Consciousness in a robot? (agnostic, animals, meaning, believe)

[MysticPhD]

Originally Posted by AREQUIPA

The reliable illusion that I call I. What is your problem? I am very aware of that sensation of 'I -ness' but I am not fooled by it. What is your problem?

It is absolutely relevant. The issue is not missed but is not addressed because it seems pretty irrelevant. You want to make a big deal if the illusion of 'I' because it supports this idea of Something More that you use as 'Evidence' for your theory. But like everything else you have produced. it vanishes as soon as you examine it.

When you say the illusion of "I-ness" you essentially discount your own existence despite its "unavoidableness." Nothing vanishes as soon as you examine it. There is no time you do NOT experience the "composite I-ness" . . . even when you for some reason are amnesiac and don't have a clue who you are or have been previously. In fact, the "I-ness" is the ONLY thing you absolutely know to be real . . . as the solipsists have often tried and failed to prove. As you said reality is real and there are other "I-nesses" in existence. What I cannot understand is how this utterly central, crucial, unavoidable and constant "I-ness" that IS you . . . whatever it does or does not remember about you and your experiences . . . can be so cavalierly dismissed. Since it is so independent of memories and experiences . . . it cannot be the result of them.

[Arach Angle]

We are NOT discounting our existence. We do exist!! "what is the "I". Stating the "I"ness is "you" is a circle talk. What is the "you"? also, if you lose all memory. "you" will not be the "same you". "you" will change over time to match the "new memories". Unless you can remove the memories while keeping the same "brain state". The "memory of "I". and the "brain state of I" are kind of the same thing.

A radio built to play one station with no tuning knobs. And image you don't know what it is or how it works. It sounds like voices in that box. Take the radio apart and you find no voice. It is different that it appears. It "seems" to more than it is. We can extent this notion to the speakers and back track to the person talking into the microphone to fit the discussion. We can link this notion directly to this discussion in many ways.

But the "music" does exist. It also matches many parts of more than one philosophy.

[Arach Angle]

Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof

You might be somewhat correct when you say "experience is not knowledge," but this would only be correct insofar as you stick to just stage 1 (and maybe 2?) At stage 3, part of your brain is turning your own bodily processes into "concepts" and thus, experience becomes objectified as knowledge of experience. And since "that which we have knowledge of" is our own process of BEING, it is not a type of knowledge that can be transferred to another mind via either ostensive pointing or by purely abstract propositions. I can tell you about "red" or my concept of "the redness of red," but since I'm referring to my own acquaintance with my own essence as a process, I can't "point to it" like I can point to a red balloon. For you to understand what I mean, you need to "turn inward" - just as I did - and objectify your own bodily processes to yourself. I can't do that for you. I can't point to it. I can't use any combination of logic and abstract structure/dynamic models to prove to you that my "acquaintance" with "red" is actually any sort of knowledge at all. This is basically what it means to say that "knowledge by acquaintance" is subjective.

This is fair. I don't agree with it all. I think people run into trouble when they try to "disprove" an entire philosophical stance. In philosophy it is very hard to do without anchoring the stance in the lab. And that only discounts parts of it anyway. Usually philosophy has so many parts that are "plausible" it is very hard to say the entirety of the stance is "false".

I haven't seen any philosophy that didn't have parts that seem plausible (usable) and parts that don't seem so plausible (usable). But a mixture of them make good (not great) models of reality . But philosophy professors didn't like talking to guys like me so take what I say with a grain of sand.

[KCfromNC]

To follow up on the "qualia are self-evidentally knowledge idea", lets look at an example from one of the papers I posted a while back. In there, researchers were trying to measure what made people feel intentionality - that is, what was it that makes people think that "I" did something.

The details of the experiment are in the paper, but the end result was that in certain situations researchers were able to create a sense that the test subjects were responsible for an action they didn't actually perform.

If we go with the idea of qualia presented in this thread, it was "self evident" to these people that their qualia included the feeling of intentionally even when the objective evidence showed that another person was responsible. That draws quite a bit of doubt on the idea that qualia are automatically correct knowledge, and shows that they're not some sort of privileged view of the workings of our mind.

Luckily here the situation was controlled enough that it was easy to see that the allegedly self-evident nature of qualia are anything but. How many similar experiments have proponents of qualia run to gain the confidence they seem to have that they can automatically trust those feelings as reality?

[Gaylenwoof]

Originally Posted by KCfromNC

So wait, you don't have qualia if you don't focus on them? Certainly it feels like something to experience red even if you're not focusing on the experience.

I think I already addressed this with my discussion of 3 "stages" (unconscious, conscious, and "mindsight"). Perhaps I should add that this is probably more like a continuum than discreet stages, so there are grey areas. Also, as I've said before, I don't believe that qualia are "things" to be perceived, but more like processes of perception. When we try to talk about "red" at all 3 stages, we are applying our natural category-making ability to a reality that, in and of itself, "lends itself to categorization" but is not objectively "categorized" until observed by "categorizers". Red is not a category apart from us; it is a category because of us (whether unconscious, conscious-in-background, or conscious-as-foreground/"objectified").

BTW: Technically I don't "have" qualia (as if there were some "I" apart from the qualia that I "have), rather, I am a complex qualitative being who has the capacity to focus on (become conscious of) my own constituent elements. When I become self-aware I discover, lo and behold, that my experience is complexly qualitative. It seems like I'm finding qualitative objects "out there" (stage 2) or becoming "acquainted with qualia" that seem, in some sense to be "not me" (stage 3 - objectification), but in all cases I'm really just becoming aware, in a certain way, of "my own" constituents. Hence there are hints of truth in saying that qualia are "illusory" - but only to the extent that we "objectify" them or make any inferential judgments about them.

(If you really want to stay on top of the game, you need to realize that, ultimately, the only "real" categorizer is "the World" (hence my insistence that consciousness is not just a "brain" process, but a "mind/body/world" process). The supposed "individual" ("mind" or "soul") that intuitively senses itself to be a discreet individual "I" is somewhat of an illusion (think of the way that waves are discreet "in a sense" yet not actually "separate from" the ocean).

And wouldn't focusing on a feeling lead to a qualia of focusing on the feeling of seeing red, not to a qualia of seeing red?

Any change in process can be (tho because of "multiple-realizability" need not necessarily be) a change in qualitative experience. So, yes, the overall qualitative experience at stage 3 is different than stage 2, but this doesn't mean that "red" has to be completely lost in the shift. I am, to some extent, composed of red and, also, composed of various "feeling about" red, but these qualitative constituents do not have to be mutually exclusive.

For all of the confident claims about them being self-evident, these things seem pretty hard to pin down in practice.

Not all aspects of qualia are self-evident but, ironically, the aspects of qualia that are most self-evident are, in fact, the hardest to "pin down" in public language. I hope you can see the irony in trying to pin down the subjective aspects of experience using public language. IF, as I'm proposing, the subjective aspects of qualitative experience are grounded in the indexical nature of BEING this process here and now, then fully conveying in public terms what it is like for you to be this process will be difficult at best - I'd say impossible.

You correctly point out that "subjectivity" has to be more than just the indexical nature of process, otherwise every process would be subjective - e.g., the erosion of a particular rock would be a subjective process. I agree. I'd say that the word "subjective" is best used for "self-aware" types of processes, which I characterize in terms of "enactive", "self-organizing" etc. - lots of criteria that are not met by geological erosion. This is why I talk about subjectivity being ontologically "ground in" the indexical aspects of processes. To be "grounded in X" is not the same as being "completely reducible to X". What makes the subjective aspects of qualia so difficult to convey in public terms is the indexical nature of processes, but this not to say that qualia are "nothing but" their subjective aspects. Qualia are "grounded in" the indexical nature of processes, but they are not fully reducible to these indexical aspects. "Categorizing" is a process of creating "Aristotelian universals." These universals are "real" - they are the ontological basis for what we call "objective reality" (i.e., they are what makes "inter-subjective agreement" possible). More specifically: Reality "lends itself to categorization" insofar as the World is a self-observing qualitative system. The "qualitative" aspect is, in essence, the "the categorizability" of Reality. "Qualitative" and "categorizability" go hand-in-hand because they are, according to my proposal, just two different ways of referring to the one-and-same Reality. The aspects of qualia that are "hard to pin down" in public language are grounded in the indexical nature of processes, and the aspects of qualia that we can publicly talk about and study objectively are grounded in the categorizability of Reality.

[Gaylenwoof]

Originally Posted by KCfromNC

To follow up on the "qualia are self-evidentally knowledge idea", lets look at an example from one of the papers I posted a while back. [...]...researchers were able to create a sense that the test subjects were responsible for an action they didn't actually perform.

If we go with the idea of qualia presented in this thread, it was "self evident" to these people that their qualia included the feeling of intentionally even when the objective evidence showed that another person was responsible.

BTW...Thank you!...Seriously. I wouldn't even bother to post anything in this forum if it weren't for people like you who keep finding ways to push me into (what I see as) deeper and better explanations of my ideas (although I know that, from your point of view, I'm just running circles in pointless philosophical swamp ).

Notice that the test subjects had "a sense that" they were responsible for their actions. This is a judgment about their qualitative experience and, as I pointed out before, any time that a judgment is imposed on qualia, errors can be introduced. The judgment "I did that" can be misguided, but the "knowledge by acquaintance" with the feeling of "I did that" (or the "feeling of making this judgment") cannot be "wrong." If that's what it feels like to me, then that's what it feels like to me; the feeling just is what it is - where there is no judgment about the nature of the feeling, there is no room for error. The term 'qualia' is meant to target the pre-evaluative (subjective/indexical) "this-ness" of "it feels like this".

[KCfromNC]

Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof

BTW...Thank you!...Seriously. I wouldn't even bother to post anything in this forum if it weren't for people like you who keep finding ways to push me into (what I see as) deeper and better explanations of my ideas (although I know that, from your point of view, I'm just running circles in pointless philosophical swamp ).

Better than actually working at work.

Notice that the test subjects had "a sense that" they were responsible for their actions. This is a judgment about their qualitative experience and, as I pointed out before, any time that a judgment is imposed on qualia, errors can be introduced.

I'm not so sure it is a judgement rather than just a raw feeling. What experiment would you propose to distinguish between the two ideas?

The judgment "I did that" can be misguided, but the "knowledge by acquaintance" with the feeling of "I did that" (or the "feeling of making this judgment") cannot be "wrong." If that's what it feels like to me, then that's what it feels like to me; the feeling just is what it is - where there is no judgment about the nature of the feeling, there is no room for error. The term 'qualia' is meant to target the pre-evaluative (subjective/indexical) "this-ness" of "it feels like this".

And that's why there's very little utility in calling this feeling knowledge. It tells you nothing reliable about how the brain works, it tells you nothing reliable about the relationship of that feeling to other similar past feelings, and it tells you nothing about the relationship of the feeling to what is happening in the external world. The best you can say is you've had a feeling - or maybe not, since the processing needed to store the memory, translate the wish to speak into words and so on includes lots of other intermediate processes which are possibly error prone in various undetectable ways.

[Gaylenwoof]

Originally Posted by KCfromNC

...claims about them being self-evident.... I'd point to a basic refutation of this idea in e.g. Quining Qualia. There's a number of examples showing that the intuition of qualia being self evident knowledge doesn't really hold up to scrutiny, since you can imagine any number of cases where you're forced to answer "I don't know" about them.

I believe that my previous response concerning the pre-evaluative "this-ness" of qualia applies to all of Dennett's examples. Each time our judgments about qualia go wrong, it's because we've made a misjudgment about qualia. (Yes, it really is just that obvious to the point of triviality.) Key question: Can we experience qualia without judgment? I say yes, in a certain sense we can. And, of course, the "feeling of" making a judgment itself is a qualitative feeling.

I completely agree with Dennett that a lot - probably even a majority - of the aspects of my qualitative experience can be judged better by scientists than be me. This is because any given quale has both objective and subjective aspects (again back to dual-aspect theory). A lot of the objective aspects can be completely beyond my comprehension at any give moment (the flow of neurotransmitters, the patterns of neural firing, etc.). My qualitative conscious experience IS this pattern of physical activity (again, I'm pursuing a version of mind/body/world "identity theory" that, in its more common forms, is generally classified as being "materialist"), but this pattern of physical activity is outrageously complex, so it is not surprising that a great deal of it is beyond my comprehension at any given time, and it's not surprising that I can misinterpret some of this stuff. But part of this complexity is a complexity of aspects - these physical events are not just objective nor just subjective - they are both.

Chase and Sanborn can be wrong about the nature of the physical processes that they judge to be constituting their current taste for coffee (change in "taste per se" vs "change in memory of taste" etc.) and beer-drinkers can be confused in judging whether their changing appreciation for the flavor of beer is "the same taste" or not, but I don't think that any of these confusions go against my proposal that qualitative experience is "what it's like to be" this or that physical process. Whether a flavor is bitter, or not, is not determined exclusively by either the molecules of the drink, nor the activity in someone's brain. The bitterness is not "outside" the brain, or "inside" the brain; the bitterness is a brain/body/process, and this process has both "subjective" and "objective" aspects.

"Subjective" insofar as the process is the indexical "this, here, now" process that it is, and part (but not all) what makes it feel like "THIS" feeling is ontologically grounded in this uniqueness; "Objective" insofar as Reality, in its essence, is a "category-making" process and categories are the ontological basis for intersubjective, aka "objective" knowledge about processes. What gets really subtle and confusing is that the "objective" aspects feed back on the subjective aspects. This is the infamous and controversial idea of "top-down causation" in self-organizing systems, and it is a large part of the reason that I keep proposing "self-organization" as one of the key criteria what can and cannot be a conscious system. The objective feed-back of emergent "higher-order" patterns - the "enslaving" of the micro-constituents composing the higher-order patterns - is plays a critical role (so says I) in the transition from unconscious to conscious experience.

[Gaylenwoof]

Originally Posted by KCfromNC

And that's why there's very little utility in calling this feeling knowledge. It tells you nothing reliable about how the brain works....

Somewhat true, and yet, without these subjective reports - fallible tho they may be - I suspect that no significant progress in brain science can be made. Finding the physical correlates of consciousness will be (I say) critical to progress in brain science, but how do you find the "correlates" without something to correlate with? We need subjective statements like "I see blue" in order to find the physical correlates for "what it is like to see blue." Of course science really just needs the statements - the physical behaviors of moving lips, etc - so technically science could progress even if we are all, in fact, "zombies". This, I think, is one of Dennett's main points. He is welcome to discard the "zombie hunch." But why discard it? Dennett himself admits the powerful intuitive pull of "something to be explained" so we have two basic philosophical options:

1. Reject the notion that qualia exist, and refuse to track down any leads that they seemingly provide because they are mere illusions and can mislead us.

2. Philosophically acknowledge the existence of qualia and let introspective insights (phenomenological investigations) provide inspiration and perhaps even lead the way in some scientific endeavors.

Let me emphasize something that I hope is obvious: This is a philosophical choice, not a scientific one. In a strictly technical sense, science could, in principle, proceed via behaviors alone ("I see blue" can be recorded a merely objective data). As Wittgenstein pointed out "the thing in the box" - whatever it is - cancels out insofar as public discourse is concerned. But "science" doesn't really do anything. Human beings do things via the scientific method. Why do humans do things? Why do we chose the scientific method? Because we want to, and wanting is a qualitative affair. Methodologically you can cancel out the qualia (so long as you continue to record the utterings of people saying "I feel X"), but if you truly deep-down start to believe that this cancelation is ontologically justified, you slip into something that I would say is a sort of madness.

Scientifically, option #2 (qualia are real) is harmless, so long as you stick with the "embodiment" and "embeddedness" of conscious experience - basically the notion I've been proposing: consciousness is "what it's like to be" a physical mind/body/world process. This conception of qualia will not provoke you to go chasing disembodied minds, and you will still record subjective reports via objective data records. BUT, you will also preserve a deep and genuine emotional sense of empathy for "other minds" - a sort of empathy that makes sense, ontologically, if you acknowledge the reality of qualitative feelings. You see yourself as the type of being who knows what it's like to feel pain, so you can have empathy for the "feeling of pain" in others. You will know, in your heart, that it's not just pain behavior that they are exhibiting, it is pain, and you know what that means because you yourself are a pain-feeling subject.

When we start to build machines that are able to act as if they are sentient, these ontologically justified feelings of empathy will kick in to gear (whether you like it or not). Rationally, we will want to ask (AND, I think, we SHOULD ask): Do these machines "really" feel pain? Or are they just acting as if they feel pain? We will (I hope) error on the side of caution and assume that if they act like they are in pain, then they are in pain, and we will need to pass laws to protect them from torture, etc. Moreover, we will continue to be motivated to find the best theory that helps us distinguish systems that "really feel" from those that only "behave as if" they feel. Knowing how to avoid building sentient machines can be just as valuable as knowing how to build sentient machines. If we want to build machines to be slaves or soldiers, I think we really ought to try to design them to be non-sentient. But to do this effectively, we need a theory of mind, and I think that such a theory ought to be build upon an ontology that takes the "feeling of being" seriously.

...oh boy...I just realized what you will probably say: We can take qualitative feelings seriously, but deny their subjectivity. What difference would it make to deny the subjectivity? I don't know. Can anyone help me out here? I'm on the verge of drifting over to the dark side.

[TRANSPONDER]

Originally Posted by MysticPhD

When you say the illusion of "I-ness" you essentially discount your own existence despite its "unavoidableness." Nothing vanishes as soon as you examine it. There is no time you do NOT experience the "composite I-ness" . . . even when you for some reason are amnesiac and don't have a clue who you are or have been previously. In fact, the "I-ness" is the ONLY thing you absolutely know to be real . . . as the solipsists have often tried and failed to prove. As you said reality is real and there are other "I-nesses" in existence. What I cannot understand is how this utterly central, crucial, unavoidable and constant "I-ness" that IS you . . . whatever it does or does not remember about you and your experiences . . . can be so cavalierly dismissed. Since it is so independent of memories and experiences . . . it cannot be the result of them.

No I don't. I have already explained that reality is real, despite it being in many ways an illusion. I am aware of the I-ness and its convincing persistence, and yet its elusiveness when you try to grasp it shows that it is illusion and not anything 'solid' but is real as part of our consciousness - which should nicely suit your view, old mate.

I wrote a couple of things that I cancelled about the feeling of identity and how it is linked with memories and experiences and yet is still there if we completely lose our memory. The brain actually has those memories but we just can't access them. You know that memory comes back. That should be some indication that it is dependent on the workings of the mind.It suggests to me also that this feeling of 'I'- ness' is an evolved survival mechanism, just like family feelings, fear, love, patriotism and religion.
I won't labour the argument but you will find this model answers all the problems you are aware of about identity, mind and solipsism.