Personally I think it’s silly as hell. Qualia is obviously a biological component of experience… Not some weird thing that science will never be able to put in to words.
I’ve been listening to a lot of psychology podcasts lately and for some reason people seem obsessed with the idea despite you needing to make the same logical leaps to believe it as any sort of mysticism… Maybe I am just tripping idk
Consciousness IMO isn’t a field of study for science. Science is based on the measurement of observable phenomena, and consciousness is the subjective experience. We can’t observe it in others, so how could we hope to form a testable theory? Utterly absurd.
yeah this 100%, it’s always the frustration i run into hearing hard (and imo reductive) physicalist/materialist arguments around this stuff. it almost always reads to me as coming from an ulterior motive of wanting to expand science beyond its purview, and/or of wanting to shortcut out the at times difficult cognitive dissonance that comes from the inherent ambiguity/mystery around philosophical questions.
Exactly.
People said that shit about the material world… So far the claim that “X isn’t a field of study for science” has been wrong every time.
Propose a falsifiable hypothesis that describes consciousness. Propose a test that could disprove the hypothesis
I like a synthesis of Global Workspace Theory and illusionism. Here’s my hypothesis:
Consciousness is a bundle of modular cognitive processes coordinated via a global workspace, with the sense of unity and richness partly illusory; even if experience is illusory or partially constructed, its functional and self-modeling properties are emergent and necessary for interaction with complex biological systems.
This can be proven false by demonstrating fully integrated conscious experience without the presence of a globalized workspace.
The illusionism part could be disproven if we ever map out the entirety of the human brain (mind reading effectively) and prove that qualia is not illusory.
I admit this doesn’t really counter the “hard problem” of why it feels like anything to experience… But I really do feel like that’s just a weird philosophy party question that doesn’t actually mean anything. What would it possible mean to not experience? We have no frame of reference for an actual, honest to goodness, p zombie
edit: actually it cannot be disproven with a fully integrated conscious experience without presence of a globalized workspace… that just means there are possibly multiple ways to develop consciousness (which I believe is already the scientific consensus) and GWT is one of those ways.
How do you demonstrate consciousness
That is certainly a good question, which is why I edited my comment. I imagine we will be able to do it at some point, the same way we can packet capture a network interaction, but for now… no clue.
We might pick up se sort of brainwave or similar, but we’re trying to identify the feeling of subjective experience through objective means, not merely identify a physical process. This is be definition impossible. An inherent contradiction
Subjective experience, at least how I think it occurs, is literally just those brain waves functioning.
Theoretically we could take brain A in a jar, take it’s exact conscious state, and apply it to Brain B in a jar and see what “qualia” transfers over.
Maybe this is just my compsci brain but I literally do this all the time with computers…
Let’s assume we had a raspberry pi sitting under a tree somewhere running Pong for the last three thousand years. Every scientist that has ever looked at that machine had thought it was magic, but we can clearly see otherwise through retrospect. We can capture the actual ones and zeroes being moved between different pieces of copper. We can take those ones and zeroes and figure out exactly what they’re for.
We can do this because we are the creator of said ones and zeroes, but to those scientists the last three thousand years, it is basically consciousness.
Without the spec doc you can never truly learn what that computer is doing… People would argue that while it may be playing pong it’s true goal is to deceive the viewer into thinking it’s doing nothing but playing pong. A P Zombie of a raspberry pi.
We can never capture the subjective experience of that machine… Whatever the hell that means… So we can never know what it’s actual goal was, without retrospect.
A P Zombie theoretically has no data running within the copper but I don’t think that is literally possible at all, which is why I think P Zombies are nonsense.
Pong is something an outside observer can see. We can show something is playing pong simply by seeing it, and transferring the code to anither PC may be a mysterious process to all but you, but seeing pong on another device would be readily evident to any observer with the senses to perceive it.
Whether that computer feels the experience of playing pong is not something anyone but the computer itself can observe. We can transfer its code to another computer, and the new computer is the only one capable of assessing its own consciousness, because there is no outside phenomena to observe when the phenomena can only be described as an inner process.
Lol, this reads like the white paper for an AI start up, and contains just about as much abuse of jargon.
hell yeah gimme that VC money dawg. Critics like you are what the silicon valley types consider “Winning:”!
Yep, the comparison to silicone valley vcs is certainly apt
So no psychology either? Heals a lot of people though. But I agree, that science is not enough for every philosophical question about our minds and experience. It still has a place though.
We can see what therapies lead to specific results quite readily. If a certain therapy reduces suicides, that’s measurable and objective. Certainly there are elements of the field that aren’t good subjects for scientific method, but the field involves plenty of science
Yes, I agree. Also, I think I now got what you meant earlier and agree with that too.
Does it though? Despite the overwhelming spread of psychology, I don’t think people are on the whole ‘getting better’. Now, I don’t think that is exclusively psychology’s fault, but I do think that there are large elements of the human experience that are not addressed by psychology, and moreover, the replication crisis has shown that psychology is better understood as a roughly systemic discipline than a heuristic one.
Psychology is still bound to the material determinations that makes it a practicing profession.
One could say the same thing of meditation and zen, but that doesn’t mean it has a heuristic aspect to it.
i think a more precise version of what Dessa was trying to convey is more like: “the ultimate nature of consciousness isn’t a field of study for science,” which i agree with. you’re right re: psychology and neuroscience - that we can study how conscious experience seems to behave under certain conditions and contexts, and within certain baseline assumptions. and through that we find practical breakthroughs that can really help people.
Yes, I absolutely agree with that, some questions are metaphysical. I just think we shouldn’t discount the field of “talking to people about their subjective experiences and using the scientific method to see what effects them” as unscientific.
Consciousness must be a possible object of study, otherwise we are all reincarnations of Descartes!