# Conscious experience is self-representational access to intrinsic properties **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 23, 2021, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/conscious-experience-is-self-representational-access-to-intrinsic-properties/954814 "2021-11-23T16:57:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 67
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2023, 4:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/conscious-experience-is-self-representational-access-to-intrinsic-properties/954814/67 "2023-04-14T04:58:31Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > And those hypothetical people are free to make their point and explain their argument here. The point is that you’re appealing to a historically contentious philosophical point, that claims about consciousness are scientific claims, without offering any argument to that effect, seemingly taking it for granted. Unfortunately, most of the people who have offered arguments to the contrary are thus long dead (although their consequent appearance in this thread would itself go a long way to substantiate their position, in some cases). More modern arguments are Chalmer’s [philosophical zombies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie) and Jackson’s tale about [Mary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument). My own argument has been given in this thread (and in the paper, and in the explanatory posts on 3QD): > [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > I follow the usage of [Strawson](https://www.sjsu.edu/people/anand.vaidya/courses/c2/s0/Realistic-Monism---Why-Physicalism-Entails-Panpsychism-Galen-Strawson.pdf) (link goes to pdf download), who distinguishes between physicalism and _physics_-alism. The former just means that everything in the universe is physical, whereas the latter includes a further commitment that everything can be made sense of by means of physical theories. This is a genuine further metaphysical hypothesis: even if everything is physical, there is no reason to think that everything should be captured by what a largely hairless primate on an unremarkable rock orbiting a small star calls a ‘theory of physics’. > > The situation, as alluded to above, parallels that of mathematics. There, the theory of the natural numbers—the Peano axioms—fails to exhaustively describe its intended object, i.e. the natural numbers as a mathematical entity: there are statements that are true about the numbers, which the theory can’t decide. Likewise, I content that there are similar lacunae in physical theories, which thus fail to fully capture the nature of matter. But the natural numbers are still mathematical entities; likewise, matter still is physical. In this sense, my model is physicalist, but not physics-alist. Essentially, physics—or science in general—gives us the structure of things, but not their ‘inner nature’. So, claims about what conscious experience is, aren’t scientific claims, simply because the object of science is that which can be modeled—and what can be modeled is just structure: indeed, modeling _is_ the recreation of a particular structure within a distinct substrate (think of constructing a Lego model of the Eifel tower, for instance). > [@Mijin](#): > > Right now it appears that you wish to make a bold claim, but when pressed on how we might test that claim, it becomes the far weaker claim of your model being “compatible with” naturalism. I don’t see what claim you think I’m making. As the OP notes, what I claim to offer is > [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > what I think is the first mathematical theory of intentionality, the nicest result of which is that the mind-state inducing an action aimed at bringing about a certain goal has that goal as its object—and moreover, can prove that fact (to itself). > > Furthermore, I argue that conscious experience is essentially self-representational access to intrinsic properties—in other words, that when what Eddington called the ‘[inner un-get-atable](http://www.stafforini.com/quotes/?cat=1028#:~:text=Whenever%20we%20state,all%20surrounding%20objects.%20%5B%E2%80%A6%5D)’ nature of matter is brought under the purview of the self-referential von Neumann process, that’s what we call ‘consciousness’ or ‘qualia’ or ‘phenomenal experience’. This leaves the Hard Problem unsolvable (them things being un-get-atable and all), but gives qualia a proper job in the world: at certain points, the von Neumann process encounters questions that can’t be decided by any theoretical model of itself, but whose answers it can introspect. In other words, I claim that I have a bit of mathematics that models how symbols acquire meanings, which leads to undecidable questions as a consequence, the solution of which can’t be captured in any formal model, since any model is limited to the structural level. This yields a theory of consciousness on which it is furnished by self-representational access to intrinsic properties. So what claim do you think I’m making that I’m backing off from? Is it just the ‘is’ in the topic title you object to? But this is Great Debates, so isn’t it usual to offer up the topic under debate as a title? Should I preface it with ‘Resolved:’? > [@DSeid](#): > > Well first of all I think your ?philosophic/metaphysic? definition of computation is very different than any meaningful real world one. I don’t know what a ‘meaningful real world’ definition of computation might be, but it’s a particular species of implementation relation that has a long pedigree, generally known as [‘mapping’ accounts](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computation-physicalsystems/#SimMapAcc), which associate steps of some formal process (giving the actual ‘computation’) with states of a physical system in its evolution (i.e. the computer). In the article, and also in [this thread](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-consciousness-is-not-computation/850402) and [this essay](https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2021/05/to-see-a-world-in-a-grain-of-silicon-why-minds-arent-programs.html), I give a detailed argument that there is always an ambiguity in what computation is thus mapped to a physical system, and that this ‘implementation relation’ is indeed a matter of choice—thus, the same system can be used to compute different functions by different users. Hence, computation is not an objective notion: there’s no objective (‘scientific’, if you like) fact of the matter regarding what a given system computes; it needs an act of interpretation to pin down that computation. (This line of argumentation also has a long philosophical pedigree, originating with Putnam (see the SEP article)—ironically, the philosopher who had originally proposed the computational theory of the mind in the first place.) > [@DSeid](#): > > Second, I am not convinced your road lead to any destination honestly. It may be that the meta phenomena of consciousness arises from the process you describe, or one similar, or one different. I’d require some evidence to actually consider the case. Whether my argument works is of course the topic under discussion: I have presented my reasoning, you’re free to poke holes into it—or, if you can’t find any, accept it. As for ‘evidence’: what would such evidence look like, in your opinion? What evidence do you need to accept that computers can’t figure out whether a set of matrices can be multiplied together to yield the zero matrix (or any other of a host of problems we know to be unsolvable by computational means)? > [@DSeid](#): > > In a sense an individual neuron is computing as it adds up various weighted inputs and fires or does not as a result. That’s a physical process, not a computational one. A basin may be said to ‘add up’ streams of water and then overflow if the total ‘sum’ exceeds a given volume, but of course, it doesn’t bother with any adding—it just overflows if it can’t hold the water anymore. There is a substantial question how such _physica_l processes are connected to the _formal_ process of computation—indeed, that question largely parallels that of how brain processes are connected to mental ones. That’s after all the attraction of the computational picture: in computers, the concrete seems to have a way to reach into the abstract; thus, making the brain a computer might adduce this capacity, too. But this really gets things the wrong way around: the capabilities of computers really piggyback on the interpretational capacities of the minds of their users, not the other way around. Consider the following simple physical device, consisting of two ‘input’ wires and one ‘output’ wire. If both ‘input’ wires are at a voltage above 5V, then so, too, is the ‘output’-wire. What function does this system compute? Well, there’s no unique answer to that question: we might consider ‘high voltage’ to mean ‘1’, and ‘low voltage’ to mean ‘0’: in this case, it computes the logical ‘and’ function (and we can _actually use it_ to compute that function). Or, we might consider ‘high’ to mean ‘0’, and ‘low’ to mean ‘1’: in this case, it computes the logical ‘or’, and again, that’s how we could actually use it. So there’s no real _fact of the matter_ regarding whether it computes one function or the other, it’s just a matter of _interpretation_. This generalizes to more complicated functions readily. But there’s in fact a further instance of subjective choice in the example, which is singling out _that particular_ level of behavior of _that particular_ physical artifact as our ‘computer’, or our substrate for computation. We might look more closely and see that there’s more detail to its behavior: the output could be between 0V and 2.5V or between 2.5V and 5V depending on the input, so that the ‘low’ state is actually two states we had lumped into one. Now, the device can be seen as computing a function from three input to three output values (and again, which one will be open to choice). So what the system computes is a matter of singling out and lumping together behaviors. But this singling out and lumping together is itself just a function of how we conceptually slice up the world. > [@DSeid](#): > > Assemblies of cells then compute based on various inputs back and forth from other assemblies of cells. At some level those dynamic computations, the processes, are experienced as symbols and consciousness arises. Else you believe in the ghost in the machine. Except of course I’ve given a detailed theory of how this arises without any ghost in the machine, albeit in a non-computable way—as it must: to explain the emergence of computation in terms of computation is just circular. > [@DSeid](#): > > Simply put I do not see any reason to believe your argument here is right. As is your prerogative, of course. But as of yet, you haven’t really engaged with my argument, but simply tried to find proxy reasons to discard it out of hand—‘not falsifiable’, ‘ghost in the machine’, ‘no evidence’. It’s of course hard work to engage with unfamiliar topics on their own terms, but I find that whenever I think I have a simple answer to a complicated question—such as ‘only falsifiable notions deserve my attention’—then what’s really at the root of this is me trying to shift the cognitive burden of actually engaging with the ideas as presented. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/conscious-experience-is-self-representational-access-to-intrinsic-properties/954814)._