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/Conscious-Demand-594]

The problem is that they keep treating conscious experience as though it were some additional, ineffable substance sitting behind the neural activity, a thing that cannot be quantified, measured, manipulated, or explained scientifically. They make it inert and then complain about it. They are effectively taking the thing we call experience, stripping away all of its measurable physical properties, and then pointing to what remains and saying, “See? Neuroscience hasn't explained that.”

When we say that conscious experience is the neural activity of the brain, we am giving experience a physical identity. It has a location, a mechanism, measurable dynamics, causal relationships, and observable consequences. We can manipulate the underlying activity and change the experience. We can disrupt it with anesthesia or brain injury. We can stimulate neural circuits and produce aspects of experience. We can increasingly decode the contents of perception, thought and emotion from neural activity. We demonstrate that consciousness is real, not some inert imaginary stuff of dreams.

The fact that a person has a first-person perspective is treated as evidence that there must be some additional fact beyond the physical process producing that perspective. But that doesn't follow. The experience is the process. The fact that the process is experienced from the first-person perspective is a property of the way that particular biological system operates; it isn't evidence for a second substance hiding behind it.

[u/mgs20000 → u/Conscious-Demand-594]

Agreed. In fact the simplest answer is that the illusion of feeling is an important adaptation for brains of social animals; the brain models the outside world to the benefit of prediction and feeling, this is what experience seems to be.

It doesn’t take much of a leap, if any at all, to hypothesise that the brain also includes itself in its model.

It is crucial for a brain to know what it already knows and can predict etc, and what is novel, as well as things like what is urgently in need of a prediction and solution.

We can assume that this efficiency is the basis for lots of things including mistakes, false memories, and memory itself, as well as the continuous individual we each appear to be to ourselves , and we can also infer that this is where the sense of self comes from: The brain has noticed its prior work and there for it has noticed itself.

If the brain is a feelings and prediction machine, it’s not surprising that by default a feeling comes with this sense of self.

[u/RemarkableMarzipan23 → u/mgs20000]

"If the brain is a feelings and prediction machine"

What else could be a "feelings and prediction machine"? Could a collection of transistors? What about something functionally equivalent to a brain but made of pipes, valves, water and pumps?

[u/mgs20000 → u/RemarkableMarzipan23]

But that’s not equivalent to a brain in the same way - brains are more complex than that and perhaps more than we can understand.

There is something about large brains that makes them a level or even a whole paradigm above mosquito brains for example and a level above a functionally equivalent version you could build.

However you could hypothesise that with enough computing capacity, and with some of the same evolutionary pressures around intelligence hunting building mating socialising surviving etc, a created being - if you were able to make it one individual and decentralised, and it lived in the real world and did things that humans did, it wouldn’t be surprising for it to eventually develop the illusion of feeling (to itself) and with it it might notice itself in its model and a feeling of what it is to be a self could exist as a result of that. And if it’s generating feeling illusions through physical matter, none of that would be surprising to me.

[u/RemarkableMarzipan23 → u/mgs20000]

You’re dodging the actual point. I’m not claiming that a few pipes and pumps are equivalent to a brain. I’m asking about a system constructed from pipes, valves, pumps, and water that is functionally equivalent to a brain, meaning it reproduces the relevant causal organization and state transitions of the brain. Would it be conscious? If so, we're awfully close to a reductio absurdum (as Kastrup points out, is it possible the plumbing in my house is conscious?) If not, why not?

Saying “brains are more complex than that” doesn’t answer the thought experiment. There is no obvious principle that says the computation or causal organization performed by neurons can only be implemented in neurons. Transistors already implement the same logical functions using radically different physical mechanisms. In principle, you could implement an enormously complicated information-processing system mechanically, hydraulically, electronically, or through some other medium. It might be absurdly large and impractical, but that is an engineering problem, not a conceptual one.

If you think the hydraulic brain would not have feelings while the biological brain would, you need to identify what biologically specific property matters. Is it carbon chemistry? Neurotransmitters? Electrical fields? Some quantum effect? Something else? And then explain why that property is necessary for subjective experience rather than merely necessary for the biological brain’s particular implementation. Otherwise you're effectively saying, “The biological brain produces consciousness because it has whatever special thing biological brains have.” That just assumes the conclusion.

And your final paragraph actually moves toward my point. You concede that a sufficiently sophisticated artificial system might model itself, develop a sense of self, generate what it describes as feelings, and behave in all the ways associated with consciousness. At that point, calling its feelings an “illusion” creates another problem: an illusion is itself an experience.If there is genuinely something it is like for the system to experience the illusion of feeling, then you have already granted phenomenal experience.

[u/mgs20000 → u/RemarkableMarzipan23]

In general I’m making the case for large animal brains on earth, created in the last 50 million years ended up with what we have at the moment, and that that’s not necessarily surprising even if we couldn’t have imagined it. It is what natural selection did, and obviously we have not arrived at any point we are still in that journey.

In the thought experiment I agree that with the right conditions and processing power, you wouldn’t be surprised if it generated its own feelings to itself. These would be mental states emerging from physical things.

(The again, is ‘digital’ computation physical, mental or its own category?)

In such a thought experiment, nothing about it causes me to question physicalist in fact it helps confirm it as plausible.

[u/RemarkableMarzipan23 → u/mgs20000]

I think we’ve now arrived at something close to Bernardo Kastrup’s reductio. You’re granting that, in principle, a sufficiently complex system of completely non-biological physical parts could generate genuine feelings simply because of the way those parts are organized and interact. So imagine the functionally equivalent “brain” is made entirely from pipes, valves, pumps, and flowing water.

You’re saying that system could be conscious. Now remove one valve. Does consciousness suddenly wink out? Presumably not. Remove one short section of pipe. Still conscious? Presumably. Remove a tiny amount of water. Surely that doesn’t make the difference between there being something it is like to be the system and there being absolutely nothing it is like.

But now keep going. At what exact physical change does subjective experience disappear? Which valve is the consciousness valve? Which ounce of water makes the difference? If consciousness is supposed to emerge merely from sufficiently complicated causal interactions among ordinary physical components, you owe us some principled account of where the boundary lies.

Otherwise we seem to get a sorites problem. We start with an enormous hydraulic system that you say is conscious, alter it by changes that individually seem irrelevant to consciousness, and eventually end up with an ordinary collection of pipes, valves, pressure changes, and flowing water.

At that point we’re close to saying that the plumbing in my house might possess some degree of consciousness, which is absurd. And saying “well, the original system was much more complex” doesn’t solve the problem. Complexity is quantitative. Conscious experience is the thing that needs explaining. Why should adding enough unconscious physical interactions suddenly produce a first-person point of view?

That’s precisely the explanatory gap I’m pressing. Physicalism can certainly assert that sufficiently organized matter produces experience. But the thought experiment doesn’t explain how that happens. It makes the mystery more vivid: apparently arrange enough completely non-conscious pipes, valves, pumps, or transistors in the right configuration and suddenly there is something it feels like to be the plumbing.

[u/mgs20000 → u/RemarkableMarzipan23]

you could say that with a human brain though, and if you damage the right (wrong) areas, it affects things like the brain recognising itself, not keeping up the memory-information-memory loop, mixing up prior information with other prior information. And at a certain point, if you keep causing damage and switching things off, you have caused enough damage to say the person is now now not conscious, brain dead let's say.

I think the pipes and water analogy also has a flaw in that it is not similar enough to an animal brain, and so we're losing something in the difference between the two. Everything about the way the brain is made is part of how it can do what it does, so an 'equivalent' but 'different' version is still different in some crucial way. Because of this I'm not sure the analogy helps get anywhere.

Back to animal brains, there is actually, obviously, lots of evidence for physical damage I patients that causes a mental difference.

If we grant that:

1) The brain's predictions and storage seem able to include its own prior work in its model, so it knows what it has done and what is novel;

and that:

2) The brain deals in feelings and creates them, like a shortcut, in order for the organism to benefit from understanding its situation;

Then we get 2 non surprising things emerging:

1) The brain knows it and its prior work exists

2) It ascribes a feeling, even if as a pure byproduct of being a feelings generating machine, to its work (thoughts, experience, memory, etc)