Three things.
First, David Chalmers is considered one of the world's foremost
researchers in the consciousness field (he is certainly now the most
celebrated). He has read the argument presented in my paper, and he has
discussed it with me. He understood all of it, and he does not share
any of your concerns, nor anything remotely like your concerns. He had
one single reservation, on a technical point, but when I explained my
answer, he thought it interesting and novel, and possibly quite valid.
Second, the remainder of your comments below are not coherent enough to
be answerable, and it is not my job to walk you through the basics of
this field.
Third, about your digression: gravity does not "escape" from black
holes, because gravity is just the curvature of spacetime. The other
things that cannot escape from black holes are not "forces".
I will not be replying to any further messages from you because you are
wasting my time.
Richard Loosemore
Ed Porter wrote:
Richard,
Thank you for your reply.
It implies your article was not as clearly worded as I would have liked
it to have been, given the interpretation you say it is limited to.
When you said
"subjective phenomena associated with consciousness ... have the special
status of being unanalyzable." (last paragraph in the first column of
page 4 of your paper.)
you apparently meant something much more narrow, such as
"subjective phenomena associated with consciousness [of the type that
cannot be communicated between people --- and/or --- of the type that
are unanalyzable] ... have the special status of being unanalyzable."
If you always intended that all your statements about the limited
ability to analyze conscious phenomena be so limited --- then you were
right --- I misunderstood your article, at least partially.
We could argue about whether a reader should have understood this narrow
interpretation. But it should be noted Wikipedia, that unquestionable
font of human knowledge, states “qualia” has multiple definitions, only
some of which matche the meaning you claim “everyone agrees upon.”,
i.e., subjective experiences that “do not involve anything that can be
compared across individuals.”
And in Wikipedia’s description of Chalmers’ hard problem of
consciousness, it lists questions that arguably would be covered by my
interpretation.
It is your paper, and it is up to you to decide how you define things,
and how clearly you make your definitions known. But even given your
narrow interpretation of conscious phenomena in your paper, I think
there are important additional statements that can be made concerning it.
First given some of the definitions of Chalmers hard problem it is not
clear how much your definition adds.
Second, and more importantly, I do not think there is a totally clear
distinction between Chalmers’ “hard problem of consciousness” and what
he classifies as the easy problems of consciousness. For example, the
first two paragraphs on the second page of your paper seem to be
discusses the unanalyzable nature of the hard problem. This includes
the following statement:
“…for every “objective” definition that has ever been proposed [for the
hard problem], it seems, someone has countered that the real mystery has
been side-stepped by the definition.”
If you define the hard problem of consciousness as being those aspects
of consciousness that cannot be physically explained, it is like the
hard problems concerning physical reality. It would seem that many key
aspects of physical reality are equally
“intrinsically beyond the reach of objective definition, while at the
same time being as deserving of explanation as anything else in the
universe” (Second paragraph on page 2 of your paper).
Over time we have explained more and more about concepts at the heart of
physical reality such as time, space, existence, but always some mystery
remains. I think the same will be true about consciousness. In the
coming decades we will be able to explain more and more about
consciousness, and what is covered by the “hard problem” (i.e., that
which is unexplainable) will shrink, but there will always remain some
mystery. I believe that within decades two to six decades we will
--be able to examine the physical manifestations of aspects of qualia
that now cannot now be communicated between people (and thus now fit
within your definition of qualia);
--have an explanation for most of the major types of subjectively
perceived properties and behaviors of consciousness; and
--be able to posit reasonable theories about why we experience
consciousness as a sense of awareness and how the various properties of
that sense of awareness are created.
But I believe there will always remain some mysteries, such as why there
is any existence of anything, why there is any separation of anything,
why there is any time, etc. In fifty to one hundred years the hard
problem of consciousness may well just be viewed as one of the other
hard problems of understanding reality.
My belief is that consciousness is inherently no more mysterious than
any of reality, given the technological advance that will occur in this
century. I believe human consciousness is an extremely complex,
dynamic, self-interacting, dynamically self-focus-selecting computation
having trillions of channels connected in a small world network. And
each human consciousness is in, and thus aware of, its own computation,
just as a physical object located in a certain point of space is
affected by a set of physical forces determined as a function of its
location. The only difference is that different human consciousness
seem to be largely separated from each other, whereas we believe the
computation of the observable universe, other than what is in black
holes, is continuously connected down to a granularity approaching the
quantum level.
(Totally digression, but how does gravity escape from black holes, if
none of the other forces can?)
Since there is no aspect of physical reality that is anything other than
computation (if you include representation as part of computation), then
there is no total distinction between physical reality and conscious
reality, they are both computations, they both probably have degrees of
consciousness, both involve complex parallel processing of interactions
between extremely large numbers of entities. The major distinction is
that human consciousness have the capability to learn and compute
complex models of senses and emotionally felt experience and action.
Maybe when humans die, our consciousness will return to the extremely
complex computations of quantum reality. But answering that would be
another “hard problem.”
Ed Porter
P.S. Note that Daniel Dennet makes some arguments somewhat similar to
mine above, although somewhat different, concerning Chalmers’ hard
problem at http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/chalmers.htm
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2008 4:05 PM
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Subject: Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of
consciousness
Ed Porter wrote:
Richard,
You have provided no basis for your argument that I have misunderstood
your paper and the literature upon which it is based.
[snip]
My position is that we can actually describe a fairly large number of
characteristics of our subjective experience consciousness that most
other intelligent people agree with. Although we cannot know that
others experience the color red exactly the same way we do, we can
determine that there are multiple shared describable characteristics
that most people claim to have with regard to their subjective
experiences of the color red.
This is what I meant when I said that you had completely misunderstood
both my paper and the background literature: the statement in the above
paragraph could only be written by a person who does not understand the
distinction between the "Hard Problem" of consciousness (this being
David Chalmers' term for it) and the "Easy" problems.
The precise definition of "qualia", which everyone agrees on, and which
you are flatly contradicting here, is that these things do not involve
anything that can be compared across individuals.
Since this an utterly fundamental concept, if you do not get this then
it is almost impossible to discuss the topic.
Matt just tried to explain it to you. You did not get it even then.
Richard Loosemore
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