You missed my point. I use the word computer as a simplified example. If I program a simple computer program in my terminal here in C++ to say “I am conscious”. It is trivially obvious that I can’t trust that the computer is “experiencing” something, is conscious, has subjective experience, has a sensation… I can only know for sure that it is programed to say “I am conscious”, “it’s a sensation”, etc.
Now I could make a more complicated computer program, so that instead of merely printing “I am conscious” to the screen, it additionally has a complicated internal information structure, and it repeats the same mantra to itself and records it for later retrieval. So when queried it can retrieve information that says “I have a sensation and I have always had this sensation. It is obvious”.
It isn’t obvious that the word has any meaning, it can be defined to be that which is said by complicated entities whose evolutionary survival has selected for this form of self-justification.
Seriously, I don’t claim to be smart, but I’m also not stupid, and I with a very low tolerance for self-deluding bullshit. I don’t think it’s so obvious that your consciousness is not an illusion. Have you ever been convinced of something as obvious, only to later face-palm? Can you at least admit it is conceivable the same situation applies to consciousness? Of course we may just have to agree to disagree.
I think that I am doing nothing but blindly following the laws of physics. I think that what I am writing currently, including any mention of subjective experience, is nothing but the blind, dumb, meaningless working out of those laws. When I look closely at what is subjectively experience, it dissolves, I don’t see anything other than that I can say that I have it. I can’t point to anything but bits of input and output that flit across my mental field. But me pointing to that is again nothing more than a computer programmed to look over its memory banks and recollect their content. What I’m describing is easier when I close my eyes, because with them open, seeing involves complicated input, and seeing in and of itself can easily be confused with subjective experience, leading one to flippantly say they are conscious even before really thinking about it.
Fair enough. I just hope there is somebody out there who is also unconscious, yet able to follow the laws of physics that allow complex entities to claim with delusional vigor that they are conscious. We could have a jolly old time bonding over our not being conscious and the meaninglessness of conversing about anything at all.
Dennett wrote a book called Consciousness Explained, which some scalawags refer to as Consciousness Explained Away. I’ve not read it, but you might enjoy it in any case.
And you’re right: “Of course consciousness exists, duh!” is not an adequate answer. I can’t articulate my experience of consciousness any more than I can my experience of the colour red.
BUT! That I experience something that, for all intents and purposes is equivalent in others, seems like pretty strong evidence for consciousness (and redness) being largely universal (by analogy).
This is not in the same way that “I’ve experienced Jesus’ love!” “Yes, me too!” works, because only a fraction of the population make that claim; rather, it’s on the level of “I’ve experienced physical pain”, which is considerably different from the mere physical mechanism that operates to trigger a pain response.
IIRC, there was an early participant for the Loebner prize (Turing test competition, for those who don’t know) who theorized that consciousness did not exist – we were simply glorified chat-bots. “Experiences” were simply part of the program, built into the code’s fabric, if you will.
I wish I could recall his name…I do think he published an article or two about it.
Related question: is it wrong to murder a truly, permanently non-conscious adult human any more than it is wrong to turn off a TV? What’s the distinction?
(And I don’t mean someone who is brain-dead, either.)
I’ll take a look. In fact, strangely, I have that book, just haven’t read it yet!
I agree that the fact that consciousness is a more or less universally accepted experience makes it a very difficult target for criticism. But nonetheless, I’d be happy if you did at least accept the possibility that it is no different than the “I’ve experienced Jesus’ love!” that happens in a subset of the population. The mere fact that a subset of the population can fall under such spells is to me pretty good evidence in support of the possibility (though you may argue remote) of the similar being true for the entire human race, which is clearly susceptible to delusion. In any case “appeal to popularity” is a logical fallacy, and relying on it is ultimately a mistake.
I think it is wrong to murder kittens, because they seem to feel pain, and seem to be enjoying indulging in their curiosity about the strange world they find themselves in, conscious or not. Same goes for unconscious humans. Unless they are assholes.
Well, there are those things we call delusion or denial. When we’re in them we don’t know so.
But I’m one of those stoopid people who still believe that there are some things about existence which yet can’t be understood using only our left brains. I hope that doesn’t make me an enemy of science. Heh.
Another way to put it is that I believe that for everything there is a balance in its opposite. No absolutes.
I believe I understand what you’re saying. Having been a student of human nature for most of my life I do agree that behavior patterns are alarming in their predictability. To me that’s a trance state that many of us prefer, or fall into unbeknownst, because of our circumstance. It’s our somewhat grim default state, yes?
And it’s one way to view one’s life. A pretty depressing one, I think. The goal for me would be to expand on what I think is honest, true-to-my-nature expression of life. What else is there to do? So do it with zest.
Yes, it’s remote. In fact, the possibility is so remote that IMHO it’s negligible. And what if consciousness is an illusion? It doesn’t change anything except that (as I hinted earlier) it removes a reason not to harm others.
So yes, it could all just be automatons fooling themselves, but as I consider this possibility virtually indistinguishable from having zero probability, and as I find the idea to have troubling ethical implications, I find it not worth seriously entertaining.
Understand that just because a line of reasoning is a tautology doesn’t mean that it is wrong; it just relies upon an internal set of self-consistent but unproven assumptions.
In the case of consciousness, because consciousness is defined as the gestalt of our ability to perceive and rationalize, we would not be able to perceive consciousness without actually being conscious. From that standpoint, consciousness is a bootstrapped phenomena; it isn’t a single, linear flow, or even a mappable network of logical activity, but is a result of a very large number of different components of perception, objectification, interpretation, reasoning, interpolation, and intuition (filling in the blanks). The overall result of this combination of components results in an ability to perceive the local environment and respond to it in a nuanced, multi-variant fashion that, if not actually self-directed cognition, is effectively the same thing. Similarly, while an individual neuron doesn’t have free will to fire whenever it wants, a very large network of interconnected and self-modifying neurons displays a behavior that deviates substantially from any attempt to impose a rigorous system logic upon it, and while it follows general rules at both the neurological level and (to a limited extent) the cognitive level, it ultimately produces results that are at best predictable only on a statistical basis. Jeffery might usually order mushrooms and peppers on his pizza, but there is a non-zero possibility that he may ask for onions and canadian bacon.
So, if you think that you’re not actually conscious and/or have free will, then your resultant behavior is still sufficiently unpredictable and generally self-involved such that it looks, sounds, and smells every bit like the general understanding of consciousness and internal cognition. At that point, the argument becomes a purely philosophical and pedantic one, of interest only to people who have nothing better than discuss whether a brick is actually a brick or just the concept of a brick in physical brick-like form, and serves only as a counterargument to marijuana legalization on the basis of fundamental inanity.
There is a bunch of information-processing going on in your brain. There is a portion of this information-processing whose contents you are especially able to report verbally. Call this portion E. Note: I’m not definingE to be the information-processing that you verbally report. Rather, accessibility to verbalization is just one of its features, which I’m using to point out that portion of information-processing that I’m calling E.
But I also want you to notice that E, as a process, continues even when you choose not to report its contents verbally, even to yourself. E is not made of words. It may even be very difficult to verbalize it. E is only comparatively easy to verbalize. Nonetheless, it is distinctively verbalizable.
For example, you said in your OP that you were “aware of the irony of asking these questions”. Evidently, your awareness of this irony was accessible to verbal reporting. Thus, this awareness was part of E.
Obviously the brain does a lot of processing that is not part of E. For example, we find it very hard to describe the processing that distinguishes colors. We also find it hard to verbalize the processing that generates grammatical sentences. (Often, the sentences are already fully-formed before we are aware that our brain is forming them.) Until we understand how the brain works at a very deep level, we won’t be able to delineate precisely what exactly is part of E and what is not.
But we do have limited access to what goes on in our brains. This access comes through several channels. There is introspection (which is how you were aware of the irony of your questions even before you saw yourself type that sentence.) There is how our brain deals with optical illusions. There are the cognitive biases. These channels of access give us a vague idea of the structure of the information-processing going on in the brain. We can make out enough to analyze this structure into roughly delineated components. Among these components is E. E is what people are talking about when they talk about consciousness.
Tautological reasoning isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s just meaningless as an argument. Consciousness can be taken as an axiom, and a tautological definition can be elaborated from that, and nothing more.
It is indeed a philosophical argument. But I think it is excessive to equate my question to discussions like “whether a brick is actually a brick or just the concept of a brick in physical brick-like form”, which I agree are inane, and which I have no patience for. Nonetheless I think it is interesting and important to me to find out if anyone else out there shares my philosophical outlook. The concept of not believing oneself to be conscious is rather disturbing and more interesting to me than many extremely inane and obvious things I’ve read discussed by some very visible and historically important philosphers.
Again, that’s irrelevant; I’m not talking about some computer external to me, I’m talking about my own thought processes. You may not be able to tell if I’m telling the truth or not but I certainly can, I’m experiencing it.
So far I agree with you. But I don’t endorse that we are conscious of E unless defined as merely being able to verbalize a recognition of the existence of information processing going on.
Yes I said I was “aware of the irony of asking these questions”; that does not imply I really was aware in any experiential sense. A computer could be programmed to detect an irony and report on it, without ever having a subjective experiential awareness of it.
Very nice post btw. I agree that an experience of E is what is being referred to, whether the experience itself is real. Let me briefly elaborate on the connection between free will and consciousness, so that you understand better what I mean. If you believe in the determinism that has been firmly established by science, then you agree we have no free will. This means that you have no free will to “experience” anything. When you say you “experience” something, you are merely saying that you experience something, and it is not necessarily a reflection of anything meaningful, because you have no control over what you are saying. If you have no control over what you are saying, are we to trust that verbalizations about “subjective experience” have any meaning at all?
