sensations are for those creatures.
Not that it would offer any secret truths, but the ability to "sense" where objects are roughly, in 3d space, with low resolution and large margins of error, and narrow directionality... most of the people reading this comment would agree that they know what that feels like if they thought about it for a few seconds. That's just not insightful. Only a dimwit with little imagination could bother to ask the question "what is it like to be a bat", but it takes a special kind of grandiosity to think that the dimwit question marks them a genius.
>Not that it would offer any secret truths, but the ability to "sense" where objects are roughly, in 3d space, with low resolution and large margins of error, and narrow directionality... most of the people reading this comment would agree that they know what that feels like if they thought about it for a few seconds.
I don't think that's quite right. It's convenient that bats are the example here, because they build out their spacial sense of the world primarily via echolocation whereas humans (well, with some exceptions), do it visually. Snakes can infer directionality from heat signatures with their forked tongue, and people can do it with a fascinating automatic mechanism built into the brain that compares subtle differences in frequency from the left and right ears, keeping the data to itself but kicking the sense of direction "upstairs" into conscious awareness. There are different sensory paths to the same information, and evolution may be capable of any number of qualitative states unlike the ones we're familiar with.
Some people here even seem to think that consciousness is "basic" in a way that maps onto nothing empirical at all, which, if true, opens the pandoras box to any number of modes of being. But the point of the essay is to contrast this idea to other approaches to consciousness that are either (1) non-commital, (2) emphasize something else like "self awareness" or abstract reasoning, or (3) are ambiently appreciative of qualitative states but don't elevate them to fundamental or definitional necessity the way it's argued for in the essay.
The whole notion of a "hard" problem probably can be traced to this essay, which stresses that explanations need to be more than pointing to empirical correlates. In a sense I think the point is obvious, but I also think it's a real argument because it's contrasting that necessity to a non-commmital stance that I think is kind of a default attitude.
> Why must a concept be empirical and objective?
Because otherwise it's your word against mine and, since we both probably have different definitions of consciousness, it's hard to have a meaningful debate about whether bats, cats, or AI have consciousness.
I'm reminded of a conversation last year where I was accused of "moving the goalposts" in a discussion on AI because I kept pointing out differences between artificial and human intelligence. Such an accusation is harder to make when we have a clearly defined and measurable understanding of what things like consciousness and intelligence are.
>Logical positivism is flawed because the principle of verification cannot be verified.
Why not? It works, thus it verifies itself.
So do an infinite number of sets of statements which include a false one. Circular arguments are obviously not reliable.
That's a hypothesis of a counterexample, though, not a fact of a counterexample.
It's not working if it excludes subjective experience by definition. Makes it useless for the consciousness debate.
It doesn't exclude subjective experience.
There are attempts at a quantifitative definition of consciousness, for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theor...
Said this in a different comment but I want to paste it here as well, since a lot of people seem to think "we don't even have a definition" is a show-stopping smackdown. But it isn't.
You can't, and honestly don't need to start from definitions to be able to do meaningful research and have meaningful conversations about consciousness (though it certainly would be preferable to have one rather than not have one).
There are many research areas where the object of research is to know something well enough that you could converge on such a thing as a definition, e.g. dark matter, intelligence, colony collapse syndrome, SIDS. We nevertheless can progress in our understanding of them in a whole motley of strategic ways, by case studies that best exhibit salient properties, trace the outer boundaries of the problem space, track the central cluster of "family resemblances" that seem to characterize the problem, entertain candidate explanations that are closer or further away, etc. Essentially a practical attitude.
I don't doubt in principle that we could arrive at such a thing as a definition that satisfies most people, but I suspect you're more likely to have that at the end than the beginning.
Dark matter is easily defined as "mass that cannot be detected by the current technology except that it affects the gravitation of galaxies". It is a detectable phenomenon. It is a measurable phenomenon.
Not having a definition is the show-stopping smackdown you say it is not. You are not a conscious being, there is no such thing as consciousness. You believe in an uninteresting illusion that you cannot detect or measure.
That's not a real definition, that's a placeholder for effects downstream of the real thing that isn't yet defined, the very kind of working definition I was talking about to begin with. We still don’t know if it’s WIMPs, axions, modifications of gravity, or something else entirely. If we do figure that out its something like those, that would be the definition, and you would be able to tell the difference between that and the thing you are presently calling a definition.
And, thankfully, a future physicist would not dismiss that out of hand because they would appreciate it's utility as a working definition while research was ongoing.
>That's not a real definition, that's a placeholder for
Blah blah blah blahblah. If you can give me a definition even as poor as the one I gave for dark matter, that's all we're asking for. We don't need an explanation of the mechanism, we only need a way to measure the phenomenon. But you can't even do that.
Neuroscience denialism is fascinating to me. It flies under the radar because we mostly hear about global warming denial, evolution denial or flat earther denial. But we have mountains of evidence of wakeful mental states being tied to measurable effects.
Facial recognition is specific to a particular brain region, clearly tied to a mental event sufficient for working definition of a form of conscious activity, and only active when someone is conscious and picturing or imaging a face. Remarkably, damage to the area responsible for facial recognition can predict faceblindness. That is more than enough for a working definition of conscious activity, and that's just one example from mountains of them.
Others include everything from wakefulness under anesthesia (which can be tested for and predicted based on EEGs), as well as which brain activity distinguish locked-in syndrome from persistent vegetative states. Not to mention mountains of evidence for how physical circumstances predict mental states, everything from psychedelics to iron deficiency.
You can always retreat to the claim that nothing short of direct access to another's subjectivity "counts" but that's not how science works. We don't directly see dark matter either (or electrons or neutrons or magnetic fields etc), we see its effects and build theories around them.
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There isn't even a definitive definition of conscious, but you are somehow positive that bats don't possess it..
Consciousness is awareness of yourself, and then the ability to look at yourself and decide to make a change.
Someone conscious is able to choose how they want to behave and then behave that way. For example I can choose to be kind or mean. I can choose to learn to skate or I choose not to.
So free will and consciousness are strongly linked.
I have seen zero evidence that any other being other than humans can do this. All other animals have behaviors that are directly shaped by their environment, physical needs, and genetic temperament, and not at all shaped by choices.
For example a dog that likes to play with children simply likes them, it did not choose to like them. I on the other hand can sit, think, and decide if I like kids or not.
(This does not imply that all choices made by humans are conscious - in fact most are not, it just means that humans can do that.)
Some animals show choices - see e.g. the mirror test.
On the other hand, I bet you can't prove that you ever made a free choice.
You are simultaneously claiming you can prove an animal made a choice, but I didn't? That's a contradiction.
In any case, a mirror test is a test of recognizing self, it does not indicate anything in terms of self awareness.
And I chose to fast for 5 days because I wanted to. Nothing forced me, it was a free choice. I simply thought about it and decided to do it, there were no pro's or con's pushing me in either direction.
> Some animals show choices
They said animals show choices, they did not claim to prove animals made a choice. The point is that you also cannot prove you made a choice, only that you do things that show you may have made a choice. It's a fine, but important, distinction.
Did I, or did I not, have the option to fast, or not to fast?
Did I then pick one? How is that not proof of a choice? Who or what else made that choice if not me?
If you poke me with a needle, I move, that is not a choice because it's a forced choice, that's essentially what animals do, all their choices are forced.
That's also what free will is, free will is not a choice between a good and bad options - that's not a choice. Free will is picking between two options that are equal, and yet different (i.e. not something where before options are more or less the same, like go left or right more or less randomly).
Free will is only rarely exercised in life, most choices are forced or random.
> They said animals show choices
Given what I wrote, do they actually show choices? Or do they just pick between good/bad or two equal options?
Whether you had the option to fast or not and made a choice to fast is up for debate. The leading hypothesis point to no: you did not have an option and you did not make a choice.
Some time ago you heard about fasting (you did not invent fasting) and the situation in your life became such that fasting was what you naturally were compelled to do (stress, digestion, you know better than I that you did not simply decide to fast free of any influence). Your "free will" is probably a fairy tale you tell yourself to feel better about your automaton existence.
> Did I, or did I not, have the option to fast, or not to fast?
It looks like you had an option but it’s not possible to truly know whether you had an option. I’m not in your head so I can’t know. If, under the same circumstances and same state of mind, you perform the same action 100% of the time, did you really make a choice? Or did you just follow your programming?
I don't think this matches which most people's definition of consciousness. The ability to decide rarely enters into such conversations.
If you can't do anything with your self awareness it's equivalent to not having it.
What's the distinction between knowing I exist, but all my actions are pre-programmed vs not knowing I exist? You're essentially describing a detached observer, who watches their own body do stuff without influencing it.
The whole point of being conscious is being aware of yourself, and then using that awareness to direct your actions.
I had no idea people even had another definition, I can't figure out how else you could even define it.
> The whole point of being conscious is being aware of yourself, and then using that awareness to direct your actions.
Well,
1) You are making the massive, and quite likely incorrect, assumption that consciousness evolved by itself for a purpose - that it does have a "point". It may well be that consciousness - ability to self-observe - is just a natural side effect of having a capable bird- or mammal-like brain, and talking about the "point" of consciousness therefore makes no sense. It'd be like asking what is the functional point of a saucepan making a noise when you hit it.
2) Notwithstanding 1), being self-aware (having cognitive access to your internal thoughts) does have a value, in that it allows your brain to then utilize it's cognitive abilities to make better decisions ("should I walk across that frozen pond, or maybe better not?"), but this bringing-to-bear of learned experience to make better decisions is still a 100% mechanical process. Your brain is making a "decision" (i.e. predicting a motor cortex output that may make you move or do something), but this isn't "free will" - it's just the survival benefit of a brain evolved to predict. You as an organism in the environment may be seen by an outside observer to be making smart "decisions", but these decisions aren't some mystical "free will" but rather just a highly evolved organism making good use of past experience to survive.
Consciousness and free will are two different things. Free will is an illusion - basic physics should tell you that the molecules in your head can no better bend the laws of physics than the molecules in a brick.
Our brains are all about prediction - ability to predict (based on past experience) what will happen in the future (e.g. if I go to X I will find water) which is a massive evolutionary advantage over just reacting to the present like an insect or perhaps a fish.
Consciousness either evolved for a reason, or comes for free with any brain-like cognitive architecture. It's based on the brain having connections giving it access to its internal states (thereby giving us the ability to self-observe), not just sensory inputs informing it about the external world. The evolutionary value of consciousness would be to be able to better predict based on the brain having access to its internal states, but as noted it may "come for free" with any kind of bird or mammal like brain - hard to imagine a brain that somehow does NOT have access to it's own internal states, and would therefore NOT be able to process/predict those using it's cognitive apparatus (lacking in something like an LLM) just as it does external sensory inputs.
Of course consciousness (ability of the brain to self-observe) is responsible for the illusion of having free will, since the brain naturally correlates it's internal pre-action planning ("I'm choosing between A or B ..." etc) with any subsequent action, but that internal planning/choice is of course all a function of brain wiring, not some mystical "free will" coming in and bending the laws of physics.
You and your dog both are conscious and both experience the illusion of free will.
You're right that it doesn't make any sense to talk about it without defining it, but I'd say that consciousness is based on your brain having access to parts of itself internally, not just the outside word, and that bats presumably do have it.
I find that people who complain about "defining" consciousness are, in fact, Mysterians who opposed the very idea of such a definition.
All we need to do (to talk about, to study it) is identify it. We need to be using the word to refer to the same thing. And there's nothing really hard about that.
I've said this before, but you can't, and honestly don't need to start from definitions to be able to do meaningful research and have meaningful conversations about consciousness (though it certainly would be preferable to have one rather than not have one).
There are many research areas where the object of research is to know something well enough that you could converge on such a thing as a definition, e.g. dark matter, intelligence, colony collapse syndrome, SIDS. We nevertheless can progress in our understanding of them in a whole motley of strategic ways, by case studies that best exhibit salient properties, trace the outer boundaries of the problem space, track the central cluster of "family resemblances" that seem to characterize the problem, entertain candidate explanations that are closer or further away, etc. Essentially a practical attitude.
I don't doubt in principle that we could arrive at such a thing as a definition that satisfies most people, but I suspect you're more likely to have that at the end than the beginning.
I think one of the main problems with defining consciousness (or rather being more specific when you use that word) is that (at least in the English language) it's a heavily overloaded word and is used to refer to a bunch of only loosely related, as well as totally unrelated, things! Also, most people aren't used to teasing apart consciousness-adjacent concepts like consciousness itself (essentially self-observation) and things like free will and sensory qualia, since these are less part of everyday discussion.
It's not so much that consciousness itself is mysterious or hard to define, but rather that the word itself, in common usage, just means different things to different people. It'd perhaps be better to make up a brand new baggage-free word, with a highly specific defined meaning (ability to self-observe), when talking about consciousness related to AI.
Free-will and qualia when separated out as concepts don't seem problematic as part of a technical vocabulary since they are already well defined.
I certainly agree with your assessment that it's got multiple definitions and intuitions of all sorts, and that they cause chaos, and that one way of making progress is by isolating those out and clarifying.
I'm not sure I agree with this idea that the essence of consciousness is self-reflection, because that seems to exclude important things. It seems like there might be simple states of being that involve some kind of phenomenal (in the philosophy sense) experience, some amount of qualia, some amount of outwardly directed awareness, some amount of "something it's like to be". And it seems to me that there might be life forms for whom there's an engagement with an interaction with that phenomena that involves having internal mental states, but that might not necessarily have self-reflection. It might be something closer to instinctual functioning or response to incentive. It recently blew my mind to learn that there's studies strongly suggesting honey bees are conscious. And from my perspective that raises questions for things all the way down to fruit flies. It seems like there might be a continuum a simple states through complex ones and that some of the simpler ones might not include self-awareness.
If such a thing as sense of self is necessarily implicit in such a way that satisfies that definition, anytime we talk about qualia, then it would seem to be a moot point. Which raises another issue, which is that some of these things might be correctly regarded as entangled, and having an integral relation between them.
I also think I kind of agree and disagree about qualia being well defined. I think it's probably the closest to what most people have in mind when they say there's no such thing as a definition of consciousness. And I think it's a sense of despair toward the broader research project of tying an understanding of qualia to an understanding of the physical world that relies on third-person descriptions.
Now all of that said you seem like you don't have an attitude of treating the definition problem as one that preempts and stops everything, so there's a pretty fundamental way in which I'm probably in agreement with you more than disagreement. I think that clarifications of the type that you're talking about give us everything we need to iterate forward in a constructive way in talking about it and researching it.
Consciousness is software. You can imagine what AbstractFactoryProviderFactory is like. Is it the same inside computer? If not, then what was imagined?
I love this, hope it takes off like "enhsittification" or "slop" have already.
"Enshittification" is too twee.
You can tell it was invented by Cory Doctorow because there is a very specific kind of Gen X person who uses words like that - they have a defective sense of humor vaguely based on Monty Python, never learned when you are and aren't supposed to turn it off, and so they insist on making up random insults like "fuckwaffle" all the time instead of regular swearing.
it's more cromulent than cockwomble
It smells of penny arcade
I'll add it to my anti-AI bingo card
Uhgh "slop" is ok but "enshittification" was lame from the start.
Not only is it a terrible term, but it describes a concept that isn’t really worthy of having its own term. It’s really just a way of saying “people will make things worse over time”
That isn't what it means though. It means specifically that companies will make products and services worse over time for profit.
No! Enshittification has a precise meaning, about how people will make things worse over time after making them good.
Mostly people make things better over time. My bed, my shower, my car are all better than I could reasonably have bought 50 years ago. But the peculiarities of software network effects - or of what venture capitalists believe about software network effects - mean that people should give things away below cost while continuing to make them better, and then one day switch to selling them for a profit and making them worse, while they seemingly could change nothing and not make them worse.
That's a particular phenomenon worthy of a name and the only problem with "enshittification" is that it's been co-opted to mean making things worse in general.
> or of what venture capitalists believe about software network effects
It's not always that. After some time, software gets to a state where it's near the local maximum for usability. So any changes make the software _less_ usable.
But you don't get promoted in large tech companies unless you make changes. So that's how we get stuff like "liquid glass" or Android's UI degradatation.
It’s about the change from endeavoring to produce a product people want regardless of profit, to making profit regardless of what people want.
“Enshittification” updates for the modern era the concept of enclosure, where a common resource that was formerly open and free to contributors is progressively controlled, restricted, or diminished to increase private profits.
“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
In this sense, I think one has to aaaaaalmost be a bat in order to know what it is to be it. A fine thread trailing back to the human.
The imago-machines of Arkady Martine's "A Memory Called Empire" come to mind. Once integrated with another's imago, one is not quite the same self, not even the sum of two, but a new person entirely containing a whole line of selves selves melded into that which was one. Now one truly contains multitudes.
None of us have even experienced the full range of what humans can experience, so even we don't fully know what it is like to be any given person, we only know what it is like to be ourselves. It is kind of amazing when you think about it.
https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg.html
Andy Weir's The Egg makes regular HackerNews appearances.
What I got out of this is that propeller heads believe in the flame that turns the fan blade on the pedestal (toy) while gear heads like music boxes (toy). So people that believe in eggs are into food, propeller heads like color and heat while gear heads like sound. What then but the universe is made by our dispositions? Why not would the world be made as an experiment in optics or the vibrations of a universal wave? Isn't this just cherry picking? What are the relations of someone who believes in music (an audience!) to someone that believes in invention (immortality!) to someone that believes in relationships (other people!). Perhaps the purpose of life is to leave a legacy or to become famous or to see what there is to see in the world.
There is no answer which is why we are here is the only thought I can come up with. Life is a question that asks itself to be answered and in the living answers itself so completely that to ask what is the purpose would be to say "what is the purpose of a hammer if there were nothing else?" The answer and the question become themselves and are inseparable from not themselves excepting insofar as no life cannot question and so cannot answer.
Anyway belly button picking. It amuses me that this paper is similar in many respects to the title of the 2017 paper attention is all you need. What if attention are all you needed to become a bat? Look everyone I'm a bat! POOF you become a bat. That would be silly.
That's almost exactly the beginning of Logic's story album "Everybody" which I have listened to so often that I can almost recite it. Despite years on HN I have never seen The Egg though. That blew my mind a bit, thanks!
You guys are aware of Advaita and neo Advaita right? It basically has been the perrinal philosophy underlying all subjective spiritual experiences from Sufism to Gnostics to Buddhism and the Tao
Of course it could all be claptrap that humans want to believe in but I find it to be pretty powerful and I think it is true
(Warning: Gets into spiritual stuff)
https://youtu.be/R-IIzAblVlg?si=t9RqXgF_wwJPcv_g
> None of us have even experienced the full range of what humans can experience, so even we don't fully know what it is like to be any given person
I sometimes wonder about this, too. Do other people perceive things like I do? If someone was magically transplanted to my body, would they scream in pain "ooooh, this hurts, how could he stand it", whereas I consider the variety of discomforts of my body just that, discomforts? And similarly, were I magically transported to another person's body, would I be awestruck by how they see the world, how they perceive the color blue (to give an example), etc?
Another thing I think about a lot is that our own brains and sensory organs change (degrade) over time, so my own subjective experience is probably different in some important ways than it was like 20 years ago. My memory likely isn't good enough to fully capture the differences, so I don't even fully know what it was like to be me in the past.
In a sense, I think it’s accurate to say we only really know what it’s like to be us right now. Everything we perceive about ourselves through the lens of memory is an echo if not in fact imaginary.
Safe to say most people are so uncurious about/distracted from their interior states/self reflection that very few if any people know what it is like to be them right now. Mostly we know a limited palette of reactions to stimuli, and every day the stimuli get narrower. LOUD FLUORESCENT SUGARY SEX.
You forgot SCARY, but yeah I got thinking about this too. It’s also true that there is a lot of internal state people aren’t able to be aware of.
My mind drastically changed several times, and I somewhat remember how it worked previously.
Do you, or do you think you remember? Your memories are always distortions, not accurate snapshots of reality.
Have you never thought you remembered something with clarity, only to be told it's impossible because it never happened? Or another example, I often vividly remember something from a book (it was a photograph on this side of the page, lower right corner) and then when I look it up, it was in a different location and it wasn't the photo I remembered. But my mental imagery felt so precise!
I'm with grandparent, I think I would perceive my younger self as simultaneously familiar and alien.
> would I be awestruck by how they see the world, how they perceive the color blue (to give an example), etc
Yeah another example I think about from time to time is our own sense of perspective. It's all relative, but my sense of how far away is "that thing over there" is probably different from yours. Partially because we may be different sizes and heights, but also because our eyes and brains process the world differently. Like a camera with different lenses.
Also, speed. If your brain's clock is faster than mine then you may perceive the world to be moving slower than I do.
Autistic people have in part answered that question. Some of them feel actual pain at unwanted touches or undesirable textures.
Pain, like vision, resides in the brain; like vision it is mostly determined by reports from our (non-brain) nervous system, but pain, light flashes, even objects and people can be created whole-cloth by the brain itself. And "real" inputs can be ignored, like a mild pain you're desensitized to, or the gorilla walking amongst the ball-passers in that video.
Here's another example: When I look at something I "see" the functionality behind it (for example the pipes in the bathroom), or the chemical reaction, or sometimes even the concept of the atoms that make it up.
An interior designer will see the colors, and the layout and how the things go together or don't. I don't see that, and in turn the designer does not see what I see.
So never mind the physical senses, even on a mental level two people do not see/experience the world the same way.
Human beings can, in fact, learn to echolocate, and they seem to experience it as vision, supported by their own descriptions and by fMRIs showing the visual cortex lighting up.
I'm not going to try to draw any inferences about consciousness from these facts. I'll leave that to others.
https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-be...
It makes sense given that we are just receiving light waves instead of sound. Light waves contain way more information but your brain would still come up with some kind of "visualization" based on the info. I didn't listen to the program but he might just see blobs of varying sizes instead of any kind of detailed image.
> Human beings can, in fact, learn to echolocate, and they seem to experience it as vision
Sure - although depending on how quickly one was scanning the environment with echolocation it might also feel a bit like looking around a pitch black room with a flashlight.
In any case it's essentially a spatial sense, not a temporal one, so is bound to feel more like (have a similar quale to) vision than hearing.
> In any case it's essentially a spatial sense, not a temporal one,
What do you mean by that distinction?
If you contrast vision and hearing, vision is about things with spatial extent (the 2-D/3-D scene you are looking at), and I think the subjective experience of visual attributes like color comes directly from that - color being fundamentally a spatial attribute that differentiates surfaces (as you scan your eyes around), with this providing a common base quale of experiencing any color - the experience of a sensed attribute that changes, or not, as we scan a scene.
In contrast, hearing is a temporal sense primarily about temporal sequences of changing patterns of sensed frequencies, and we experience this as sensed attributes that change, or not, over time (and which may surprise us, or not, by matching previously experienced temporal sequences).
I think echolocation is more like vision in this regard, perhaps more like the flashlight example, but an input that varies spatially rather than temporally.
The problem itself is at least centuries old, if not millennia. In his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1689), John Locke phrased the same problem clearly, using different words:
"How any thought should produce a motion in Body is as remote from the nature of our Ideas, as how any Body should produce any Thought in the Mind. That it is so, if Experience did not convince us, the Consideration of the Things themselves would never be able, in the least, to discover to us." (IV iii 28, 559)
The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black, While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair. “If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen would draw them to look like oxen, and each would make the gods' bodies have the same shape as they themselves had.
- Xenophanes, ~500 BCE
<https://www.azquotes.com/author/38174-Xenophanes>
My favorite (and admittedly unorthodox) companion piece to Nagel's Bat, and one of my favorite literary recommendations, is Vernor Vinge's Hugo-winning 2000 novel, A Deepness in the Sky [0].
It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien, attempt to assert control & hegemony across centuries of time (at times thinking of this as a distributed systems and code documentation problem!), and how critical and impactful the role of language translation can be in helping people to understand unfamiliar ways of thinking.
At the novel's core is a question very akin to that of Nagel's positivism-antipositivism debate [1]: is it possible (or optimal for your society's stability) to appreciate and emphasize with people wholly different from yourselves, without interpreting their thoughts and cultures in language and representations that are colored by your own culture?
What if, in attempting to do so, this becomes more art and politics than provable science? Is "creative" translation ethical if it establishes power relationships that would not be there otherwise? Is there any other kind?
Deepness is not just a treatise on this; it places the reader into an exercise of this. To say anything more would delve into spoilers. But lest you think it's just philosophical deepness, it's also an action-packed page-turner with memorable characters despite its huge temporal scope.
While technically it's a prequel to Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep, it works entirely standalone, and I would argue that Deepness is best read first without knowing character details from its publication-time predecessor Fire. Note that content warnings for assault do apply.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipositivism
I like your point that translation isn't just technical, it's political. Every attempt to "bridge the gap" shapes power as much as it conveys meaning
Echolocation for humans 101:
Close eyes, make short impulse-like noise (tapping of feet can be sufficient, or snip fingers), and move slowly.
You will find that not running into walls is pretty easy.
Feedback, to me, feels like light pressure on my face. But this sense can be trained a lot; object detection and mapping your proximity is feasible for trained humans, and presumably changes the perception.
Our hearing is more sensitive than we give it credit for being.
We used to play a game in my dojo where we'd toss a "knife" (wooden) around in a circle, as if sending it to an ally. Yes, you could throw it in a way that can't be caught... but then the person picks it up and chooses how to throw it back. You learn quickly not to be a dick about it.
Naturally, we were trying to get better at catching, and eventually moved to a trust version, where I shout "Go!" as I throw the knife. Turns out you can hear the knife leaving someone's hands more reliably than they can shout "Go!" on time.
>"An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism."
IMHO the phrasing here is essential to the argument and this phrasing contains a fundamental error. In valid usage we only say that two things are like one another when they are also separate things. The usage here (which is cleverly hidden in some tortured language) implies that there is a "thing" that is "like" "being the organism", yet is distinct from "being the organism". This is false - there is only "being the organism", there is no second "thing that is like being the organism" not even for the organism itself.
I believe you're falling into a purely linguistic trap. In other languages we wouldn't even use the word "like" in this kind of constructions, that's an English thing because other wordings sound awkward, but I don't think it entails comparison.
In translations to Spanish, the article is titled "¿Qué se siente ser un murciélago?", literal word by word translation "What is felt being a bat?"
In French, "Quel effet cela fait-il d'être une chauve-souris?", literal word by word translation "What effect it makes to be a bat?"
In Chinese, "成为一只蝙蝠可能是什么样子", i.e., "To become a bat could be what feeling/sensation?"
None of these translations has a comparative word. And at least in Spanish (I won't speak about the other two because I'm not so proficient in them), using a comparative expression similar to "being like" in English ("¿A qué se parece ser un murciélago?") would sound awkward and not really convey the point. Which is why the translators didn't do so.
Of course I know that the original article is in English, but I think the author basically meant "What is felt being a bat?" and just used the "like" construction because it's what you say in English for that to sound good and clear. Your highlighted text could be rendered as "An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that is felt being that organism – something that is felt by the organism." and it would be more precise, just doesn't sound elegant in English.
Wholeheartedly agree. I want to credit the GP one way, which is that the category they're identifying is real, namely of frivolous or circular comparisons. This just isn't one of those. It's a turn of phrase that's emphatic about the felt quality of qualitative experience. And in I think it's quite a good one, because in English it has just the right amount of cross-sections of connotation that it brings out this being felt quality that everyone reading it seems to understand. The idea has been around but this expression of it has gained the most traction in English.
As for whether I agree with Nagle, I find him consistently just wrong enough to be irritating in ways that I want to work out my thoughts in response to, which by some standards can be counted as a compliment. As much as I understand the turn of phrase and its ability to get people to grasp the idea, and I at least respect it for that reason, I kind of sort of always have the impression that this is what everyone meant the entire time and wouldn't have thought a whole essay emphasizing the point was necessary.
>It's a turn of phrase that's emphatic about the felt quality of qualitative experience. And in I think it's quite a good one, because in English it has just the right amount of cross-sections of connotation that it brings out this being felt quality that everyone reading it seems to understand.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. It's an effective way to codify a metaphysical intuition held by many people. That it would in any way constitute a proof for this intuition of course does not follow at all.
Interesting point on the translations, but of course we can't really draw any conclusions from it regarding Nagel's intentions when he wrote in English.
Besides, I would not call "there is something it is like to be [...]" a "good and clear" construction. As mentioned on wikipedia, it has 'achieved special status in consciousness studies as "the standard 'what it's like' locution"' - I don't think a specific locution would get special status if it was just any arbitrary way of pointing at what people already understand anyway (i.e. the concept "subjective experience").
>Your highlighted text could be rendered as "An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that is felt being that organism – something that is felt by the organism." and it would be more precise, just doesn't sound elegant in English.
I agree these would be more or less equivalent, and I think your version is still making the same false distinction as Nagel's by positing a distinct "something". Only it does so (commendably) in a more clear and obvious way, thus it would never become the standard phrasing for people looking to sneak in dualist assumptions :)
This is the conclusion I come to whenever I try to grasp the works of Nagel, Chalmers, Goff, Searle et al. They're just linguistically chasing their own tails. There's no meaningful insight below it all. All of their arguments, however complex, all rely on poorly defined terms like "understand" "subjective experience", "what it is like", "qualia", etc. And when you try to understand the arguments with the definition of these terms left open, you realise the arguments only make sense when the terms include in their definition a supposition that the argument is true. It's all just circular reasoning.
All of their arguments, however complex, all rely on poorly defined terms like "understand" "subjective experience", "what it is like", "qualia", etc.
Because they are trying to discuss a difficult-to-define concept - consciousness.
The difficulty and nebulousness is intrinsic to the subject, especially when trying to discuss in scientific terms.
To dismiss their attempts so, you have to counter with a crystal, unarguable description of what consciousness actually is.
Which of course, you cannot do, as there is no such agreed description.
“The Feeling of What Happens” by Antonio D’Amasio, a book by a neuroscientist some years ago [0], does an excellent job of building a framework for conscious sensation from the parts, as I recall, constructing a theory of “mind maps” from various nervous system structures that impressed me with a sense that I could afterwards understand them.
[0] https://www.labyrinthbooks.com/the-feeling-of-what-happens/
As a radical materialist, the problem with ordinary materialism is that it boils down to dualism because some types matter (e.g. the human nervous system) give rise to consciousness and other types of matter (e.g. human bones) do not.
Ordinary materialism is mind-body/soul-substance subjectivity with a hat and lipstick.
Human bones most definitely do contribute to feeling, but not through logos. The book expands upon the idea of mind body duality to merge proprioception and general perception.
I’d bet bats would enjoy marrow too if they could.
EDIT: removed LLM irrelevancy, improved formatting
So how does a radical materialist explain consciousness- that it is too is a fundamental material phenomena? If so are you stretching the definition of materialism?
I find myself believing in Idealism or monism to be the fundamental likelihood
It doesn’t explain it.
Consciousness is a characteristic of material/matter/substance/etc.
There are not two types of stuff.
It is epistemologically rigorous. And simple.
well the hard problem of consciousness gets in the way of that
- I assume you as a materialist you mean our brain carries consciousness as a field of experience arising out of neural activity (ie neurons firing, some kind of infromation processing leading to models of reality simulated in our mind leading to ourselves feeling aware) ie that we our awareness is the 'software' running inside the wetware.
That's all well and good except that none of that explains the 'feeling of it' there is nothing in that 3rd person material activity that correlates with first person feeling. The two things, (reductionist physical processes cannot substitute for the feeling you and I have as we experience)
This hard problem is difficult to surmount physically -either you say its an illusion but how can the primary thing we are, we expereince as the self be an illusion? or you say that somewhere in fields, atoms, molecules, cells, in 'stuff; is the redness of red or the taste of chocolate..
whenever I see the word 'reductionist', I wonder why it's being used to disparage.
a materialist isn't saying that only material exists: no materialist denies that interesting stuff (behaviors, properties) emerges from material. in fact, "material" is a bit dated, since "stuff-type material" is an emergent property of quantum fields.
why is experience not just the behavior of a neural computer which has certain capabilities (such as remembering its history/identity, some amount of introspection, and of course embodiment and perception)? non-computer-programming philosophers may think there's something hard there, but they only way they can express it boils down to "I think my experience is special".
Because consciousness itself cannot be explained except through experience ie consciousness (ie first person experience) - not through material phenomena
It’s like explaining music vs hearing music
We can explain music intellectually and physically and mathematically
But hearing it in our awareness is a categorically different activity and it’s experience that has no direct correlation to the physical correlates of its being
The common thought experiment is the color blind researcher experiencing color for the first time(Mary the Colour Scientist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument)
Experience doesn't look necessary: we consider tesseract explained even though we can't experience it.
Nervous system and bones work differently, because they have different structure, that's materialism alright.
Up to a point I agree, but when someone deploys this vague language in what are presented as strong arguments for big claims, it is they who bear the burden of disambiguating, clarifying and justifying the terms they use.
I don't agree that the inherent nebulousness of the subject extends cover to the likes of Goff, Chalmers (on pansychism), or Searle and Nagel (on the hard problem). It's a both can be true situation and many practicing philosophers appreciate the nebulousness of the topic while strongly disagreeing with the collective attitudes embodied by those names.
If he were capable of describing subjective experience in words with the exactitude you're asking for, then his central argument would be false. The point is that objective measures, like writing, are external, and cannot describe internal subjective experience. Its one thing to probe the atoms; its another thing to be the atoms themselves.
Basically his answer to the question "What is it like to be a bat?" is that its impossible to know.
>If he were capable of describing subjective experience in words with the exactitude you're asking for, then his central argument would be false.
Indeed! Makes you think: maybe it's a bug rather than a feature.
Tautologically, its “batty”.
Worship of subjectivity is a tell for Mysterianism.
>This is the conclusion I come to whenever I try to grasp the works of Nagel, Chalmers, Goff, Searle et al. They're just linguistically chasing their own tails.
I do mostly agree with that and I think that they collectively give analytic philosophy a bad name. The worst I can say for Nagel in this particular case though is that the whole entire argument amounts to, at best, an evocative variation of a familiar idea presented as though it's a revelatory introduction of a novel concept. But I don't think he's hiding an untruth behind equivocations, at least not in this case.
But more generally, I would say I couldn't agree more when it comes to the names you listed. Analytic philosophy ended up being almost completely irrelevant to the necessary conceptual breakthroughs that brought us LLMs, a critical missed opportunity for philosophy to be the field that germinates new branches of science, and a sign that a non-trivial portion of its leading lights are just dithering.
Don't agree with this kind of linguistic dismissal. It doesn't change the fact that we have sensations of color, sound, etc. and there are animals that can see colors, hear sounds and detect phenomena we don't. It's also quite possible they experience the same frequencies we see or hear differently, due to their biological differences. This was noted by ancient skeptics when discussing the relativity of perception.
That is what is being discussed using the "what it's like" language.
It’s fun to imagine what it would be like to understand consciousness.
I like the more specific versions of those terms: the feeling of a toothache and the taste of mint. There's no need to grasp anything, they're feelings. There's no feeling when a metal bar is bent by a press.
Why they focus on feelings is a different issue.
[flagged]
The way I understand it the second thing is the observer of the organism, the person posing the question. The definition seems to be sort of equivalent to the statement "an entity is conscious IFF the sentence 'what is it like to be that entity' is well-posed".
"What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states
"What is it like to be a bat" => the subjective experience of a bat is what it is like => a bat has conscious mental states
Basically it seems like a roundabout way of equating "the existence of subjective experience" with "the existence of consciousness"
edit: one of the criticism papers that the wiki cites also provides a nice exploration of the usage of the word "like" in the definition, which you might be interested to read (http://www.phps.at/texte/HackerP1.pdf)
> It is important to note that the phrase 'there is something which it is like for a subject to have experience E' does not indicate a comparison. Nagel does not claim that to have a given conscious experience resembles something (e.g. some other experience), but rather that there is something which it is like for the subject to have it, i.e. 'what it is like' is intended to signify 'how it is for the subject himself'.
"What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states
How do you know that?
Philosophically, of course.
I mean sure you can’t cut a rock open and see any mental states. But you can no more cut a human open and see mental states either.
Now I am no way suggesting that you don’t have a model for ascribing mental states to humans. Or dogs. Or LLM’s. Just that all models, however useful are still models. Not having a model capable of ascribing mental states to rocks does not preclude rocks having mental states.
> How do you know that?
Well you don't, and my reading of the article was that Nagle also recognized that it was basically an assumption which he granted to bats specifically so as to have a concrete example (one which was suitably unobjectionable, seems like he thought bats 'obviously' had some level of consciousness). The actual utility of this definition is not, as far as my understanding goes, to demarcate between what is and what is not conscious. It seems more like he's using it to establish a sort of "proof-by-contradiction" against the proposal that consciousness admits a totally materialistic description. Something like:
(1) If you say that A is conscious, then you also must say that A has subjective self-experience (which is my understanding of the point of the whole "what it is to be like" thing)
(2) Any complete description/account of the consciousness of A must contain a description of the subjective self-experience of A because of (1)
(3) Subjective self-experience cannot be explained in purely materialistic/universal terms, because it's subjective (so basically by definition)
=> Consciousness cannot be fully described in a materialistic framework, because of the contradiction between (2) and (3)
> Just that all models, however useful are still models
Totally agree with this, I think you're just misunderstanding the specific utility of this model (which is this specific argument about what can be described using human language). My example with the rock was kind of a specific response to OP illustrate how I understood the whole "what it is to be like" thing to be equivalent to (1). If I'd had a bit more forethought I probably would have made those arrows in the line you've quoted bidirectional.
There is no fundamental error it’s purposefully exactly as you state. Nagel is saying that consciousness is that second thing.
>Nagel is saying that consciousness is that second thing.
That's exactly what I'm saying is erroneous. Consciousness is the first thing, we are only led to believe it is a separate, second thing by a millenia-old legacy of dualism and certain built-in tendencies of mind.
So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness? That everything is conscious? The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience”. You don’t need dualism to agree with that quote. I agree with Nagel’s general construction but I’m also a materialist. The hard problem doesn’t mean magic is needed to solve it, just that we don’t have a good explanation for why subjective experience exists.
Materialists don’t even know what materials are though.
>The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience”
I doubt Nagel would go out of his way to offer such an unnatural linguistic construction, and other philosophers would adopt this construction as a standard point of reference, if that was the sole intent.
>So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness?
No, not at all. I'm only saying that if we want to talk about "the consciousness of a bat", we should talk about it directly, and not invent (implicitly) a second concept that is in some senses distinct from it, and in some sense comparable to it.
That's just idealism. Idealism doesn't have a hard problem. But it does have a problem with accounting for how the world appears to be physical independent of any mind experiencing it, such as before any life evolved or in many places were no life is around.
Do you believe that each run of a ChatGPT prompt has a conscious experience of its existence, much like you (presumably) do?
If you don't believe that, then you face the challenge of describing what the difference is. It's difficult to do in ordinary language.
That's what Nagel is attempting to do. Unless you're an eliminativist who believes that conscious experience is an "illusion" (experienced by what?), then you're just quibbling about wording, and I suspect you'll have a difficult time coming up with better wording yourself.
Wait a minute - it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious.
I also don't think it's fair to say I'm just quibbling about wording. Yes, I am quibbling about wording, but the quibble is quite essential because the argument depends to such a large extent on wording. There are many other arguments for or against different views of consciousness but they are not the argument Nagel makes.
(Though fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears" and a far cry from "consciousness doesn't exist at all")
> it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious.
Certainly. I just didn't know where you stood on the question.
In Nagel's terms, there is not something it is like to be a game of Tetris. A game of Tetris doesn't have experiences. "Something it is like" is an attempt to characterize the aspect of consciousness that's proved most difficult to explain - what Chalmers dubbed the hard problem.
How would you describe the distinction?
> fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears"
Oh sure, I think that's widely accepted.
There is no distinction: the idea that there is a distinction rests on a linguistic confusion. The sentence "something it is like to be a bat" tries, as it were, to split the concept of "being a bat" in two, then makes us wonder about the difference between the two halves. I reject that we have to answer for any such difference, when we can show that the two halves are actually the same thing. It's a grammatical trick caused by collapsing a word that usually relates two distinct things ("A is like B") onto a singular "something".
I agree with the other reply that you're overthinking this.
If you claim there's no distinction, then in terms of the meaning Nagel is trying to convey, you're claiming there's no distinction that sets you apart from a game of Tetris in terms of consciousness.
That's where my first reply to you was coming from: if you believe the distinction Nagel is trying to convey doesn't exist, that's tantamount to saying that consciousness as a real phenomenon doesn't exist - the eliminativist position - or something along those lines.
If you do believe consciousness exists, then you're simply arguing with the way Nagel is choosing to characterize it. I asked how you would describe it, but you haven't tried to address that.
But there are many things that set me apart from a game of Tetris! For example, I'm not made up of falling puzzle pieces, I enjoy drinking a cup of coffee every now and then, I was not invented by Alexey Pajitnov in 1985... The difference between an unconscious and a conscious thing could be a difference of this order, which does not at all amount to saying that consciousness does not exist.
We're not discussing whether you're identical to a game of Tetris.
We're discussing a way of characterizing the nature of the conscious experience that you presumably have, that a game of Tetris doesn't.
The way Nagel would put this is that "there is something it is like to be bondarchuk" - i.e., you have an experience of your existence that you can describe, because you're consciously aware of it.
We can ask the question of you, "What is it like to be bondarchuk?" and you can answer based on your actual experience. You wouldn't just be generating text in response to a prompt the way an LLM would, you'd be describing your conscious experience of your existence. For example, you say you enjoy drinking a cup of coffee occasionally. That's a conscious experience that shows that there is something it is like to be you.
There is, presumably, nothing it is like to be a Tetris game, because a Tetris game has no consciousness.
This is a standard, widely accepted characterization in consciousness studies. Even if you object to it, you should at least understand what it's saying. And if you do object to it, the onus is on you to provide a better description, which I note you've declined to do on multiple occasions now.
>We're discussing a way of characterizing the nature of the conscious experience that you presumably have, that a game of Tetris doesn't.
By talking of a different "nature" you already place the discussion on dualist grounds.
>you have an experience of your existence that you can describe, because you're consciously aware of it.
Certainly. But the way Nagel phrases it, "the experience" becomes akin to a "thing", and the absence of this "thing" in physical nature becomes an argument for the hypothesis that it's highly unlikely (maybe even impossible) to give a physicalist account of consciousness. That is what I disagree with.
>There is, presumably, nothing it is like to be a Tetris game, because a Tetris game has no consciousness.
What does saying this get you over just saying "a Tetris game has no consciousness"?
>This is a standard, widely accepted characterization in consciousness studies. Even if you object to it, you should at least understand what it's saying.
I understand what it is saying only insofar as it is simply another way to say "consciousness". But it is clearly taken to be more than just an alternative phrase we can use in lieu of the words "consciousness" or "subjective experience" to vaguely gesture in the direction of these ill-defined concepts we are all familiar with. I disagree that "there is something it is like to be bondarchuk" has greater descriptory power than "bondarchuk is conscious", therefore I don't think we should draw any conclusions regarding consciousness from this phrasing, especially the conclusion Nagel draws which is that consciousness is highly likely to be non-physical or at least that our current understanding of "the physical" is insufficient to ever approach the problem of consciousness (because we can never hope to give proper account of "the something that it is like to be bondarchuk").
>And if you do object to it, the onus is on you to provide a better description, which I note you've declined to do on multiple occasions now.
Not really; my rejection of Nagel's argument can stand on its own regardless of whether I can offer an alternative argument.
There’s no trick to it, you’re overanalyzing. It’s just saing if I were a stone -> no experience, a bat -> some kind of experience. It is not claiming to define the ”something” as you seem to think.
>It is not claiming to define the ”something” as you seem to think.
Certainly it's not claiming to define it, but it is making a claim about the existence of the "something", and also about the physical irreducibility of this "something".
A running game of Tetris has memory, responds to stimuli, and communicates. There has been evolution and reproduction of games of Tetris (perhaps in the way that viruses do). It isn't able to have feelings, what needs to be added for it to start having feelings and experiences?
I would say a lot would need to be added. Given the same input, the tetris game will respond exactly the same each time. There is no awareness, learning, no decisions made, but purely a 100% predictible process.
The Oxford Living Dictionary defines consciousness as "[t]he state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings", "[a] person's awareness or perception of something", and "[t]he fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world".
That Oxford definition highlights why work such as Nagel's is needed. It can plausibly be argued that LLMs or other AI systems can qualify on all those counts, but many (most?) people wouldn't consider them to have conscious experience.
Characterizing that distinction is surprisingly tricky. "What is it like to be..." is one way to do that. David Chalmers' article about "the hard problem of consciousness" is another: https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf
That’s the hard problem.
Describing something as illusionary adds nothing because it implies someone to experience the illusion.
The “something” here refers to inner experience (something similar to Kantian “aperception”.
The tricky bit is that “to be” is not an ordinary verb like fly, eat, or echo-locate. And “‘being an organism’” is — in the context of the paper — about subjective experience (subjective to everything except the organism.
To put it another way, the language game Nagel plays follows the conventions of language games played in post-war English language analytic philosophy. One of those conventions is awareness of Wittgenstein’s “philosophical problem”: language is a context sensitive agreement within a community…
…sure you may find fault with Wittgenstein and often there are uncomfortable epistemological implications for Modernists, Aristotelians, Positivists and such…then again that’s true of Kant.
Anyway, what the language-game model gives philosophical discourse is a way of dealing with or better avoiding Carnapian psuedo-problems arising from an insistence that the use of a word in one context applies to a context where the word is used differently…Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World pre-dates Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations by about 25 years.
Nagel's question "What is it like to be a bat?" is about the sensory qualia of a bat, assuming it has consciousness and ability to experience quales, which he assumes it does.
The question is not "What would it be like (i.e. be similar to) to be a bat?" which seems to be the strawman you are responding to.
I think that's why he states it as a biconditional, which makes the exclusive restriction you're arguing is necessary
That particular phrasing happened to catch on, but I don't think it's essential to any of the arguments. How would you phrase the distinction between objects that are conscious and objects that aren't? Or are you saying that that distinction is just a verbal trick?
>How would you phrase the distinction between objects that are conscious and objects that aren't?
You just did! Why would we need to rephrase this and then attach special importance to that new sentence construction, when "the distinction between objects that are conscious and objects that aren't" is perfectly adequate?
That's just a label, though, it makes no attempt to describe the difference. You could say a conscious object has subjective experience, but that's open to the same observation that it implies there are two things (the subject and the experience).
I can only use a label to vaguely point at the concept of consciousness, and thus the disctinction between conscious and non-conscious objects. This is not infinitely precise, because noone really understands what's going on. What you call "describing the difference" would in fact be making further claims about consciousness. If one is not in the position of making further claims, it is better to not make any claims and stick to vague but commonly understood labels, instead of making claims implicitly by using complicated labels without further examination.
It might be one of those cases where the philosophical hook works because of its rhetorical power
Related - Charles Foster has put perhaps the most effort of any individual to try to really understand what it's like to live as an animal. From the blurb or 'Being a Beast':
> He lived alongside badgers for weeks, sleeping in a sett in a Welsh hillside and eating earthworms, learning to sense the landscape through his nose rather than his eyes. He caught fish in his teeth while swimming like an otter; rooted through London garbage cans as an urban fox; was hunted by bloodhounds as a red deer, nearly dying in the snow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Foster
Bandit: "Hey, Bluey! You're a fruit bat!"
Bluey: "Yeah!"
Bandit: "How is it?"
Bluey: "It's great! You get to eat a lot of fruit!"
I'm less convinced with consciousness as some sort of exceptional phenomenon—and how it's been used to define the "hard problem"—but the paper is still valuable as it provides an accessible entry point into the many problems of reductionism.
What brought down your level on convinced?
When you reject the idea of reductionism, which Nagel's paper provokes us to do, then the entire idea of emergent phenomena collapses. Everything is on the same level, from fundamental particles to consciousness. Of course, some things can still be reduced and others can't, but in no situation is a phenomenon reduced in its metaphysical status. So what's the "problem" again, exactly? Consciousness doesn't need to be explained in terms of objective facts—it's not a special metaphysical thing but merely a theoretical term like anything else.
>When you reject the idea of reductionism, which Nagel's paper provokes us to do, then the entire idea of emergent phenomena collapses. Everything is on the same level, from fundamental particles to consciousness
Interesting. I would have said that something like that is the definition of reductionism.
>Consciousness doesn't need to be explained in terms of objective facts
If there's one good thing that analytic philosophy achieved, it was spending the better part of the 20th century beating back various forms of dualism and ghosts in the machine. You'd have to be something other than a naturalist traditionally conceived to treat "consciousness" as ontologically basic.
I don’t read Nagel as rejecting the idea of reductionism as strongly as you suggest. He’s simply calling out its limitations with regard to subjective experience. Why does it imply that “everything is on the same level”?
This definition is a special metaphysical thing.
Both consciousness and experience arise from physical means. However, they are very distinct concepts and not mutually exclusive, which can lead to confusion when they are conflated.
Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience.
Anything that is able to be measured is able to experience. A subject like an apple "experiences" gravity when it falls from a tree. Things that do not interact with the physical world lack experience, and the closest things to those are WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles). Truly non-interacting particles (NIP) are presumed to be immeasurable.
So there you have it. The conundrum that consciousness can lack experience and unconsciousness can have experience. A more interesting question in my opinion: what is a soul?
>Anything that is able to be measured is able to experience.
I was quite liking this explanation but you lost me here. I very strongly agree with your opening, and I think it's the key to everything. I think everyone insisting on a categorical divide runs into impossible problems.
And a good explanation of consciousness has to take the hard problem seriously, but doesn't have to agree that subjective and objective, or first person in third person or whatever you want to call them, are irreducibly distinct categories. But I think it makes more sense to say that some subset of all of the objective stuff out there is simultaneously subjective, rather than saying that all stuff at all times is both objective and subjective. I don't think an apple experiences gravity the way a mind experiences a conscious state, but I do think the through line of understanding them both as importantly physical in the same sense is key to tying physical reality to explanation of conscious states.
> Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience.
If they don't have an "inner world"/"mind's eye" and are sensory deprived, in which sense can they be considered conscious? What is your definition here?
How can an apple "experience" gravity? I think you're overloading the term "experience" to mean two very different things, which happen (in some languages like English) to share the same word. You could say gravity "happens" to an apple, and then there's no confusion with subjective experiences.
But I still don’t know what it’s like to be a bat
Also, if there is a soul, then how can we be confident concisouness arises from physical means? If there is a soul, it is the perfect means to differentiate concisouness and p-zombies.
There is a soul if you believe we aren’t all p-zombies. (Soul is the all encompassing word to distinguish this. Maybe there are better words?)
Yeah what I was trying to get at was the post I replied to said concisouness is a physical process, and the more interesting question is if souls exist.
My thinking is if soul’s exist, then we can’t call concisouness a purely physical process yet
Ive wondered if to a bat a bat is more like a whale, swimming through the air, calling out at a rate and pitch sort of matching the distance its electrical signals travel. To them they aren’t moving fast at all, or maybe to them maybe humans are like ents, plodding along so slow talking like ents.
Related. Others?
What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35771587 - May 2023 (117 comments)
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998867 - March 2017 (95 comments)
A browser game inspired by Thomas Nagle's Essay “What is it like to be a bat?” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8622829 - Nov 2014 (3 comments)
If you are a secular person, it should follow that you are a non-dualist. Yet that is not so common. There's no "whats its like to be a bat". Because that invokes a sense of a "soul" or "spirit" or "self" being transferred from one being to another.
There is only is and its content. That's it. The easiest way to see or get a sense of this is to replace any "I am ..." with "There is a ....". For example, instead of "I am thinking of writing of using stable sort", replace it with "This person have a thought of using stable sort".
This is much closer to the actual reality underneath. Even attachment itself can be put in this term. "There's a feeling that this person own this" or "There's a sense of I".
After doing, perhaps this is mental illness, I already see glimpse of the sense that everything is everything at the same time. As there are no real difference between this rock and the other rock behind the mountain that I can't see. There should be no difference between my thoughts, senses, feelings, emotions etc and that of other people. Now your sense of self captures the entirety of the universe. If you die, the universe dies for all you know. I think this is what the ancient books have been talking about by rising and being a God.
This is a spiritual error called monism. It's taking non-dualism too far.
> As there are no real difference between this rock and the other rock behind the mountain that I can't see.
There is a real difference between the two; there must be because they're in different places. Monism requires you to deny actually existing differences by saying they're not "real".
> There should be no difference between my thoughts, senses, feelings, emotions etc and that of other people.
This is what in therapyspeak you'd call "not having boundaries". You aren't the same thing as other people; you can tell because the other people don't think that, won't let you borrow their car, etc. It opens them or yourself up to abuse if you think this way.
> There is a real difference between the two; there must be because they're in different places.
That is according to our human perception. For example a single, uniform 4D object could have a projection in 3D that appears as two distinct 3D objects. I am not claiming that a fourth spacial dimension exists, only that we cannot possibly know what exists.
>There's no "whats its like to be a bat". Because that invokes a sense of a "soul" or "spirit" or "self" being transferred from one being to another.
what's it like to be a human?
"There's no "whats its like to be a human". Because that invokes a sense of a "soul" or "spirit" or "self" being transferred from one being to another." -- anon-3988
it does?
If you become the bat, you become the bat. There is nothing permanent that is being transferred. When you think of "being the bat", you have this image of thinking "oh shit, i am a bat now!? I can echolocate and shit". Its more like, ...what? The imagination of being another person is simply an imagination that arises within this body, spirit, soul, or whatever it is.
"what does it feel like to be a bat" means what you think you are telling me. it does not mean "what would it feel like to become a bat"
"what does it feel like to be blind from birth?" can you, a sighted person near-sighted though you may be for this example, even/ever comprehend it no matter how extensively described. can someone who has never seen actually describe it to you?
> "what does it feel like to be blind from birth?" can you, a sighted person near-sighted though you may be for this example, even/ever comprehend it no matter how extensively described
I am saying that it is not possible. It is entirely possible that you can "see" but not comprehend anything, hence effectively being blind. Is my red your red? Is my hotness your hotness? Is the universe upside down? Is your 3d the same as my 3d? Even all of this imaginations and hypothesis is coming purely from my sense of experience.
I don't even know that you exist, you might simply be a figment of reality, there could be nothing behind this post. I wouldn't know.
I can't believe all these qualia questions have not evolved in centuries (or at least, the common discourse arond them hasn't). We all have similar rods and cones in our eyes. We have common kinds of color blindness. What other reasonable conclusion is there but that my red is your red? All the machinery is similar enough.
I suppose it's because people associate so much of who they are to the subjectivity of their experience. If I'm not the only one to see and taste the world as I do, am I even special? (The answer is no, and that there are more important things in life than being special.)
sounds like you are grappling with the question as intended. you are not answering the question. keep going. consider what it would feel like to be Boltzmann's bat DesCartes in Plato's cave. Ask yourself, "Flappito ergo quod?"
Imagining yourself flapping your hands in the air is not "what its like to be a bat". People are fooling themselves when they can honestly imagine being a bat. Even the question "I think therefore I am" does not mean that "I" exist. "I" here implies a center of thinking. There is no center. There is only reality and its content. And thinking is apparently one of its content.
if you don't accept a>b and b>c, you have nothing to say about "therefore a>c"; you can say nothing about it. if you did accept a>b and b>c then you would agree "therefore a>c"
>"I" here implies a center of thinking. There is no center.
"I think", according to you, implies that I implies a center of thinking, and you don't believe that there is a center, so you don't believe "I think" even more than you don't believe "therefore I am". You don't have an opinion about therefore I am.
it doesn't matter about the "existence" in the predicate, because you don't accept the "I" in the subject.
> If you are a secular person, it should follow that you are a non-dualist.
It depends on your definition of "dualism". If you define it as "having a soul that was created by a higher being", then yes, they are mutually exclusive.
On the other hand, one can also define dualism as being purely evolutionary. David Chalmers [1], an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist, has some interesting ideas around how dualistic consciousness may relate to quantum mechanics.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers
Secular != Strict Materialist
There are far fewer of the latter than the former
I am not that versed in the terminologies and the differences, but I am talking about people that the physical reality is all that there is.
Materialism (perhaps physicalism as well) appears to be on shaky ground to me - it does not tell me 'why' I have the first person experience that I have, why I experience and embody the matter that is my person or being, a specific entity. Another way to look at it is to say there doesn't appear to be a region in the brain that defines why I experience the brain, that or this specific brain. From this perspective, I find it self-refuting. They appear only to locate or correlate matter and experience - to help explain 'how'. If I could experience other persons or beings in the first person, and the matter in each person explained why it is that I experience that specific person or entity, I might believe otherwise. To me, this simple fact makes it obvious there is something 'more' that must explain how 'being' relates to consciousness, otherwise, we are simply explaining how the brain modulates experience - very valuable, but less interesting and within reach and validated in everyday life (biochemically and physically, degeneration, damage, etc.). So I would say the brain appears to modulate what is responsible for first person experience. This may not be the correct way to look at consciousness, but it's the most intuitively appealing to me. Because we can't separate being from consciousness, I find the idea that we might create it in the near-term unbelievable. We might certainly create something that can operate with the same or similar results, but I'm not currently convinced it would actually have a subjective first person experience equivalent to the reason we experience the matter we experience. There may be a logical or philosophical way around this view, but as I'm not trained, it's not immediately obvious.
IMO a lot of this comes from still holding onto the dualist idea of "I" as a separate non-physical entity, and then expecting some region of the brain to act as a link or communication channel to it.
> If I could experience other persons or beings in the first person, and the matter in each person explained why it is that I experience that specific person or entity, I might believe otherwise.
Materialism doesn't say that there's some "I" that could experience different persons. I think the best you could do, in theory, is transplant aspects like your personality/train of thought/memories into someone else's brain (by physically altering it to have those aspects).
It's unfortunate there are pseudo-intellectual trolls on hacker news.
I'm open to there being something in reality that explains being someone or a specific person. Having a specific location in reality raises the question of how it came to be and what are the possibilities or limits - it's a piece of unexplained information that suggests more information and explanation is needed. Saying it is meaningless or assumed actually appears to not explain anything. But I would have to think about it more.
Contrarily, the problem I have with non-materialist/physicalist explanations is that they don't really seem to explain anything.
If we assume dualism, that there is some non-material stuff -- call it soul or spirit or mind or psyche or whatever -- that gives rise to consciousness, I think it's fair to ask how it does that.
And if the answer is "we don't know" or "it just does", I really can't see what we've gained over materialism.
Materialism is indeed on shaky ground, but the ground shakes everywhere else, too.
The problem of consciousness has no real solution. A quick way to demonstrate this is via the simulation hypothesis. Consider the following for yourself in first person:
It's impossible to know for certain whether I am in a simulation until I wake up outside of it. Not having observed any evidence of being inside a simulation (probability=0) doesn't necessarily mean I'm certainly in base reality. It could be that the evidence just hasn't been observed yet. And even then, it's impossible to know whether that outer world is a simulation until I wake up in the outer-outer-world, and so on.
That is to say, if my definition of real equals my consciousness equals my existence, I'm really saying that consciousness/reality/existence is a self-defining thing.
Descartes' cogito had unexamined metaphysical convictions. "I think, therefore I am" is not compatible with consciousness because rationality has consciousness as a dependency. If I think back on my entire conscious experience as a timeline, I was conscious before I was rational. I had to derive rationality from experience, not the other way around.
Now I throw away those convictions. "I think" means the same thing as "I am", and "therefore" is a decorative force of habit rather than a reference to logic. In which case, "I think, therefore I am" is the same as: I observe that I observe.
Is the same as: I observe.
Is the same as: I am.
There is no certainty beyond this, only convictions. Even if I'm truly a human brain in a matter-based world, the world would still appear uncertain to this brain in this way.
"A scientist rejecting consciousness is not that different from a nun accepting god in this regard. Neither of them are fully honest with themselves and the world."
That's what I find myself thinking as I take a materialist stance and assume that this is base reality and other people are real in the same way that I am. This appears to fit all of my observations the best, so far, after all.
// end of monologue
And here's my pitch, from me to you:
Let's be provisional materialists together. You can't know if it's the ultimate truth but you can make the correct predictions more often and not be alone while doing it.
In this world "why" and "how" are synonyms. Asking why experience happens is equivalent to asking how experience happens.
You could probably look at them differently if you tried. I wouldn't make a strong argument as I wasn't leaning strongly on a precise distinction in the moment, but to at least connote more maturity and activity and knowledge building in how, while why appears more conceptual, distant, more philosophical, idea-driven, than scientific. It may be viewed as similar to asking why there is something rather than nothing. Why we experience some matter rather than other matter seems more appropriate 'considering first person experience as granted, but the presence of others as well that presumably could have been the case'. Why we experience a specific location and time in reality seems more appropriate than how: we have accepted it has occurred and reoccurred virtually countless times, but we are but one case. This is perhaps two reasons I can see for using a distinction, but that doesn't mean I would pursue it or stand by it in a serious inquiry or exposition.
> It may be viewed as similar to asking why there is something rather than nothing.
The answer to that is a description how something happened to exist. A possible difference is that "how" asks for a full description, while "why" asks for an abbreviated description only of the relevant part, the rest assumed to be irrelevant. Experience of time a good example, because it happens differently depending on nature of time, so you can't assume nature of time to be irrelevant to the question.
It's more appropriate to ask you 'why' you do what you do, than 'how'.
Describing a cause of my actions tell how I ended up doing it. It's synonymous.
[dead]
Can a bat answer the question of “what is it like to be a bat?” I mean, I guess they would have to be able to comprehend the idea of being, and then the idea that things might experience things in ways other than how they do. Bats don’t seem like very abstract thinkers.
I bet if we could communicate with crows, we might be able to make some progress. They seem cleverer.
Although, I’m not sure I could answer the question for “a human.”
Wittgenstein famously said "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him". This subject is a philosophical fun rabbit hole to explore.
> I think, on the contrary, that if a lion could talk, that lion would have a mind so different from the general run of lion minds, that although we could understand him just fine, we would learn little about ordinary lions from him.
(More Daniel Dennett)
That makes any kind of insight into consciousness as a general term impossible though. That would mean we could not learn anything about human consciousness as such from studying specific persons.
It's a great pull, because it has an important implication that I think ties in directly to Nagels point. Another fascinating variation of the same idea is "beetle in the box", another great one from Wittgenstein. I don't think I agree with him, because I think it hinges on assuming lions have fundamental and irreducibly different experiences. But I think we have important similarities due to our shared evolutionary heritage, and even from the outside I'm willing to die on the hill of insisting that Lions certainly do have experiences familiar to us, like hunger, pain, the satisfaction of having an itch scratched, having a visual field, and having the ability to distinguish shades and color (though their experience of color is likely importantly different from ours, but overlaps enough for there to be such a thing as shared meaning).
I don't understand why Wittgenstein wasn't more forcefully challenged on this. There's something to the principle as a linguistic principle, but it just feels overextended into a foundational assumption that their experiences are fundamentally unlike ours.
The very capability and flexibility of language drove evolution of the mind beyond what species with less linguistic behaviors could handle. After all, facility with language is a massive survival benefit, in our species more than any other. It’s circular because feedback loops in evolution are circular too.
That’s called meta cognition (what humans do) not subjective experience - which is the feeling of what happens and sets animal or agentic creatures apart from rocks (not sure about plants)
Dennett has a character telling a story about a bat:
Here's Billy the bat perceiving, in his special sonar sort of way, that the flying thing swooping down toward him was not his cousin Bob, but a eagle, with pinfeathers spread and talons poised for the kill!
He then points out that this story is amenable to criticism. We know that the sonar has limited range, so Billy is not at least perceiving this eagle until the last minute; we could set up experiments to find out whether bats track their kin or not; the sonar has a resolution and if we find out the resolution we know whether Billy might be perceiving the pinfeathers. He also mentions that bats have a filter, a muscle, that excludes their own squeaks when they pick up sonar echoes, so we know they aren't hearing their own squeaks directly. So, we can establish lots about what it could be like to be a bat, if it's like anything. Or at least what is isn't like.
What is that criticism supposed to be criticizing?
Nagel's paper covers a lot of ground, but none of what you described has any bearing on the point about it "what it's like" as a way to identify conscious experience as distinct from, say, the life of a rock. (Assuming one isn't a panpsychist who believe that rocks possess consciousness.)
It gives obvious examples of the way our awareness of factual circumstances give us inroads into what might be experienced. And the upshot is that this might suggest the rest of consciousness can be understood by iterating forward in a similar manner. Dennett makes this exact same point about Mary's Room. Far from talking past the article, it's attacking the fundamental principle.
"Might suggest" - sure, that might be possible. That's not so much a criticism of Nagel as the hope that the problems he's highlighting might one day be solved.
The pessimism, the "facts beyond the reach of human concepts".
That's not pessimism. It's interrogating the nature of reality. If you want to discover truth, you can't shy away from conclusions because they don't make you feel good.
That's the magic answer. It's a/the hard problem, but permeable to inquiry. The top neuroscience research into consciousness however doesn't seem like this kind of inquiry Dennett is referencing.
To me, "what is it like to be a" is more or less the intersection of sensory modalities between two systems... but I'm not sure the extent of the overlap tells you much about whether a given system is "conscious" or not.
Pretty much the same conclusion here. Consciousness is what we feel when sheaf 1-cohomology among our different senses vanishes.
Bringing it back to bats, a failure to imagine what it's like to be a bat is just indicative that the overlaps between human and bat modalities don’t admit a coherent gluing that humans can inhabit phenomenally.
> Pretty much the same conclusion here. Consciousness is what we feel when sheaf 1-cohomology among our different senses vanishes.
There's something more to it than this.
For one thing there's a threshold of awareness. Your mind is constantly doing things and having thoughts that don't arrive to the threshold of awareness. You can observe more of this stuff if you meditate and less of this stuff if you constantly distract yourself. But consciousness IMO should have the idea of a threshold baked in.
For another, the brain will unify things that don't make sense. I assume you mean something like consciousness is what happens when there aren't obstructions to stitching sensory data together. But the brain does a lot of work interpreting incoherent data as best it can. It doesn't have to limit itself to coherent data.
I'll have to reflect more on the first part, but as far as
> It doesn't have to limit itself to coherent data.
There are specific failure cases for non-integrability:
1. Dissociation/derealization = partial failures of gluing.
2. Nausea = inconsistent overlaps (ie: large cocycles) interpreted as bodily threat.
3. Anesthesia = disabling of the sheaf functor: no global section possible.
At least for me it provides a consistent working model for hallucinogenic, synesthesia, phantom limb phenomena, and split-brain scenarios. If anything, the ways in which sensor integration fails are more interesting than when it succeeds.
Yeah to be clear I like this mental model a lot, and I give it extra points for invoking sheaf theory :). I was just saying it doesn't seem complete to me from a psychological perspective.
The way I look at it is that the sensors provide data as activations and awareness is some output with a thresholding or activation function.
Sense making and consciousness in my mental model is something that happens after the fact and it tries to happen even with nonsense data. As opposed to -- as I was reading you to be leaning toward -- being the consequence of sensory data being in a sufficiently nice relationship with each other.
Do you really mean that it's very nearly the same thing "To be a" you, and an Elon Musk, a homo sapiens infant, and an Orangutan? And only modestly different from these to be a dog or a horse?
If I've understood you correctly, I'll suggest that simple sensory intersection is way way not enough: the processing hardware and software are material to what it is like to be someone.
good point, I'd agree sensors are just a piece of the picture
Maybe in the future we'll be able to run computer simulations of people and bats that think they are conscious and you'll be able to merge them a bit to get some bat experience?
You would be adding bat experience (sonar, hanging upside down, flying etc) to become a literal Bat Man so to speak :)
But you would never know exactly what it feels to be a bat without removing your human level experience from the picture
Though you could have like a slider control for more or less bat.
Anil Seth recently wrote a book "Being You", which very much states that we can only know what it is like to be ourselves.
Basically, to know what it is like to be a bat, you need to have evolved as a bat.
His theory that our perception is a hallucination generated by a prediction algorithm that uses sensory input to update and correct the hallucination is very interesting.
Ed Yong wrote an excellent book closely related to this topic titled An Immense World on the sensory lives of animals that we are still only beginning to understand.
"It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. As a result, we tend "to frame animals' lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs."
>An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.
Isn’t this just the same as saying an organism is conscious if it perceives? If it is aware of input from one or more senses (and I’m not limiting that to the five human senses)?
The bat article might be a more philosophical treatise...
But it makes me think of this article:
https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html
which is a more concrete(?) dive into being an animal?
The article basically talkes about "umwelt" (there is a link at the bottom) - "is the specific way in which organisms of a particular species perceive and experience the world, shaped by the capabilities of their sensory organs and perceptual systems"
How it at all related to let's say programming?
Well, for example learning vim-navigation or Lisp or a language with an advanced type system (e.g. Haskell) can be umwelt-transformative.
Vim changes how you perceive text as a structured, navigable space. Lisp reveals code-as-data and makes you see programs as transformable structures. Haskell's type system creates new categories of thought about correctness, composition, and effects.
These aren't just new skills - they're new sensory-cognitive modalities. You literally cannot "unsee" monadic patterns or homoiconicity once internalized. They become part of your computational umwelt, shaping what problems you notice, what solutions seem natural, and even how you conceptualize everyday processes outside programming.
It's similar to how learning music theory changes how you hear songs, or how learning a tonal language might affect how you perceive pitch. The tools become part of your extended cognition, restructuring your problem-space perception.
When a Lisper says "code is data" they're not just stating a fact - they're describing a lived perceptual reality where parentheses dissolve into tree structures and programs become sculptable material. When a Haskeller mentions "following the types" they're describing an actual sensory-like experience of being guided through problem space by type constraints.
This creates a profound pedagogical challenge: you can explain the mechanics of monads endlessly, but until someone has that "aha" moment where they start thinking monadically, they don't really get it. It's like trying to explain color to someone who's never seen, or echolocation to someone without that sense. That's why who's never given a truthful and heartfelt attempt to understand Lisp, often never gets it.
The umwelt shift is precisely what makes these tools powerful - they're not just different syntax but different ways of being-in-computational-world. And like the bat's echolocation, once you're inside that experiential framework, it seems impossible that others can't "hear" the elegant shape of a well-typed program.
There are other umwelt-transforming examples, like: debugging with time-travel/reversible debuggers, using pure concatenative languages, logic programming - Datalog/Prolog, array programming, constraint solvers - SAT/SMT, etc.
The point I'm trying to make - don't try to "understand" the cons and pros of being a bat, try to "be a bat", that would allow you to see the world differently.
I suppose someone (even an experienced vimmer) might argue that learning vim is not so much "umwelt-transformative", but rather like "muscle memory training", like LeetCode drilling.
Indeed, basic vim-navigation - (hjkl, w, b) is muscle memory.
But, I'd argue the umwelt shift comes from vim's modal nature and its language of text objects. You start perceiving text as having an inherent grammar - "inside parentheses", "around word", "until comma." Text gains topology and structure that was invisible before.
The transformative part isn't the keystrokes but learning to think "delete inside quotes" (di") or "change around paragraph" (cap). You see text as composable objects with boundaries, not just streams of characters. This may even persists when you're reading on paper.
That mental model often transforms your keyboard workflow not just in your editor - but your WM, terminal, web browser, etc.
He anticipated an AI problem decades early. Replace “bat” with “LLM” or “alien intelligence,” and the paper reads like a warning: describing behavior and mechanisms might never reveal the inner feel, if there is one, to outsiders.
I think I wrote a whole book around this. :)) Feel free to reach out at theillusionengine@gmail.com for a draft :) https://illusionengine.xyz/ :)
Interesting topic, but I can only see one chapter. Based on chapter names it seems you lean closer to cybernetics or process philosophy. Is that true? I find ignoring time and process to be the greatest sin in the field of consciousness. The big issue is not that we don't know the quantum trick or property-dualism that explains consciousness, but that we try to remove time and process from it. That is impossible, a static explanation will never capture dynamic execution of a system.
I worked on similar topics, I publish on a "personal" subreddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/VisargaPersonal/
Cybernetics is behind all modern AI (Turing was a cyberneticist), and also modern cognitive science with the ideas close to hybrid computing, neuromorphic computing, enactivism, embodied minds etc. Basically, cyberneticists were functionalists - and that allows for multiple realizability.
At the core of the book is the question of consciousness and qualia (and I do believe that a walkthrough through computational complexity is necessary, especially taking into account TIME and SPACE for both human neural processing and artificial one, differentiating between being incomputable in principle, being incomputable in practice or being tractable.
> Nagel asserts that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."
Struggling to make sense of this sentence.
An organism is conscious exactly when there is something it is like for that organism to be itself.
Or in a simpler way, consciousness is present just in case being that organism has an inner, subjective character - something that can not be reduced to a purely material state.
It means that if something has conscious mental states then it must have subjective experience from its own perspective. If John has a conscious mental state, then I must be able to ask "What is it like to be John?". Hope that helps.
I wouldn’t bother.
The fact that we can't bridge subjective and objective descriptions without hand-waving probably says more about the limits of human concepts than about bats
Science studies the physical and measurable. Consciousness isn’t physical or measurable. That’s why the “hard problem” sits outside what science, by definition, can explain.
>Consciousness isn’t physical or measurable.
That's just a question begging assertion, and there's plenty of empirical knowledge of necessary physical conditions for consciousness as well as predictable physical influences on conscious states. Whether consciousness is "measurable" is part of what's at issue and can't just be definitionally presupposed.
Answer: You are a creature of the night, terrible, able to strike terror into a superstitious, cowardly lot.
As Disney almost wrote:
Everybody wants to be a bat Cause noone but a bat really knows where it's at
It's not like anything, a bat has no sense of self or personal history, it operates on instinct without a personal, reflective self. A bat having consciousness is as relevant as whether a sonar does.
> it operates on instinct without a personal, reflective self
I think we would call this "without ego" and not "without consciousness". I think it's totally possible to be conscious without ego. And perhaps bats do have an ego however small - some may be more greedy than others, etc.
I think what consciousness nominally means is an awareness of things in relation to a self, a subject-object relation. If there is such a thing as awareness without subject object content, I'd love to hear more, like how would you even know you have it.
Do you mean the bat has no subjective experience? If so - That’s a pretty extraordinary claim to make there and one that risks great ethical concern on the treatment or animals
If bats have no subjective experience it’s ethical to do anything to them but if there is than they deserve to (as all animals) be treated ethically as much as we can do so
IMO considering Bats to be similar to Mice -we’ve studied mice and rats extensively and while cannot know precisely we can be pretty sure there is subjective experience (felt experience there) ie almost our scientific experiments and field data with so called ‘lower’ organisms show evidence of pain, suffering and desires, play etc - all critical evidence of subjectivity
Now I don’t think bats are meta-conscious (meta cognitive) because they can’t commiserate on their experiences or worry about death etc like humans can but they feel stuff - and we must respect that
You don't need to know if it has a "subjectivity" to know if you can torture and kill it, you can rely on the writhing and squealing. Making up artificial distinctions and questions with no answers is just a conceit we get into, ultimately to justify whatever we want. There are too many people on the planet and we need to "process" a lot of life for our benefit.
Anyway, if there is no mind in the sense of a personal identity or a reflective thought process, then really you're just torturing and killing a set of sense perceptions, so what would be the basis of a morality that forbids that?
>Anyway, if there is no mind in the sense of a personal identity or a reflective thought process
I don't think "mind" is limited to those two things, and I think it may be on a continuum rather than binary, and they may also be integrally related to the having of other senses.
I also think they probably do have some non trivial degree of mind even in the strong sense, and that mental states that aren't immediately tied to self reflection are independently valuable because even mere "sense perceptions" include valenced states (pain, comfort) that traditionally tend to fall within the scope of moral consideration. I also think their stake in future modes of being over their long term evolutionary trajectory is a morally significant interest they have.
Saying it might be on a continuum just obfuscates things. What do you mean exactly?
If there is no sense of self or personal identity, how is that different than a block of wood or a computer? That there might be "mental" functions performed doesn't give it subjectivity if there is no subject performing them. And if there is no persistent reflective self there is no subject. You could call instincts or trained behaviors mental, activities of a kind of mind if you wanted to. But if it's not self aware it's not a moral subject.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote an essay about this essay in the book “The Mind’s I” which I thoroughly enjoyed reading even if a lot of it is beyond me. There’s a somewhat janky OCR version here http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-24-what-is-it-l...
Classic Hofstadter, he introduces a concept called a “Be-Able Thing” (BAT for short)
Can we just all admit there has basically been no real progress made to the mind-body problem. They all rest on metaphysical axioms of which no one has any proof of. Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism.
Exhibit a
> Nagel begins by assuming that "conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon" present in many animals (particularly mammals), even though it is "difficult to say [...] what provides evidence of it".
> Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism.
Physicalism is an ontological assertion that is almost certainly true, and is adhered to by nearly all scientists and most philosophers of mind. Solipsism is an ontological assertion that could only possibly be true for one person, and is generally dismissed. They are at opposite ends of the plausibility scale.
One big problem with physicalism is that many alleged arguments in its favor are nothing of the sort. Any argument for physicalism that refers to neurological observation is invalid. Physicalism claims that all mental events can be reduced to physical events. But you cannot look at physical events to prove this. No matter the detail in which you describe a physical event, you can't use this to prove, or even argue in favor of, the thesis that all mental events can be reduced to the physical.
It's like describing the inside of a house in very great detail, and then using this to argue that there's nothing outside the house. The method is explicitly limiting its scope to the inside of the house, so can say nothing about what's outside, for or against. Same with physicalism: most arguments in its favor limit their method to looking at the physical, so in practice say nothing about whether this is all there is.
You're making a number of unsupported assertions. There's a massive amount of literature in support of physicalism. And it's a far cry from "there's no proof of x" to "x is invalid". No metaphysical stance can be proved.
> Same with physicalism: most arguments in its favor limit their method to looking at the physical, so in practice say nothing about whether this is all there is.
This is simply wrong ... there are very strong arguments that, when we're looking at mental events, we are looking at the physical. To say that arguments for physicalism are limited to looking at the physical is a circular argument that presupposes that physicalism is wrong. The arguments for physicalism absolutely are not based at looking at a limited set of things, they are logical arguments that there's no way to escape being physical ... certainly Descartes' dualism is long dead due to the interaction problem -- mental states must be physical in order to be acted upon or act upon the physical. The alternatives are ad hoc nonsense like Chalmers' "bridging laws" that posit that there's a mental world that is kept in tight sync with the physical world by these "bridging laws" that have no description or explanation or reason to believe exist.
> And it's a far cry from "there's no proof of x" to "x is invalid".
Oh this is undoubtedly true, and my argument was limited to the statement that the most common argument for physicalism is invalid. I was not launching an attack on physicalism itself.
> No metaphysical stance can be proved.
That's an interesting metaphysical stance, but again, I'm not trying to prove any metaphysics, just pointing out the main weakness that I see in the physicalist argument. I'm pointing out that any pro-physicalist argument that is a variant of "neuroscience says X" is invalid for the reason I gave: by limiting your scope to S, you can say nothing about anything outside S. This is true regardless of whether there is actually anything outside S, so there is no assumption in my argument that physicalism is wrong.
One argument against physicalism is that if thought or knowledge can be reduced to particles bouncing around, then there is no thought or knowledge. My knowledge that 2+2=4 is about something other than, or different from, the particles in my brain. Knowledge is about the content of the mind, which is different from the associated physical state of the brain. If content is neurons, then content as something my mind considers doesn't exist. If my thought "2+2=4" just is a bunch of particles in my brain doing stuff, then my belief that my thought is true is not even wrong, as the saying goes: just absurd.
I'm no Cartesian dualist though -- the interaction problem is just one problem with his dualism. I think Aristotle and Aquinas basically got the picture of reality right, and their metaphysics can shed yuuuuge amounts of light on the mind-body problem but obviously that's a grossly unfashionable worldview these days :-)
> I'm not trying to prove any metaphysics
You attacked physicalism for not being proven.
I disagree with your arguments and I think they are hopelessly confused. Since our views are conceptually incommensurate, there's no point in continuing.
I'm afraid the physicalist position is absolutely impossible. When I think about something, I'm thinking about something different from the brain state that represents it. There is nothing difficult or subtle about this: if I think about a tiger, I am not thinking about a brain state that is associated therewith.
The physicalist position wants to reduce the mental to the physical. My thought cannot be reduced from the mental to the physical, because my thought is about a tiger, and a tiger cannot be reduced to a brain state.
If physicalism is true, I can't really be thinking about a tiger, because the tiger in my thought has no physical existence-as-a-tiger, and therefore can't have any existence-as-a-tiger at all. But then I'm not really thinking about a tiger. And the same applies to all our thoughts: physicalism would imply that all our thoughts are delusional, and not about reality at all. A non-physicalist view allows my thought to be actually about a tiger, without that tiger-thought having physical existence.
(Note that I have no problem with the view that the mental and the physical co-incide, or have some kind of causal relationship -- this is obviously true -- only with the view that the mental is reducible to the physical.)
You aren't even wrong, thoughts are fantasy indeed, and imaginary tiger doesn't have a literal physical existence, because it's, well, imaginary, it only has existence in imagination. And this theory matches observation.
Here's what I just posted to the other person. Perhaps you can tell me where I'm going wrong, because it seems to me that physicalism is impossible.
The UMD paper you link to elsewhere describes the central proposition of mind-brain identity physicalism as follows:
> a pain or a thought is (is identical with) some state of the brain or central nervous system
or
> ‘pain’ doesn’t mean ‘such-and-such a stimulation of the neural fibers’... yet, for all that, the two terms in fact refer to the very same thing." [emphasis in original]
(If you search for this second sentence and see it in context, you will see that substituting 'thought' for 'pain' is a fair reflection of the document's position.)
But this is problematic. Consider the following:
1. Thoughts are, at least sometimes, about reality.
2. My thought in some way refers to the object of that thought. Otherwise, I am not thinking about the thing I purport to be thinking about, and (1) is false.
3. That reference is not limited to my subjective, conscious experience of that thought, but is an inherent property of the thought itself. Otherwise, again, (1) is false.
4. Physicalism says the word "thought" and the phrase "a particular stimulation of neural fibers" refer to the same thing (from document above).
5. "A particular stimulation of neural fibers" does not refer to any object outside itself. Suppose I'm thinking about a tiger. You cannot analyze a neural state with a brain scan and find a reference to a tiger. You will see a bunch of chemical and electrical states, nothing more. You will not see the object of the thought.
6. But a thought must refer to its object, given 2 and 3. So "thought" and "particular stimulation of neural fibers" cannot refer to the same thing. (I will grant, and it is my position, that the latter is part of the former, but physicalism identifies the two.)
This seems to imply physicalism is false.
What step am I going wrong on?
5. If the reference exists, it doesn't disappear if you don't see it. You should see better. Reference has a corresponding material fact too.
Point 5 is sound, and it's actually impossible for a configuration of neural fibers to refer to something outside itself (and therefore, if physicalism is true and thought = neural fibers, it's impossible for a thought to refer to something outside itself, which would falsify point 2). Here's why:
The reference can't exist in the thought if "thought" and "a particular stimulation of neural fibers" refer to the same thing. There is no reference in the fibers. You can't "encode" a reference to something else in the physical brain (or any part of the body).
This is because a reference must in some way refer to its object (obviously). But a reference can only be referred to its object by something else. The word "tiger", or a picture of a tiger, refer to an actual tiger only when there is a mind to give them that meaning. But "a particular stimulation of neural fibers" cannot refer to any object, because there is nothing that can give it that meaning. A word or a picture or anything extra-mental can be given meaning by a mind, but when we are talking about the mind itself, this is impossible.
If meaning is given, it's a structural property of mind and is encoded in brain like any other structural property.
Whoheartedly agree. I think what they're stressing though if I'm understanding correctly, is we do kind of start in a Cartesian space, and branch out via inferences to the presumption of an external world. And, from a certain philosophical perspective, one could point to that and insist that at any moment that connection could be the weak link that brings all of epistemology crashing down. We could get unhooked from the simulation, so to speak, open our real eyes, and witness a new world with new bedrock alternatives to our notions of causality, qualia, and so on.
I don't believe any of that to be true, but I think that's kind of the point of that argument. I do think we start from that Cartesian starting place, but once we know enough about the external world to know that we're a part of it, and can explain our mind in terms of it, it effectively shifts the foundation, so that our mental states are grounded in empirical reality rather than the other way around.
See their comment just above where they say "I'm afraid the physicalist position is absolutely impossible." ... it's the worst argued rubbish imaginable.
The UMD paper you link to elsewhere describes the central proposition of mind-brain identity physicalism as follows:
> a pain or a thought is (is identical with) some state of the brain or central nervous system
or
> ‘pain’ doesn’t mean ‘such-and-such a stimulation of the neural fibers’... yet, for all that, the two terms in fact refer to the very same thing." [emphasis in original]
(If you search for this second sentence and see it in context, you will see that substituting 'thought' for 'pain' is a fair reflection of the document's position.)
But this is problematic. Consider the following:
1. Thoughts are, at least sometimes, about reality.
2. My thought in some way refers to the object of that thought. Otherwise, I am not thinking about the thing I purport to be thinking about, and (1) is false.
3. That reference is not limited to my subjective, conscious experience of that thought, but is an inherent property of the thought itself. Otherwise, again, (1) is false.
4. Physicalism says the word "thought" and the phrase "a particular stimulation of neural fibers" refer to the same thing (from document above).
5. "A particular stimulation of neural fibers" does not refer to any object outside itself. Suppose I'm thinking about a tiger. You cannot analyze a neural state with a brain scan and find a reference to a tiger. You will see a bunch of chemical and electrical states, nothing more. You will not see the object of the thought.
6. But a thought must refer to its object, given 2 and 3. So "thought" and "particular stimulation of neural fibers" cannot refer to the same thing. (I will grant, and it is my position, that the latter is part of the former, but physicalism identifies the two.)
This seems to imply physicalism is false.
What step am I going wrong on?
If having a thought is strictly a consequence of physical processes, physical occurrences, then physicalism is true, so of course it is not "absolutely impossible", even if it were to turn out that it's not true. By token-identity -- which is one but not the only possible model -- the brain being in some specific physical state is synonymous with having some specific thought--that's all ... the brain being in that specific state is coincident with having that specific thought. Word games about "reference" don't change that. The language we use to talk about brain states is very different from the language we use to talk about thoughts because they are very different conceptual frameworks for describing what happen to be the same occurrence. We describe thoughts as being about things, not in terms of activation levels, synapses firing, etc., and we talk about brain states in terms the latter, not in terms of being about tigers etc., but that doesn't mean that these totally different sorts of descriptions aren't about the same physical occurrence. When you have a specific thought about a tiger, your brain is in a specific configuration, and if it weren't then you wouldn't be having that specific thought. That's what token identity means ... each mental state corresponds directly to a physical state of the brain.
> Physicalism says the word "thought" and the phrase "a particular stimulation of neural fibers" refer to the same thing (from document above)
Here is what it actually says:
> The identity-thesis is a version of physicalism: it holds that all mental states and events are in fact physical states and events. But it is not, of course, a thesis about meaning: it does not claim that words such as ‘pain’ and ‘after-image’ may be analyzed or defined in terms of descriptions of brain-processes. (That would be absurd.) Rather, it is an empirical thesis about the things in the world to which our words refer: it holds that the ways of thinking represented by our terms for conscious states, and the ways of thinking represented by some of our terms for brain-states, are in fact different ways of thinking of the very same (physical) states and events. So ‘pain’ doesn’t mean ‘such-and-such a stimulation of the neural fibers’ (just as ‘lightning’ doesn’t mean ‘such-and-such a discharge of electricity’); yet, for all that, the two terms in fact refer to the very same thing.
And yet the sort of analysis that points out as absurd is exactly the sort of analysis you are attempting.
> You cannot analyze a neural state with a brain scan and find a reference to a tiger. You will see a bunch of chemical and electrical states, nothing more. You will not see the object of the thought.
Says who? Of course we don't currently don't have such technology, but at some time in the future we may be able to analyze a brain scan and determine that the subject is thinking of a tiger. (This may well turn out not to be feasible if only token-identity holds but not type-identity ... thoughts about similar things need not correspond to similar brain states.)
Saying that we only see a bunch of chemical and electrical states is the most absurd naive reductivist denial of inference possible. When we look at a spectrogram, all we see is colored lines, yet we are able to infer what substances produced them. When we look at an oscilloscope, we will see a bunch of curves. etc. Or take the examples at the beginning of the paper ... "a particular cloud is, as a matter of fact, a great many water droplets suspended close together in the atmosphere; and just as a flash of lightning is, as a matter of fact, a certain sort of discharge of electrical energy" -- these are different levels and frameworks of description. Look at a photograph or a computer screen up close and you will see pixels or chemical arrangements. To say that you will see "nothing more" is to deny the entirety of science and rational thought. One can just as well talk about windows, titles, bar charts, this comment on a computer screen as referring to things but the pixel states of the screens that are coincident with them don't and thereby foolishly, absurdly, think that one has defeated physicalism
Enough with the terrible arguments and shoddy thinking. You're welcome to them ... I reject them.
Over and out.
I agree that when I see the word "tiger" on paper and a screen, I am looking at something that refers to a tiger. And the same is true, mutatis mutandis, for spectograms, oscilliscopes, photos on screens, etc etc. But the word "tiger" only refers to a tiger because a mind make the connection between the word and the thing in my mind. Without that connection, it really is just a bunch of ink on a page. There is nothing inherent in the shape of the ink's squiggles that make it refer to a tiger.
It is not a question of "different levels and frameworks" of description in this case, or at least not solely. The examples of clouds and lightning given in the paper are not valid parallels (I know the paper doesn't offer them as parallels, but your comment did), because they do not need relations with other things to be water droplets and discharges of electricity. But a word needs a relation with something else (its referent) to be a word, otherwise it is just meaningless squiggles, sounds or pixels. And the word does not have this relation in and of itself: only a mind can give it this relation.
(You can take relation and reference as largely synonymous for the purposes of this comment.)
You can analyze the squiggles as closely as you like, but you will still not find any relation to a tiger, unless you have something else (a mind) giving it that relation. And again, the same is true for the other examples you give. Extrinsic relations exist between word and thing or oscilliscope and wave, but not intrinsic ones.
In the same way, the brain's state when it thinks of a tiger is, in and of itself, a bunch of chemical and electric states that bear no intrisic relation to a tiger. No amount of analysis of the brain's state will change this. As I stated somewhere else, a tiger and a brain state, like a tiger and the word "tiger", are two entirely different things, and are not intrinsically related to each other. You can analyze either the tiger or the brain state with whatever sophisticated technology you want, but that will not change this fact. Analyzing a bunch of squiggles will produce information about the ink, but not information about a tiger: you are still looking at ink. Analyzing chemical and electric states will produce interesting and very valuable information about the brain, but not information about a tiger: you are still looking at chemical and electric states. No amount of searching will find intrinsic relation between brain-state and thing. [I think this is also a good argument against Cartesian dualism, but that's beside the point right now.]
The relation between thought and its object must be intrinsic (assuming our thoughts are about, or can be about, reality). It cannot be extrinsic like a word or oscilliscope, because our thoughts are not given their meaning by something outside our minds. (I assume we agree on this last point after "because", and it doesn't need arguing.) Our thoughts' relations to their objects must be intrinsic to the thoughts. But they can't be intrinsic if our thoughts are our brain states, for the reason just given.
(The UMD paper responds to this objection in section 3.8: briefly, my response is that we might get the illusion of intentionality in a physical system like a computer, but no more than that.)
No disagreement from me that it's not a strong argument.
Where am I going wrong? If the answer is "everywhere", what's the single worst part? You must at least agree with points 1, 2 and 3, and probably point 4?
You're getting a little ahead of yourself. First, ontological assertions need to reflect reality. That is, they need to be true or false, and many philosophers, including prominent scientists, don't think they qualify. Indeed, the arguments against ontological realism are more airtight than any particular metaphysical theory.
> You're getting a little ahead of yourself.
Nonsense.
> First, ontological assertions need to reflect reality.
You're getting ahead of yourself to imply that somehow physicalism does not reflect reality, or that an assertion has to be proven to reflect reality before being made.
> That is, they need to be true or false
No, that's not what reflecting reality means. Of course ontological assertions are true or false, if they aren't incoherent, but that's neither here nor there.
> and many philosophers, including prominent scientists, don't think they qualify.
What's this "they" that don't qualify? The subject was physicalism, and again almost all scientists and most philosophers of mind subscribe to it ... which leaves room for some not doing so. Whether or not the outliers are "prominent" is irrelevant.
> Indeed, the arguments against ontological realism are more airtight than any particular metaphysical theory.
That's a much stronger claim than that physicalism is wrong ... many dualists are ontological realists. And it's certainly convenient to claim that there are airtight arguments for one's views, and easy to dismiss the claim.
I've never heard any argument that demonstrates any certainty around physicalism. I like the argument bcuz it sounds nice, but I would never ever claim to know it to be true. I mostly arrived at physicalism because there are eggregious problems with the other theories and physicalism seemed like the suitable default naive answer.
You might want to look at https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/46w6qp/comme...
and
https://faculty.philosophy.umd.edu/pcarruthers/NoM%20-%205.p...
> Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism
And while you're at it, as plausible as any metaphysical theory, insofar as you're still doing metaphysics.
They have different probabilities as they require different fine tuning. Sorted by fine tuning: physicalism < simulation < idealism < dualism < solipsism.
>Can we just all admit there has basically been no real progress made to the mind-body problem.
I think we've made extraordinary progress on things like brain to machine interfaces, and demonstrating that something much like human thought can be approximated according to computational principles.
I do think some sort of theoretical bedrock is necessary to explain to "something there's like to be" quality, but I think it would be obtuse to brush aside the rather extraordinary infiltrations into the black box of consciousness that we've made thus far, even if it's all been knowing more about it from the outside. There's a real problem that remains unpenetrated but as has been noted elsewhere in this thread, it is a nebulous concept, and perhaps one of the most difficult and important research questions, and I think nothing other than ordinary humility is necessary to explain the limit an extent to which we understand it thus far.
If anything, it's getting weirder... real progress looks, well, batshit insane. For example:
Against Mind-Blindness: recognizing and communicating with diverse intelligences - by Michael Levin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD5TOsPZIQY
Much of the mind-body problem comes from Descartes, who assumed that physical reality was nothing more than a bunch of particles bouncing around. Given that the mind cannot be reduced to this (whatever my experiences are, they are different from particles bouncing around), then the mind must be something utterly unlike everything else in reality. Thus Descartes posits that the mind is one thing and the body another (substance dualism).
If one drops the assumption that physical reality is nothing more than a bunch of particles, the mind stops being so utterly weird and unique, and the mind-body problem is more tractable. Pre-17th century, philosophers weren't so troubled by it.
> Given that the mind cannot be reduced to this (whatever my experiences are, they are different from particles bouncing around)
Why cannot it?
Several reasons. One is that my experience of looking at a tree is one thing, but the neurological firing that takes place in my brain when I look at a tree is another. They are not the same. If you can reduce your experience of looking at a tree to neurons firing, then you are not really looking at a tree, and absurdity results.
Another is that the propositions "the thought 2+2=4 is correct" and "the thought 2+2=5 is wrong" can only be true with regard to the content of a thought. If thought can be reduced to neurons firing, then describing a thought as correct or wrong is absurd. Since this is not the case, it must be impossible to reduce thought to neurons firing.
(Btw, the first paragraph of my previous comment is not my position. I am giving a three-sentence summary of Descartes' contribution to the mind-body problem.)
I don't follow the reasoning at all. Why is human experience not the neurological firing? Why can't a thought be reduced to neurons firing, what about that would make it absurd?
I promise I'm not being dense or rhetorical, I truly don't understand that line of thought.
It seems to me like begging the question, almost like saying "experience cannot be this, because it'd be absurd, because it cannot be this."
Here's something I posted a while ago, I'm copying and pasting with a few slight edits:
It is wrong to claim that brain states (neurons firing) are the same as mental states (thoughts). There are several reasons for this. One is that reducing thoughts to brain states means a thought cannot be correct or incorrect. For example, one series of mental states leads to the thought "2+2=4"; another series leads to the thought "2+2=5". The correctness of the former and the wrongness of the latter refers only to the thought's content, not the physical brain state. If thoughts are nothing more than brain states, it's meaningless to say that one thought is correct -- that is to say, it's a thought that conforms to reality -- and that the other is incorrect. A particular state of neurons and chemicals cannot per se be incorrect or incorrect. If one thought is right (about reality) and another thought is wrong (not about reality), then there must be aspects of thought that are distinct from the physical state of the brain.
If it's meaningless to say that one thought is correct and another is incorrect, then of course nothing we think or say has any connection to reality. Hence the existence of this disagreement, along with the belief that one of us is right and the other wrong, presupposes that the physicalist position is wrong.
There's a leap you're making I cannot follow.
I agree with this: the physical configuration of neurons, their firings, the atoms that make them, etc, cannot be "right" or "wrong". This wouldn't make sense in reality; it either is or isn't, and "right" or "wrong" are human values. The universe is neither right nor wrong, it just is.
What about the thoughts those neuron firings mean to us? Well, a good argument can be made that they are also not "right" or "wrong" in isolation, they are just phenomena. Trivially, a thought of "2+2=4" is neither right nor wrong, it's only other thoughts that consider it "right" or "wrong" (often with additional context). So the values themselves can be a physical manifestation.
So it seems to me your problem can be resolved like this: in response to a physical configuration we call a "thought", other "thoughts" can be formed in physical configurations we call "right" or "wrong".
The qualities of "right" or "wrong" only exist as physical configurations in the minds of humans.
And voila! There's no incompatibility between the physical world and thoughts, emotions, "right" or "wrong".
I will try to respond later, but briefly:
> "right" or "wrong" are human values
Would 2+2=4 be correct, and 2+2=5 be incorrect, only if there were a human being to say so?
I think it's a question that only makes sense if there's a human asking it. "Correct" is always relative to something, in this case, the meaning a human attaches to that string, a string that only exists as a physical configuration of neurons.
Even without getting into the body-mind duality we are discussing here, it's understood that the string "2+2=4" requires additional context to have meaning, it's just that this context is often implicit (i.e. we're talking about arabic digits in base 10 notation, + is sum as defined in ..., etc).
> (I cannot edit my other comment any longer, but I want to add that it's far from my intention to sound as if I'm lecturing anyone, I'm well aware a lot of these are open questions -- possibly unresolvable -- and I don't consider myself an expert or well-read on this topic. I find it fascinating to discuss. All of my remarks/questions/disagreements with you are made in good faith.)
Thanks, I greatly appreciate your politeness and goodwill. Everything I say is in good faith too. I appreciate my ideas can seem odd, and sometimes I write in haste so do not take the time to explain things properly.
> it's understood that the string "2+2=4" requires additional context to have meaning, it's just that this context is often implicit (i.e. we're talking about arabic digits in base 10 notation, + is sum as defined in ..., etc).
I would distinguish the symbols from the concepts they represent. The string (or words, or handwritten notes) "2+2=4" is one thing; the concepts that it refers to are another. I could use binary instead of base-10, and write "10+10=100". The string would be different, but the concepts that the string referred to would be the same.
Everything I say, unless otherwise stated, refers to the concepts, not to the string.
>> Would 2+2=4 be correct, and 2+2=5 be incorrect, only if there were a human being to say so? > I think it's a question that only makes sense if there's a human asking it. "Correct" is always relative to something
This is true: correct is always relative to something (or, better, measured against something).
> in this case, the meaning a human attaches to that string, a string that only exists as a physical configuration of neurons.
But I disagree here. I would say it must be measured against something outside the mind, not the meaning a person gives something. If the correctness of arithmetic is measured against something inside the person's mind, then a madman who thought that 2+2=5 would be just as right as someone who thought that 2+2=4. Because there would be nothing outside the mind to measure against. One person can only be correct, and the other wrong, if there is something independent of both people to measure against. So if we say that arithmetic describes reality (which it clearly does: all physics, chemistry, engineering, computer science, etc etc assumes the reality of arithmetic), then we must say that there is something extra-mental to measure people's ideas against. It is this extra-mental measure that makes them correct or incorrect.
This is true not just of math, but of the empirical sciences. For example, somebody who thinks that a hammer and a feather will fall at different velocities in a vacuum is wrong, and somebody who thinks they fall at the same velocity is right. But these judgements can only be made by comparing against an extra-mental reality
So it seems to me when you say that
> the qualities of "right" or "wrong" only exist as physical configurations in the minds of humans.
you imply that arithmetic (and by extension, any subject) cannot describe reality, which must be false. It's also self-contradictory, because in this conversation each of us claims to be describing reality.
(I cannot edit my other comment any longer, but I want to add that it's far from my intention to sound as if I'm lecturing anyone, I'm well aware a lot of these are open questions -- possibly unresolvable -- and I don't consider myself an expert or well-read on this topic. I find it fascinating to discuss. All of my remarks/questions/disagreements with you are made in good faith.)
Correctness is evaluated by comparison to an etalon. Here you compare to two different etalons. Thought is formed correctly in terms of laws of motion of particles, then you find it incorrect in terms of mathematics. the results of comparisons are different because etalons are different.
What is it like to be another person?
I'm not sure how to answer the even more fundamental question, "What is it like to be yourself?" What constitutes a valid answer? It's a vague question.
True. I suppose every one of us has asked:
What makes me me? Whatever you identify as "yourself", how come it lives within your body? Why is there not someone else living inside your body? Why was I born, specifically "me", and not someone else?
This has puzzled me since childhood.
> I suppose every one of us has asked
Not at all. I was shocked when I noticed that how few people have asked themselves this question. In fact, it is impossible to even explain this question to the majority of people. Most people confuse the question with "what makes us intelligent", missing the whole "first person perspective" aspect of it.
I guess evolution tries to stop us from asking question that might lead to nihilism.
I think about this sometimes. From the POV of being in the human body I feel we must all be "me". If I wasn't here having this specific subjective experience as a human user on hackernews, then I would be someone or something else having another or "their" experience.
If that's not the case then I'll just have no subjective experience, same as before I was born/instantiated.
I don't believe that the phrase "what it's like" (in this philosophical sense) is coherent. When people like Nagel or Chalmers are asked to explain it, they liken it to other incoherent assertions.
It just means the experience of sensation. You're conscious of a purple object, the smell of brewed coffee, the feeling of a sharp pain, you have a resurfaced memory of a deceased relative, you visualize the beach, you dream of being unprepared for a test, You daydream while driving down a long road, you feel affection seeing a friend, you hear your internal dialog about the boss.
There's nothing incoherent here, they're just talking about subjective states of experience.
As I said, the phrase gets described in terms of other incoherent phrases ... it's entirely circular.
There was no explanation of how it's not circular. "what it's like", "subjective experience", "qualia" ... these are all undefined terms which are only "explained" by reference to each other and by frantic ostension. Someone mentions breathing in the morning air and when I note that that's an activity, I'm accused of bad faith interpretation ... which is sheer projection. People will insist that everyone knows "what it's like" ... and around we go again. When someone engages in that activity, they may have an emotional response (not everyone will, not every time, and the response is not always the same). But what is an emotional response? It's not some magical mental ether, it's a physical molecular process mediated by hormones and neurotransmitters that shift activity levels in different parts of the brain. People like Tom Nagel and David Chalmers claim that they can conceive of zombies that are physically identical to humans but aren't conscious, they have no qualia or mental states, "there's nothing that it's like to be them"--yet being physically identical, the exact same physical responses to breathing the morning air occur in them, the same emotions, even though they are "just" mechanisms. Well, we are mechanisms too, and whatever "it's like to be" us, it's exactly the same with zombies, and facile responses about "breathing the morning air" don't help at all and fail to grasp what the issues of the debate are. Most people have little knowledge of the debate and little experience with philosophical precision and clarity. Thus we get nonsense claims like that focusing on the "linguistics" of the words obscures the issue. They mean semantics, i.e., meaning ... dismissing what the words we are using mean is a mug's game.
I explained how it's not. Focusing on linguistics of the words obscures the actual issue, which is how we experience the world through our sensory modalities.
What's incoherent about it? Do you not think subjective experience has its own qualities? Breathing in fresh morning air, for example?
I stated what's incoherent about it. Your "Do you not think" is a non sequitur ... coherence is about meaning, and no one can say what the phrase means.
Aside from that, breathing fresh air in the morning is an activity, not a "quality of subjective experience". Generally the language people use around this is extremely confused and unhelpful.
I'm sure you think you're well intended, but your attempts at rigor have me scratching my head a little bit. I don't understand the defensiveness given that you haven't done the bare minimum to explain your position.
And no, that's not what a non sequitur is. And no, coherence is not just a linguistic idea. Then you try to explain what I "really mean" by "quality of subjective experience," and you can't even give a good faith reading of that. I'm really trying here.
What "defensiveness"? And you're accusing me of bad faith? Stick to talking about ideas, not people. I won't engage with you further.
It's more or less OK, thank you for asking. Recently I felt:
Disappointed when I went somewhere and there wasn't any tea,
Enthralled by a story about someone guarding a mystical treasure alone in a remote museum on a dark and stormy night,
Sympathetic toward a hardworking guy nobody likes, but also aggravated by his bossiness to the point of swearing at him,
Confused due to waking up at 7 pm and not being sure how it happened.
You probably don't entirely understand any of those. What is it to entirely understand something? But you probably get the idea in each case.
I'm going to ignore the issues of mind/body dualism since they are orthogonal to the argument I want to make about Nagel's bat.
The short version is that if we can approximate the sensory experience and the motor experience of an organism, and we can successively refine that approximation as measured by similarity in behavior between bat and man-bad, then I would argue that we can in fact imagine what it is like to be a bat.
In short, it is a Chinese Bat Room argument. If you put a human controlling a robot bat and a bat in two boxes and then ask someone to determine which is the human and which is the bat, when science can no longer tell the difference (because we have refined the human/bat interface sufficiently) you can ask the human controlling the robot bat to write down their experience and it would be strikingly similar to what the bat would say if we could teach it English.
The bat case is actually easier than one might suppose, similarly say, a jumping spider, because we can translate their sensory inputs to our nervous system and if we tune our reward system and motor system so that we can get even an approximate set of inputs and similar set of actuators, then we can experience what it is like to be a bat.
Further, if I improve the fidelity of the experimental man-bat simulation rig, the experience will likewise converge. While we will not be able to truly be a bat since that is asymptotically mutually exclusive with our biology, the fact that we can build systems that allow progressive approach to bat sensory motor experience means that we actually do have the ability to image the experience of other beings. That is, our experiences are converging and differ only due to our lack of our technical ability to overcome the limitations of our biological differences.
The harder case is when we literally don't have the molecule that is used to detect something, as in the tetrachormat case. That said one of my friends has always wanted to find a way to do an experiment where a trichromat can somehow have the new photo receptor expressed in one eye and see what happens.
The general argument about why we would expect something similar to happen should the technical hurdles be overcome is because basically all nervous systems wire themselves up by learning. Therefore, as long as the input and output ranges can be mapped to something that a human can learn, then a human nervous system should likewise converge to be able to sense and produce those inputs and outputs (modulo certain critical periods in neural development, though even those can be overcome, e.g. language acquisition by slowing down speech for adults).
Some technical hurdle examples. Converting a trichromat into a tetrachormat by crispering someone's left eye. Learning dolphin by slowing down dolphin speech in time while also providing a way for humans to produce dolphin high frequency speech via some transform on the human orofacial vocal system. There are limitations when we can't literally dilate time, but I supposed if we are going all the way, we can accelerate the human to the fraction of the speed of light that will compensate for the fact that the human motor system can't quite operate fast enough to allow a rapid fire conversation with a dolphin.
Daniel Dennett was the only good part of the "New Atheism" movement. May he rest in peace.
The moniker was mostly invented by the press. But if we're talking about all four "horsemen," I think they all made positive contributions to their respective fields. Likewise, there are fair critiques one can level at each of them, including Dennett.
[flagged]
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? We're trying for something else here.
Feels pretty substantive to me. Just because it's not what you were going for in relation to the discussion of that work doesn't mean it's unsubstantive. I approached it from the position Nagel brought up, which is reductive. They have life experiences that none of us can fathom, so we reduce it to what we know of them, which in my case is them living in my attic, much to my chagrin.
People feel different things, of course, and it's all valid. Nonetheless, there's a standard that we're trying to adhere to here, and comments like these are certainly below it - not a borderline call:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118703
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45115367
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45111401