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If you believe that what we describe as "consciousness" is emergent from the ideas a material brain develops about itself, then it's in fact not logically possi

If you believe that what we describe as "consciousness" is emergent from the ideas a material brain develops about itself, then it's in fact not logically possible to have a world that is physically identical to ours yet does not contain consciousness. So indeed, premise 2. sneaks in the conclusion. To illustrate this point, here's an argument with the same structure that would similarly "prove" that gravity doesn't cause things to fall down: 1. In our world, there is gravity and things fall down. 2. There is a logically possible world where there is gravity yet things do not fall down. 3. Therefore, things falling down is a further fact about our world, over and above gravity. 4. So, gravity causing things to fall down is false.

deleted 2y ago
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goatlover 2y ago
But Chalmers doesn't think that approach works, nor any other physicalist attempt to explain consciousness. The problem with what you stated is that you're substituting ideas about consciousness for sensations. And those aren't the same thing. We experience sensations as part of being embodied organisms, and then we think about those sensations.
- codeflo 2y ago
  I’m making an argument about the validity of an argument. A rebuttal to that can never be “but the conclusion is true”.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  It's quite clear if you approach these things logically that Chalmers doesn't do a lot of thinking before coming up with these arguments. All of his arguments boil down to "if we assume that consciousness is different from everything else, then it's different from everything else". He gets way, way too much attention for someone who is sub mediocre in his reasoning. He also doesn't understand what computation is, even though he often makes confident statements about it. He thinks computation is a subjective process, that something only counts as a computation if someone interprets it as such, which is simply wrong, not a debatable topic. And this is the core of one of his other arguments about why consciousness can't be a computational process.
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    There are a number of ways to determine that consciousness is not a computational process. Roger Penrose is a good source on this.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      There is not. It's by the far the most likely explanation, and even if you don't agree with that, it is at least completely consistent with everything we know about computation.
      - mensetmanusman 2y ago
        For one, you would have to determine whether physical laws are computational processes. Stephen Wolfram is trying this, but it requires some incredible assumptions.
        tsimionescu 2y ago
        The laws of physics we know right now are either computable or stochastic with computable probabilities. This was of course the only possible outcome if physics made any sense at all, since the purpose of physics is to compute outcomes, so a physical theory that was not computable would never have been invented. Still, the laws of physics could be anything and it wouldn't matter for this question. The only relevant question is whether our brains are computers, regardless of how the physics work at the lowest level. After all, we have clear proof that you can make computers on the existing laws of physics (I'm typing this reply on one!), so all we need to know is whether our brains are bio-chemical computers. Neuroscience is nowhere near a level where it can answer this, but it at least remains a plausible explanation. After all, we humans can't compute any non-computable function, or at least none that we know of (the Church-Turing thesis).
mistermann 2y ago
> If you believe that what we describe as "consciousness" is emergent from the ideas a material brain develops about itself, then it's in fact not logically possible to have a world that is physically identical to ours yet does not contain consciousness. This sneaks in an implicit axiom: that the brain is not only necessary, but is also sufficient, necessarily, for consciousness (implicitly ruling out some unknown outside, non-materialistic force(s)).
empath75 2y ago
I don't think your point 2 is directly analogous to his point 2. Because a world where things do not fall down is not physically identical to a world in which they don't. I think the point of arguing about p-zombies is this. Do you believe it's possible for a human being to exhibit all the external characteristics of consciousness without an internal conscious experience? And if you believe that's true, then you can posit a world which is physically indistinguishable from our world through any experiment in which consciousness simply does not exist, because, as far as I know, there is no test that can prove that an individual does have an internal consciousness, and isn't merely mimicking it. Most arguments that p-zombies don't exist sort of rely on the internal conscious experience of the person making it, which no one else has access to -- "I have an internal conscious experience of the world, other people are similar to me and so they must also have those experiences." That is _not_ true about a world in which gravity does not exist for obvious reasons. That universe would be very different from ours and easily distinguishible through experiment. I think his point does hinge on whether it's possible for p-zombies to exist, but it's not as silly as you all are making it out to be, and it is not begging the question. I actually think his weakest point is part 3 and 4, because I think mostly the problem is that we don't really have good definitions of consciousness and related concepts let alone a complete physical explanation of their origins, and his whole argument hinges on the fact that we currently don't have a way to test for internal conscious experience, but I think that might not always be true.
- observationist 2y ago
  You experience your own consciousness - your own model of your self, time, and the world as perceived through your physical sensory apparatus. This could give you a probability of 100% certainty of your own consciousness. You're a good skeptic, though, and after much consideration, you decide that, despite absence of evidence to the contrary, you'll allow for 2% uncertainty, since you might be a simulation specifically designed to "feel" conscious, or some other bizarre circumstance. Knowing this, you compare your own experience with reports by others, and find that, despite some startling variety in social and cultural practice, humans all more or less go through life experiencing the world in a way that more or less maps to your own experiences. You find that even Helen Keller, despite her tragic disability, wrote about experiences which you can simulate for yourself. You conclude that if you somehow swapped places with her, she would be able to map the sensory input of your physical sensors to her own experience of the world, and vice versa. This leads you to think that our physical brains are performing a process that models the world, and it does so consistently. After reading up on people's experiences, you also learn that our subjective experiences are constructed, moment by moment, by a combination of these world models, real-time stimulation, abstract feedback loops of conscious and unconscious thinking. The more you read, the more evidence you have of this strange loop being the default case for every instance of a human having a brain and being alive. The Bayesian probability that you are conscious, because of your brain, given all available evidence, approaches 100% certainty. You conclude your brain is more or less the same as anyone else's brain, broadly speaking, and this is supported by the evidence provided by a vast majority of accounts from other similarly brained individuals through all of human history. Since your brain doesn't have a particular difference upon which to pin your experience of consciousness, and the evidence doesn't speak to any need for explanation, Occam's razor leads you to the conclusion that the simplest explanation is also the best. The living human brain is necessary and sufficient for consciousness, and consciousness is the default case for any living human brain. The posterior probability that any given human (with a "normal" living brain) is conscious approaches 100% certainty, unless you can specifically provide evidence to the contrary. Saying "but what if p-zombies exist" makes for a diverting thought experiment, but it's rationally equivalent to saying "but what if little invisible unicorns are the ones actually experiencing things" or "what if we're all in the Matrix and it's a simulation" or "what if we're just an oddly persistent Boltzmann brain in an energetic nebula somewhere in the universe." Without evidence, p-zombies are a plot device, not a legitimate rational launching off point for theorizing about anything serious. Humans are conscious. We have neural correlates, endless recorded evidence, all sorts of second hand reporting which can compare and contrast our own first hand experiences and arrive at rational conclusions. Insisting on some arbitrary threshold of double blind, first hand, objective replicable evidence is not necessary, and even a bit shortsighted and silly, since the thing we are talking about cannot be directly shared or communicated. At some point, we'll be able to map engrams and share conscious experience directly between brains using BCI, and the translation layer between individuals will be studied, and we'll have chains of double blinded, replicable experiments that give us visibility into the algorithms of conscious experience. Without direct interfaces to the brain and a robust knowledge of neural operation, we're left with tools of abstract reasoning. There's no good reason for p-zombies - they cannot exist, given the evidence, so we'd be better served by thinking about things that are real.
mensetmanusman 2y ago
Your Step 2 is so off as an analogy, it’s possible you don’t understand Chalmer’s point.
- chr1 2y ago
  What is Chalmers saying then? As i understand he is saying that there can be a world where conciousness does not exist, but all the possible physical experiments cannot distinguish between that world and our world. But that simply means the conciousness he is looking for has absolutely no consequence, and therefore his point has no value...
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    He is saying that the person in the Chinese room doesn’t understand Chinese.
    - chr1 2y ago
      How is this related to the 2nd point in OP's comment? The whole Chinese room argument is based merely on a misinterpretation of computentionalist/physicalist argument. Of course the computer or person who executes the program does not understand Chinese, they are just performing arithmetic operations, the entity understanding Chinese is the program itself, not the medium on which the program runs.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

goatlover 2y ago

But Chalmers doesn't think that approach works, nor any other physicalist attempt to explain consciousness. The problem with what you stated is that you're substituting ideas about consciousness for sensations. And those aren't the same thing. We experience sensations as part of being embodied organisms, and then we think about those sensations.

codeflo 2y ago
I’m making an argument about the validity of an argument. A rebuttal to that can never be “but the conclusion is true”.
tsimionescu 2y ago
It's quite clear if you approach these things logically that Chalmers doesn't do a lot of thinking before coming up with these arguments. All of his arguments boil down to "if we assume that consciousness is different from everything else, then it's different from everything else". He gets way, way too much attention for someone who is sub mediocre in his reasoning. He also doesn't understand what computation is, even though he often makes confident statements about it. He thinks computation is a subjective process, that something only counts as a computation if someone interprets it as such, which is simply wrong, not a debatable topic. And this is the core of one of his other arguments about why consciousness can't be a computational process.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  There are a number of ways to determine that consciousness is not a computational process. Roger Penrose is a good source on this.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    There is not. It's by the far the most likely explanation, and even if you don't agree with that, it is at least completely consistent with everything we know about computation.
    - mensetmanusman 2y ago
      For one, you would have to determine whether physical laws are computational processes. Stephen Wolfram is trying this, but it requires some incredible assumptions.
      - tsimionescu 2y ago
        The laws of physics we know right now are either computable or stochastic with computable probabilities. This was of course the only possible outcome if physics made any sense at all, since the purpose of physics is to compute outcomes, so a physical theory that was not computable would never have been invented. Still, the laws of physics could be anything and it wouldn't matter for this question. The only relevant question is whether our brains are computers, regardless of how the physics work at the lowest level. After all, we have clear proof that you can make computers on the existing laws of physics (I'm typing this reply on one!), so all we need to know is whether our brains are bio-chemical computers. Neuroscience is nowhere near a level where it can answer this, but it at least remains a plausible explanation. After all, we humans can't compute any non-computable function, or at least none that we know of (the Church-Turing thesis).

mistermann 2y ago

> If you believe that what we describe as "consciousness" is emergent from the ideas a material brain develops about itself, then it's in fact not logically possible to have a world that is physically identical to ours yet does not contain consciousness. This sneaks in an implicit axiom: that the brain is not only necessary, but is also sufficient, necessarily, for consciousness (implicitly ruling out some unknown outside, non-materialistic force(s)).

empath75 2y ago

I don't think your point 2 is directly analogous to his point 2. Because a world where things do not fall down is not physically identical to a world in which they don't. I think the point of arguing about p-zombies is this. Do you believe it's possible for a human being to exhibit all the external characteristics of consciousness without an internal conscious experience? And if you believe that's true, then you can posit a world which is physically indistinguishable from our world through any experiment in which consciousness simply does not exist, because, as far as I know, there is no test that can prove that an individual does have an internal consciousness, and isn't merely mimicking it. Most arguments that p-zombies don't exist sort of rely on the internal conscious experience of the person making it, which no one else has access to -- "I have an internal conscious experience of the world, other people are similar to me and so they must also have those experiences." That is _not_ true about a world in which gravity does not exist for obvious reasons. That universe would be very different from ours and easily distinguishible through experiment. I think his point does hinge on whether it's possible for p-zombies to exist, but it's not as silly as you all are making it out to be, and it is not begging the question. I actually think his weakest point is part 3 and 4, because I think mostly the problem is that we don't really have good definitions of consciousness and related concepts let alone a complete physical explanation of their origins, and his whole argument hinges on the fact that we currently don't have a way to test for internal conscious experience, but I think that might not always be true.

observationist 2y ago
You experience your own consciousness - your own model of your self, time, and the world as perceived through your physical sensory apparatus. This could give you a probability of 100% certainty of your own consciousness. You're a good skeptic, though, and after much consideration, you decide that, despite absence of evidence to the contrary, you'll allow for 2% uncertainty, since you might be a simulation specifically designed to "feel" conscious, or some other bizarre circumstance. Knowing this, you compare your own experience with reports by others, and find that, despite some startling variety in social and cultural practice, humans all more or less go through life experiencing the world in a way that more or less maps to your own experiences. You find that even Helen Keller, despite her tragic disability, wrote about experiences which you can simulate for yourself. You conclude that if you somehow swapped places with her, she would be able to map the sensory input of your physical sensors to her own experience of the world, and vice versa. This leads you to think that our physical brains are performing a process that models the world, and it does so consistently. After reading up on people's experiences, you also learn that our subjective experiences are constructed, moment by moment, by a combination of these world models, real-time stimulation, abstract feedback loops of conscious and unconscious thinking. The more you read, the more evidence you have of this strange loop being the default case for every instance of a human having a brain and being alive. The Bayesian probability that you are conscious, because of your brain, given all available evidence, approaches 100% certainty. You conclude your brain is more or less the same as anyone else's brain, broadly speaking, and this is supported by the evidence provided by a vast majority of accounts from other similarly brained individuals through all of human history. Since your brain doesn't have a particular difference upon which to pin your experience of consciousness, and the evidence doesn't speak to any need for explanation, Occam's razor leads you to the conclusion that the simplest explanation is also the best. The living human brain is necessary and sufficient for consciousness, and consciousness is the default case for any living human brain. The posterior probability that any given human (with a "normal" living brain) is conscious approaches 100% certainty, unless you can specifically provide evidence to the contrary. Saying "but what if p-zombies exist" makes for a diverting thought experiment, but it's rationally equivalent to saying "but what if little invisible unicorns are the ones actually experiencing things" or "what if we're all in the Matrix and it's a simulation" or "what if we're just an oddly persistent Boltzmann brain in an energetic nebula somewhere in the universe." Without evidence, p-zombies are a plot device, not a legitimate rational launching off point for theorizing about anything serious. Humans are conscious. We have neural correlates, endless recorded evidence, all sorts of second hand reporting which can compare and contrast our own first hand experiences and arrive at rational conclusions. Insisting on some arbitrary threshold of double blind, first hand, objective replicable evidence is not necessary, and even a bit shortsighted and silly, since the thing we are talking about cannot be directly shared or communicated. At some point, we'll be able to map engrams and share conscious experience directly between brains using BCI, and the translation layer between individuals will be studied, and we'll have chains of double blinded, replicable experiments that give us visibility into the algorithms of conscious experience. Without direct interfaces to the brain and a robust knowledge of neural operation, we're left with tools of abstract reasoning. There's no good reason for p-zombies - they cannot exist, given the evidence, so we'd be better served by thinking about things that are real.

mensetmanusman 2y ago

Your Step 2 is so off as an analogy, it’s possible you don’t understand Chalmer’s point.

chr1 2y ago
What is Chalmers saying then? As i understand he is saying that there can be a world where conciousness does not exist, but all the possible physical experiments cannot distinguish between that world and our world. But that simply means the conciousness he is looking for has absolutely no consequence, and therefore his point has no value...
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  He is saying that the person in the Chinese room doesn’t understand Chinese.
  - chr1 2y ago
    How is this related to the 2nd point in OP's comment? The whole Chinese room argument is based merely on a misinterpretation of computentionalist/physicalist argument. Of course the computer or person who executes the program does not understand Chinese, they are just performing arithmetic operations, the entity understanding Chinese is the program itself, not the medium on which the program runs.