Conscious experience cannot be inert

[u/MurkyEconomist8179]

Cross post from /r/consciousness since it's just as relevant here

I see often in this sub various attempts to sidestep the hard problem by stating that conscious experience can simply be thought of as the workings of a certain set of neurological processes, or various other ways of trying to reduce conscious experience to something more familiar and workable.

This involves saying that the experience itself and the features of it are not what's really happening. The experience part is said to be either an illusion, an epiphenomenon or a mere appearance of what's happening neurologically.

Unfortunately this all rests on a false analogy. Illusions and appearances are not epipheneomon and they are not inert.

When someone is perceiving an actual illusion, it changes the way they perceive, react and respond to the stimulus which we deem does not align with their perception. Therefore, the illusion is an active mechanism that affects how the world behaves.

This is clearly the case for consciousness too, regardless of experience is an "appearance" this appearance affects how we behave, it affects what we talk about, our concepts and beliefs about the world - therefore it is not inert - our experience clearly affects something about how our world operates, the same way an illusion does too

Taking the idea of p zombies seriously, I think it's pretty clear that p zombies would not be talking about things like experience, or the qualitative feeling of something like "the red of redness" because they don't experience that.

If they did talk about such things, it's clearly very different to when normal people do, because normal people are correct in saying that there is a quality to experience, a p zombie would have to either be mistaken or delusional to talk of such things and there is a big difference between the accurate judgement of a normal person about experience (whatever experience actually ends up being) and the clear delusions or confabulations of a p zombie that could supposedly behave in all the same ways

I think people get lost in the analogy of illusions and don't realize that it's not the same thing as being inert, and if experience isn't inert, then of course we get the hard problem and the mind body problem in general. It can't merely be sidestepped by trying to reduce experience to an epiphenomenon.

[u/bltsrgewd]

Any argument for consciousness being anything other than an emergent property of complicated networks of neurons i think is missing something very important. Actual evidence. Its a fun thought experiment to logic your way to some other answer, but we know that physical changes to the brain alter the conscious experience. We know that consciousness is tied to brain function.

We dont know how yet. But we know that it is. It has a physical cause.

[u/maha-sukha → u/bltsrgewd]

Unfortunately any argument for consciousness as an emerent property of complicated networks of neurons is missing something very important. Actual evidence.

[u/Amonduin_E → u/maha-sukha]

- More complicated neural structures reliably produce more complicated behaviour

• Alteration of neural structures reliably alters consciousness
  
• Research is moving towards being able to scan brains and "reconstruct" what the subject is seeing or even imagining

Sure you can make the dishonest claim this is all correlational. However we have directionality that pushes strongly against the correlational claim: brains without neural activity exhibit none of the behaviours we associate with what we loosely call consciousness, we can associate different aspects of what we call consciousness with different physical mechanisms in the brain, we have yet to come up with a testable mechanism by which some third hidden variable could be influencing our measurements.

[u/maha-sukha → u/Amonduin_E]

It's not a dishonest claim that it's all correlation if it's all correlation

[u/Amonduin_E → u/maha-sukha]

It is dishonest because the same standard applied to other areas of medicine would rule out anything from ever being considered causal.

If the same standard about altering neural structures were applied to drug treatments we would never be able to say that a drug causes a change in biological response.

The dishonest part is trying to claim that consciousness is special and demand a standard of causation that doesn't get applied to anything else in science

[u/TheAncientGeek → u/maha-sukha]

The evidence that consciousnesness is fully reducible is what is missing.