Welcome to this week's Open Discussion Thread. This thread is a place for posts/comments which are related to philosophy but wouldn't necessarily meet our posting rules (especially posting rule 2). For example, these threads are great places for:

• Arguments that aren't substantive enough to meet PR2.

• Open discussion about philosophy, e.g. who your favourite philosopher is, what you are currently reading

• Philosophical questions. Please note that /r/askphilosophy is a great resource for questions and if you are looking for moderated answers we suggest you ask there.

This thread is not a completely open discussion! Any posts not relating to philosophy will be removed. Please keep comments related to philosophy, and expect low-effort comments to be removed. All of our normal commenting rules are still in place for these threads, although we will be more lenient with regards to commenting rule 2.

Previous Open Discussion Threads can be found here.

I recently posted about Frank Jackson’s Mary’s Room experiment. That thread is here. In that thread some of the very smart commenters from this subreddit talked about the efficacy of intuition in philosophical inquiry. I wanted to talk a little more about my own intuitions, and then go from there to speak more broadly about metaphysical questions of physicalism and consciousness that Mary’s Room and the Knowledge Argument purport to address. I make no claims as to the originality of anything here. Just stuff I’ve been thinking about.

I. Intuitions and Illusions

I have been at war with my own mind for all of my life — all of it that I can remember anyway. I have the very common experiences of clinical depression, and a late in life diagnosis of ADHD. The result of this is that long before I knew anything about philosophy of mind or any theory of consciousness I have always had a very deep distrust of my own subjective experience. I hadn’t really thought about this as being related to philosophy of mind until I started hearing people like David Chalmers defending their theories. People like Chalmers and Philip Goff who are willing to upend the wildly successful theories of modern physics based solely or largely on their confidence in their own subjective experience. They are willing to exclude purely physical descriptions of consciousness because they claim to have another data point — one so fundamental and important it merits this kind of radical stance — they have their own subjectivity.

What happens to your intuitions about consciousness when you have no confidence in your own subjective experience? Every day I believe I am having powerful affective and subjective experiences. They usually suck. But luckily it turns out I can take a pill for that. What about my free will? Will I blabber on about something in an inappropriate way or fidget uncontrollably in a meeting? There’s a pill for that too (good luck getting a steady supply though!).

I’ve come to feel that there is in dualism and panpsychism and similar theories a kind of (certainly unintentional) ableism and perhaps even übermenschen-perfectability-of-man ethos hiding in the discourse. The idea of a pure consciousness — a force or property at the lowest level of reality — pure "non-physics" untroubled and un-occluded by a squishy brain hidden away beneath hair and bone.

But of course my own consciousness is anything but pure; my thoughts are not to be trusted, and my phenomenal experience is hardly unmediated. I have to wonder: if one’s thoughts and self-experience can be so profoundly shaped by biology, then what exactly is the non-biological bit doing? And where can I get a pill for it?

I am far too new to philosophy to hold any convictions worth the term, but I think this is why my intuitions lean so much toward illusionism, identity theory, and even eliminativsm. Or at least why I don’t recoil at these theories when others sometimes do.

II. Stories; Reasons; Unsatisfying Loops

I submit that there is total equivalency — there is no distinction — between theories and concepts and stories. It’s all about stories. A theory — an explanation — is just the aggregate of all the individual understandings and interpretations and associations we might have with the underlying physics This is most obvious when we have the mathematical framework on which to hang a physical theory, and disagreement about what story it tells. The most famous example is QM, but there are others. The point is that the Schrödinger Equation isn’t a theory — it’s an equation. What we want is a story; an explanation; a reason.In fact one definition of consciousness is that it is “the ability to have reasons.” And reasons are just little contained stories about the dynamical evolution of a system or whatever you’re examining.

The stories that are most self-consistent, most complete, and most accurately reflect what we see in the natural world are what we call scientific theories. And they are our best stories! There’s nothing special about them except that: 1. The natural things we so far observe (and I know idealists and dualists will disagree) appear to lend themselves to internally consistent storytelling, and 2. These are the stories that are generally subjected to the most testing to confirm their internal consistency and descriptive precision. But they’re still just stories. Stories about cause and effect. Stories about “why” an atom has the ratio of protons and electrons it does. Etcetera.

In any case, this suggests a question: if we were to find a final and complete theory of life, the universe, and everything, would we know it? If we did, what would we know? What kind of story could it, even in principle, be? I can kinda-sorta imagine something like this for the physical laws of the universe — kinda... maybe… But with phenomenal consciousness, I can’t even imagine what that story could be beyond a simple physical accounting of the processes involved. What story can you construct for consciousness with any explanatory power exceeding that? I’d love to know what it would be even in principle — I put it to any anti-physicalists out there: please make one up. I don’t care if it’s true, I just need to see that it is a self-consistent story that would add explanatory depth over and above what could in principle be described by a rote accounting of physical processes.

Perhaps a more concrete, “ripped from the headlines” example is helpful. We ask all the time whether General AI is possible, and we love sci-fi stories where “Skynet becomes self-aware” etc. It might happen like that I suppose. But isn’t by far the most likely scenario that we’ll create machines that seem incredibly intelligent — will pass every Turing test we can think of. And by definition they will tell us they’re conscious! But the thing is: we’ll know how they’re made. We will have the code — the neural correlates so to speak. These are our real-life p-Zombies. So we’ll just spend eternity debating whether they’re really conscious or not, won’t we? In other words, what matters is the story we tell about consciousness — not the thing itself. Whether we accord rights and autonomy to AIs and believe them when they say, “my hard drives are aching today.” Or whether we just chuckle and say, “what an amazing simulation we’ve constructed” — this will depend on our judgement, not something empirical. Because what story could even in principle answer the question of whether there is something special and different about the way we are conscious? There isn’t one, as far as I can tell. The best we could ever do is say, “it sure looks the same from the outside.” In other words, with an AI, the explanation of its consciousness is its code. Full stop. There is no other lower level of description. Maybe there are higher level ones — AI folk psychology. But underneath there's just the code.

This is frustrating because we want reality to come with explanations — with stories — that are viscerally satisfying. But we have no reason to believe that every physical phenomenon will either 1. have such an explanation, or 2. that we would know it when we see it. After all, isn’t 46 a perfectly good explanation for life, the universe, and everything? How would you tell it was or wasn’t, aside from the fact that it is subjectively satisfying or unsatisfying?

Explanation of phenomenal experience is itself a kind of satisfaction loop — ironically a very physical, neurological process — in which you have an experience of something like seeing red, and then have an explanation of the experience which — if successful in meeting some criteria — provides the nice phenomenal feeling of accepting a satisfying explanation — the joy of a good story. But this is not a reliable guide to physical or metaphysical truth. After all, why should the fundamental nature of reality owe me an endorphin rush when I hear it?

This all has to do with language, and the idea of explanations, and our belief that we are entitled to explanations that we can discretize and render in language. Why should it be so? In some ways is miraculous that so many things have so far been amenable to such descriptions. But why would it be surprising that when we move beyond our everyday experience — the kinds of things our brains evolved to comprehend — we arrive at answers that may be highly abstract or unrecognizable as explanations? I think folks who do philosophy of math are probably a lot more comfortable with this state of affairs than people who do philosophy of mind. After all, the explanation for why 1 = 1 is that it = 1.

I believe (and I’d be happy to be proven wrong because it would be far more satisfying) that when we develop a complete theory of phenomenal consciousness it will be isomorphic to the brains states that comprise it. And that will be it. The explanation for why we experience the redness of red will be a list of neurons in some configuration. And that’s it. There will be no further story, because to be frank it is impossible, for me at least, to imagine what that story could be, even in principle. It will be unsatisfying. This state of affairs is suggested by the fact that none of us can describe "the redness of red" to in any objective sense to begin with. This is a failure of language — of explanation — not of metaphysics. The explanation for the redness of red is the experience itself — it is isomorphic and it is not clear what sort of theory could ever provide a deeper, objective description aside from describing the purely physical properties of the color.

To be honest I assume the same thing will be true of the universe as well. After all, I think it is theoretically plausible that tomorrow someone will prove that 1. Some version of string theory or some cute little tweak to the standard model is the ultimate TOE; and that 2. According to this theory, there can’t be a deeper layer. This is it. How would we feel? Satisfied? I doubt it. But that’s it. We’re done. Because what would actually be satisfying, given the question? What could be satisfying? God did it? I don’t think so. It's too far to invoke Gödel here, but you get the idea — the system is the system — at some point it's axiomatic and there are no more turtles.

But why should it be otherwise? It seems entirely consistent with human existence that there are classes of things — especially things that resemble the workings of our everyday existence — that can be described with self-consistent stories that are also satisfying — that give us that little rush. And there will be things at the highest levels of complexity or the most abstract levels of physical reality that won’t. They will be unsatisfying and in fact may be difficult to identify as explanations even if we are staring right at them.

Phenomenal consciousness, I believe, likely falls into the latter category; consciousness is a weakly emergent, purely physical process, and qualia are epiphenomenal.

III. Additional thoughts on non-physical consciousness

Ironically, it is the anti-physicalists who are most skeptical about the explanatory power of weak emergence, and yet it is at the foundation of many of their theories. After all, they must explain why people are conscious, rocks are not, and dogs sit somewhere in the middle. And so they turn to a kind of hand-wave-y invocation of complexity. But of course even if we entertain the notion of property dualism or panpsychism we still know nothing about about the actual process of consciousness, and every intuition about complexity that we have is tied to the physical aspect of our brains.

Once you lay out the flow chart of anti-physicalist reasoning in this context it’s like the Mitchell & Webb moon landing conspiracy sketch. “You mean we won’t make any savings on the massive rocket..?” Someone like Goff wants to claim to have contributed — to have added to our understanding of the universe. But in essence he’s saying, “explaining the brain won’t explain consciousness! You’re wasting your time. In order to understand consciousness you have to accept that there’s a magic mystery MacGuffin that you cannot understand the essence of even in principle because it’s not physical or measurable. Don’t think about it too much just quickly sign here and initial there. Great and also oops forgot to mention: in order to understand consciousness you still have to understand everything about the brain. The magic dust doesn’t actually add anything to the formula that you can in any way measure or distinguish from the brain. But trust me, it’s there! Would I scam you!? Never.”

As we progress from entities with low or no intelligence to human, it’s stuff like reasoning and memory that most obviously scale with complexity. But qualia seem a lot more like a binary condition or at least a much more compressed dynamic range when compared to “intellect.” You can add “consciousness particles” or non-physical properties or whatever all day until we’re hyper intelligent demigods — you’re never going to appreciate the qualia associated with a perfectly cooked steak or a gentle, approving belly rub more than your bog-standard golden retriever. If it is these experiential aspects of existence that require the magic bits — what Mary doesn’t know — then it’s a pretty tiny corner of the landscape, isn’t it?

In fact the aspects of consciousness that are most mysterious are the ones that are least like physical sensation. The qualia of pain? My dog feels pain every bit as acutely as I do. The entire thing that is interesting about the difference between me and my dog is intellectual capacity. To be clear, there is a phenomenal, qualia-involved aspect to all subjective experience and as Nagel suggests us there are qualitative aspects to synthesized sensation and that includes the awareness of subjectivity. The subjectivity of subjectivity. This is the much more interesting area of inquiry! But it’s downplayed by the likes of Goff and Chalmers because it seems so obviously amenable to weak emergence as an explanation.

(As an aside: how founded actually is the assumption that a necessary condition for non-physical consciousness is this complexity? I’m guessing not at all. It just sounds scientific. If consciousness is not physical, then why does it need to have any spatial properties at all..? Says who? It’s just a way to back-fit the theory to explain why rocks aren’t conscious. But if you take p-zombies seriously then you cannot in principle tell whether the rock is conscious based on its inert behavior, because consciousness and behavior are unrelated, at least as I understand the claim.)

All for now ty!

Welcome to this week's Open Discussion Thread. This thread is a place for posts/comments which are related to philosophy but wouldn't necessarily meet our posting rules (especially posting rule 2). For example, these threads are great places for:

• Arguments that aren't substantive enough to meet PR2.

• Open discussion about philosophy, e.g. who your favourite philosopher is, what you are currently reading

• Philosophical questions. Please note that /r/askphilosophy is a great resource for questions and if you are looking for moderated answers we suggest you ask there.

This thread is not a completely open discussion! Any posts not relating to philosophy will be removed. Please keep comments related to philosophy, and expect low-effort comments to be removed. All of our normal commenting rules are still in place for these threads, although we will be more lenient with regards to commenting rule 2.

Previous Open Discussion Threads can be found here.