It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.

So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that).

We're in the wrong frame. If you accept consciousness is a thing you end up in this weird tautological state - it's not special, but we've put it in a special category.

If you view via a grounded, practical frame, you probably don't care about consciousness. The fact that it's undefinable is probably a major clue.

    echo "I feel pain"

> This contradicts everything we have learned about nature.

It doesn't contradict anything. It simply means that there is a gap in our current understanding, which may (or may not [1]) be scientifically explained in the future.

The default reflex of the opponents of "the hard question" (i.e. those who deny the existence of such a question) is to attach a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day.

[1] The "may not" part does not imply that there is something magical or metaphysical about it. There are things that we may not ever answer, like "do parallel universes exist" or "was there another universe before the big bang".

I'm not sure where all this discussion about the hard problem is coming from suddenly, or why people continue to struggle to understand it. It's really very simple. The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function. It's like saying you can't explain facts about cats given only facts about dogs, they're just different categories of description. That's really all there is to it.

Whether or not physicalism has any hope of succeeding depends on whether there is a further conceptual or explanatory insight that when added to the standard structure and function explanatory framework of science, will ultimately bridge the gap. Who knows what that might look like. It's certainly premature to render a verdict on the possibility of this. But it should be clear that a full explanation in physical terms will need some new conceptual ideas and so the problem of consciousness isn't merely a scientific problem that will dissolve in the face of more scientific data, but a philosophical problem at core.

The first point (analogizing the hard problem to the reaction to Darwinism) is a very common rhetorical move: an analogy and history of ideas, which is convincing to many people, but what does it prove?

> A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible consciousness of which he speaks is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well.

And this is why illusionism is not a satisfactory explanation. "Convincing it". Who is being convinced? Who is experiencing this?

Imagine the easy problem of consciousness is solved: we understand the brain at every scale, from ion channels up. We can draw up a complete account, at every level of abstraction, of what goes on in the brain when you see and "apple" and say apple, and trace the signals across the optic nerve, map those signals to high-level mental representations, explain how those symbols become trees in a production rule which become words which the motor cortex coordinates into speech, etc. We can map every "pixel" of the visual field at any time t.

Now imagine you take this description and rewrite the labels consistently, and show it to an alien. And they see this very complex diagram of an information-processing machine and they're not sure what it's for. And they'd think it's as conscious as a calculator, or a water integrator, or a telephone network, or the futures market of the European Union.

Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience (since consciousness and experience is all that we have); or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets, and that is incredibly, and also has a number of problems (e.g.: why aren't my neurons individually conscious? Why does consciousness stop at my skull, that is, why is the causality of signal-trains in neurons more "conscious" than phonons in the hydroxyapatite crystals in my skull?).

That's the hard problem.

I found this article really frustrating.

The author takes a blurry position between non-dualist naturalists like John Searle and eliminativists like Dennett and the Churchlands and doesn't seem to engage with them at all, much less probing into the issues with those views that might motivate people like Chalmers and Nagel.

It crescendos with a hand-wave:

> The mind is the behavior of the brain, properly described in a high-level language. Neither my own experience of myself nor an external experience of me is primary[.]

A number of views about consciousness are compatible with statements like that (like the ones above and many others), each with their own philosophical tradeoffs and bullets to bite. The author seems generally unaware of them yet somehow confident that they've solved the matter.

It’s going to be a long road, but I think as LLMs and their offspring create more and more convincing arguments for silicon consciousness we will conclude that consciousness is about as real as humours, and we’ve all been p-zombies this whole time.

Maybe the literary creature shoe should have started on the other foot, and sent us in search of proof that we are or are not p-angels. That at least puts the burden of proof on the compatibilists where it belongs.

This article is pretty slim on details, but I agree with the general argument that dualism is unnecessary to explain phenomenal consciousness. The word "consciousness" has a lot of baggage, which causes us to mislabel cognition as consciousness. [1] This is why I really like using terms like "qualia" or _phenomenal_ consciousness to make explicit what we're talking about.

I still don't like this new trend of dismissing the hard problem altogether. We really don't have an explanation of phenomenal consciousness—it might even require novel physics to explain! [2]

I'd also like to point out that, though this might seem like a semantic argument, it has meaningful consequences for how we approach science and ethics. [3] For example, if we are physicalists and accept that phenomenal consciousness is a property of the world, what does this tell us about other unobservable properties of the world science may be missing? (Recall that we only know about phenomenal consciousness through our own experience of it; we cannot observe it in others)

[1] https://write.ianwsperber.com/p/what-is-the-color-blue

[2] https://youtu.be/DI6Hu-DhQwE?si=RB3qkt6PZ62SVpx3&t=2493

[3] https://write.ianwsperber.com/p/morality-without-consciousne...

I once read a comment on here that I found interesting but haven't been able to find it again.

Basically it flipped the problem on its head. We're arguing how you start at the physical substrate and get to consciousness. They argued that you could start with consciousness and argue how you get to the physical side (experimentation via your conscious experience, etc). It was from a religious individual who called the conscious experience God and went further into how we all share this sliver of godhood.

Does anyone who knows philosophical "camps" know the terms for what I'm trying to remember? I guess I've leaned "materialist" for most of my life, but what other common philosophies (as in the academic discipline) are there?

FTA:

> Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness.

The hard problem isn't about "why", it's about "what it's like".

Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind.

None of the things you say, sign or write will make them experience these sensations.

Ultimately no one but you can know what it's like to be you.

This doesn't mean that subjective experience can't be modeled. but the caveats that apply to models in general are relevant here too: none are correct, some are useful.

Dualism doesn't necessarily means that subjectivity is ineffable. Mind and matter could work like mathematical duals: platonic solids (cube vs octahedron, dodecahedron vs icosahedron, tetrahedron vs itself), Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations, etc... These are intimately linked, and you can generate one from the other and inversely, yet they have their own distinct properties.

Neal Stephenson touches on this topic in several of his novels. Probably the most concrete of this is "Fall; or Dodge in Hell" which involves a simulation of people's scanned brains rediscovering qualia and constructing their own simulated world from scratch. In the book, two of the deceased digital "souls" eventually mate and produce digital offspring and the whole simulation starts consuming more and more resources.

His Baroque Cycle series also touches on this in several places. One funny side plot involves a freed African slave (Dappa) who speaks dozens of different languages and is highly intelligent and an aristocratic person who maintains that of course this former slave (who is obviously a lot smarter than this aristocrat) is just a trained monkey that naturally is not conscious even though he is quite clever with language. The same books also have a lot of side plots involving Leibniz and various attempts to build thinking/computing machines.

The Dappa plot is probably the closest to a lot of debates there will be around AGI with people likely to insist for all sorts of reasons rooted in philosophy, religion, etc. that even though the AGI walks, talks, etc. like a duck, it can't be a duck. At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.

This article had absolutely no proof of its statements and all it did was use past allegories. We are definitely missing something in our understanding of the world, like before we knew about electromagnetism or radioactivity. There are some mechanisms we know about that contribute to the knowledge of self that become exposed by conditions like Depersonalization/Derealization disorder from certain neurons in inflammatory environment, making one feel detached from their own body, feeling like they control a videogame character instead. Yet that still doesn't tell where does the "self" come from.

Chalmers: “It is natural to hope that there will be a materialist solution to the hard problem and a reductive explanation of consciousness, just as there have been reductive explanations of many other phenomena in many other domains. But consciousness seems to resist materialist explanation in a way that other phenomena do not.”

"A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S007961072...

This argument sounds nice at a surface level, but seems deeply incoherent and wrong in a way I haven’t yet put my finger on precisely. How can you say this:

> We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense. We have emotions and spiritual life; we experience qualia. These entities are not obtained by addition to a physical state, but by subtraction from a complete physical account. Mental processes are physical processes described in a way that captures only their salient characteristics.

followed by this:

> The reason why this picture is more credible than any dualism is not that “science explains everything” — it doesn’t — or because “physics explains everything” — it does so even less. It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.

followed by this:

> Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature, like anything else in this sweet world.

So it isn’t describable by physics but it is only physics? And there are no closures or gaps? Ok sure in one sense we can say everything is connected, but this article seems to me to demonstrate effectively that without these divisions, pursuing understanding of it is essentially intractable.

He seems to be describing the dissolution of some construct in his worldview that I am having a difficult time relating to. Anyone have a different take?

The author demonstrates a common misunderstanding about medieval philosophy. The medieval Scholastic tradition does not maintain that the body and the soul were "distinct entities", or that matter was "vile". In fact that kind of thinking was the position of gnostic groups that Christian thinkers were resolutely opposed to. Read St Augustine's "Confessions" if you don't believe me.

Scholastic philosophers taught that body and soul were two components of the SAME entity, the human being, and that both were good because they were created by God. One good essence with two components, in other words. And while they claimed that the soul component was immaterial, that absolutely did NOT mean that the soul was not part of the natural world. To claim this is to seriously misunderstand their view of the physical world. To them, matter was only one component of creation.

The strict mind/body dualism was not introduced by medieval Scholastics, but rather by the advent of modernity in Descartes, and developed further by Kant and other enlightenment philosophers. In other words, this is very far from being a medieval problem - on the contrary, it a problem created by modern philosophy.

As for the author's equation between subjective experience and qualities of things, or his equation of processes in the brain with the mind itself, this just ignores the facts. Qualities we observe in nature are obviously distinct from the feelings they produce in us in many cases (beauty, sublimity, injustice, etc. produce distinct feelings like reverence, humility, anger), and if the mind were equivalent to brain processes, then certain powers of the mind that we obviously have would be impossible (such as our ability to reflect on those very same brain processes in ourselves).

Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable. It cannot be disproven in the same way you can't disprove the existence of God, and so arguing with people that believe in it is largely pointless.

There are 325+ theories of consciousness mapped here:

https://loc.closertotruth.com/map

And a good walkthrough here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5G6Oc_V3Lw

Many of these already gave up on dualism: they already rejected the idea that mind and body are separate (e.g. panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is a feature of reality, that all matter possesses "experience" of some kind).

I believe nature is all there is. If we could replicate a human brain several times, and make each 'human brain' receive the exact same input data (sounds, sights, smells e.t.c.) from the moment they 'exist' until the end of their lifetime, I truly think that each of these brains will make precisely the same decisions (and each of these 'brains' would think they were conscious and in control of their lives).

In my eyes, consciousness is simply a natural phenomenon that can be explained but we just lack the understanding at this moment. Time and time again we have made this mistake of assuming there is something supernatural about the things we cannot comprehend and only a few centuries later it is completely understood scientifically. I think consciousness will be a similar case but will take more time.

Philosophers have had these rifts(an similar lines of arguments) forever.

From Plato vs Aristotle (300 to 400 BC) (idea of forms vs nicomachean), In India Adi Shankara (around 700 CE) vs Madhavacharya (1200 CE) (dualism vs non-dualism) - there is a common thread to all of these arguments.

But eventually, for me it comes down to a statement J Krishnamurti made (& it makes the most sense to me): "The self is a problem that thought cannot solve"

These conversations drive me insane. There isn't even an clear or even consensus definition of consciousness, yet here we are all acting like we are talking about the same thing. "It's right there, don't you see it? That's consciousness! We just need to define what it is so we can figure out if it's real or not".

The author is mixing two discussions: soul/body dualism and qualia (hard problem).

It could be true that there's only physical body, but still have the qualia explanatory gap.

I think what is needed, and what will happen, is to pull apart concepts like intelligence, consciousness, and language use, and create narrower and more rigorous definitions of what those are.

My go-to analogy is the concept of heat and warmth, which was the subject of philosophical speculation and inquiry for centuries. But ultimately it was not useful or predictive until it was redefined very narrowly by scientists as a specific measurable attribute of a collection of molecules. Arguably this redefinition itself was an important component of the establishment of “science” as a discipline distinct from philosophy.

This let scientists work with heat rigorously, even though non-scientists still have a largely colloquial vocabulary about it, e.g. “this coat is warmer than my last one.” On matters like consciousness, we’re all still smashed together into colloquial land, arguing about definitions when we think we are arguing about concepts.

I do think the current advancements in AI may help us develop the new vocabulary we need to quantitatively reason about intelligence and language, and in doing so, help better define / constrain what the we mean by consciousness. We think of LLMs now as a tool we can use to do work, but another view is that they are a sensor that directly correlates physical inputs to intelligent outputs. Sort of like how burning can be used to measure the energy contained in various materials, in addition to keeping us warm.

> The false “hard problem of consciousness” assumes upfront that there exists a metaphysical gap between mind and body.

Or a gap between my mind and the minds of the other commuters on this bus.

There are 15 or so biological machines here, but only one of them is being experienced in bright sound and colour.

I followed and was very interested until:

> But the argument is weak. A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible consciousness of which he speaks is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well. If this is true, can I believe my own conclusion of having this mysterious non-physical experience, knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it? The argument is self-defeating.

My reaction here: it seems to me that the p-zombie by construction doesn't have a "me" to be convinced, so "physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well." doesn't make sense.

Therefore the demonstration that the argument is self-defeating fell appart, and I stopped finding the article insightful.

Can someone help me see what I'm missing?

There's a simpler way to state this: the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has.

We understand everything a CNN or Transformer does, but we have no idea how to relate that to qualia. This may also be why we need to run endless tests and don't have a theory that let's us predict how well the network processes anything.

If qualia is just an emergent property, it should follow that ethics exists just as a means to achieve a practical end like order or societal stability. What would be the answer to "in an isolated universe, would torturing a being capable of experiencing qualia be good, bad or neither?". I can't accept it would be neither. Pain is negative and that's obvious to me even though I'm a masochist. Suffering is negative if you want to get more precise.

I don't know what qualia is, but it IS something. Some people don't seem to get any arguments and debates about it, at all. Others do. I doubt the people that don't get it are zombies but it's weird that someone can't even comprehend what the issue is about. When I say "red" or "pain", they talk about neurons and whatnot. Of course that's true, but don't they feel the redness and the pain subjectively in a way that makes them question how that feeling relates to the atoms, neurons and other levels of abstraction could be used to describe the physical reality?

And I think, having read a bunch of philosophy years ago that solved nothing, dualism or not is not the right question right now, in our level of understanding. It's not even the right answer because what's "physical" is not well defined either. If we can explain qualia, why would that explanation not count as a "physical" one? If there's some logic to it, it's as physical as anything else.

Lots of ill-defined questions and assumptions. I think we should accept qualia is not understood and won't be for some time. We should realize we can suffer and so can beings similar to us. Where do we draw the line - we'll have to base that on what we know about biology. To me it's obvious many animals are capable of suffering. I think that's a good place to start with our ethics. Suffering is shit, let's reduce it as much as possible.

I don’t think consciousness exists, at least not in the way people talk about it. First, there’s no clear definition that everyone agrees on. Second, there’s no way to test whether something has it. Does a cow have it? A dog? A spider? If you can't test for it and even define it, how can you claim its real?

Here's a trippy idea I have about consciousness, which arose from thinking about recent AI advances and also watching kids develop.

I think children's main "cost function" is the ability to predict the future. This might start out, for example, as being - how will this vertical line move as I move my head. Later, where is the ball going. And they are essentially building a "world model" in their brains, starting with the very simple like this and recursively building more complex predictors. When they predict correctly, happy feedback reinforces the connections that are firing, when they are wrong, they weaken. Just a really simple feedback algorithm that is super robust.

So the brain is building this world model, and it's essentially gradually compressing a description of the environment into a structure made of neurons. And this is the ultimate survival tactic: model the environment explicitly in your head, then adapt your behaviour to fit it. The better you are adapating to future states (dodging that tree as you run) the better survival chance you have.

At some point (complete speculation) we then begin to do something quite strange: we develop a world model _of ourselves_. We get to a level of sophistication where we begin to predict the future states of our own brains. This might emerge naturally as a way to compress existing learnt behaviour. For example, we re-learn to follow lines in a smarter way, particularly as other parts of the brain learn useful things that we can re-use in our line following. This treats our existing model as a cost function, and we learn a model of the model. But it eventually starts to model the higher-level models the brain has, higher up the abstraction stack.

And somehow, the modelling of our brain function creates a chaotic feedback loop that leads to the sensation of consciousness. It's super handwavey, I know, but somehow this recursion feeds awareness. It's like the abilty to see yourself thinking. Consider meditating and the way words appear in consciousness... you get to a point where you can observe what you're going to say before you say them, and I conjecture that is the modelling of the model that's going on.

And this is useful for survival, as you can optimise the way you think, compressing your circuits further, but also has this weird side-effect of creating awareness.

It also explains why consciousness takes time to develop - because you need to develop a model of yourself, but before that you need a model of the world.

Copying what I said 9 days ago when this post first appeared but didn't catch enough attention and only got two replies including my own:

> I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”

This is essentially saying "I don't understand therefore you are wrong".

> We do not need to explain why it looks red for the same reason that we do not have to explain why the animal that we call “cat” looks like a cat. Why should we have to explain why “red” looks red?

We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats.

If we wish to actually know if some AI is or is not conscious, and not simply re-hashing conversations ancient Greeks will probably have had as animism faded from their culture and they stopped believing in dryads and anima loci, then it needs to be testable *by something outside the intelligence being tested for conscious*.

> Scientific knowledge is ultimately first-personal. The world is real, but any account of it can exist only from within it. Any knowledge is perspectival. Subjectivity is not mysterious

Mysteriousness isn't the problem with subjectivity, lack of repeatability is. This is why we make instruments to measure things: my "about the size of a cat" is subjective and likely different from yours, while my "31.4 cm" is only going to differ from yours if one of us is surprisingly bad at using a ruler; my "pleasantly warm" may or may not be yours, but my "21.3 C" will only differ from yours if one of our thermometers has broken.

The "hard problem of consciousness" is that we not only don't have a device to measure consciousness, but even worse than that we don't even know what its equivalent of a ruler or thermometer would do.

(At least for this meaning of consciousness; there's at least 40, we can at least test for the presence or absence of the meaning that e.g. anesthesiologists care about, but that's not the hard problem).

I'll add a comment that hopefully won't get buried. The hard problem that Rovelli is talking was, I think, the first time someone said something in the field of consciousness that people could (at the time) agree on. Not many people were openly discussing in the 90's in academic settings.

It was proposed by Chalmers as a young undergrad at the Science of Consciousness conference. I have been attending for awhile and really enjoy it. There are so many opinions and thoughts on this post, if you are really into thinking about consciousness, this year the conference will be in San Diego. It's a long day of lectures, followed by evenings of great conversations. https://cs2026.org/

> It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.

This has to be one of the most dumbfounding pseudo-philosophical sentences I've ever read. Metaphysics by definition is unfalsifiable and unscientific; it exists on a parallel plane from empiricism and is derived only through intuition, reason, and for the religious revelation. If this guy's claim for material consciousness simply rests on an intuitive argument from induction, it suffices as a counter argument to say "If I am mistaken, I am".

My take is that we are all living an illusion which is the continuous perception of a ‘self’. All people are inside the bubble of the self as it is part and parcel of the human condition and baked into the neural pathways that are created while still in the womb. It is like an operating system that is locked down to running only one application ‘self’. It is only when there is glitch in the system that the self relinquishes its stranglehold over our consciousness and it becomes just another background process alongside other mental processes. The ghost in the system disappears.

Where we are, it is still a matter of belief.

I do believe what the author claîms, but it’s not something that’s proven so far, so it can’t be imposed as fact.

The main consequence to the “soul” being physical is that free will is an illusion. And many people can’t stand this idea. People want to believe they are more than a deterministic physical process. They want to believe the future is not already written.

They’ll look for free will in what still stands : god or quantum uncertainty.

God can’t be disproved, and quantum uncertainty leaves room for a kind of mystery, that’s appealing.

But LLMs definitely do a convincing job at “faking consciousness”.

This is hard to take seriously, the argument this article makes against the hard problem is… that it’s not hard? There is very little in the way of argument here at all, actually; it’s simply a refutation that there is any division between biological function and subjective experience, with no evidence or novel perspective to provide it any weight.

Ironically, I think this article serves as quite a strong defense of the hard problem, because it shows how hard it is to articulate or construct an argument against it at all.

I enjoyed the article, and I'm actually, surprisingly, fairly convinced by his idea there is something off about things like the imaginary philosophical zombie[1].

I think that the idea of a soul or spirit could be both interesting and also self evident though, so it's odd to read these being thrown out in the same bath water.

I.e if we imagine our simplified brains as points of matter with signals being sent between; then the kind of experience we have as human beings is more about the relationships between the matter. I don't see that as a harmful duality as if it were the case, it would shed light on what we understand and how. We're still physical but exist in "spirit of matter", different but bound. No magic required.

I'd see this as fairly separate from the question of why we witness ourselves, which seems more prone to mental trickery.

Rovelli also has some fun popsci book on how Time might be constructed. Mostly a fun read but the theories, when he gets to them, are an interesting take. Highly recommend.

[1] However if Carlo Rovelli were a philosophical zombie, are these exactly the responses he would give - as it wouldn't "see" the moment of awareness and be confused by implied significance? I think so.

I'm all in the "brains cause minds" camp. But isn't the main argument here "We accept explanation gaps already in many places, why not also for consciousness?"?

My objection would then be that actually, that's not true. The real statement would be "In everyday life (including science), we accept explanation gaps already in many places"

But this does not mean that we have to accept this particular instance of an explanation gap.

> During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul.

This is absolutely, completely, demonstrably false. Soul-body dualism was largely a 17th-century innovation, although Plato somewhat anticipated it. Most medieval Catholic thought rejected it (and continues to do so), being quite clear that the soul/mind and the body are one entity. How can people in good conscience write about things they're so ignorant of?

Gell-Mann suggests I don't read the rest of the article. A brief scan reveals a rehash of the common assertions with no serious attempt to reply to counterarguments.

I think that whether we think of consciousness in terms of dualism, or if we think of it as emergent from natural behavior, it really doesn't matter functionally. Either way we are positioning it as something inaccessible from our realm or control.

I believe that we can at least posit some kind of mechanism through which emergence can happen. In my opinion we should look at language and how language evolved. However, i also believe we should expand our study of natural language to things like network protocols, and observe the "protocol hourglass" structure that has emerged from the internet protocol stack.

In my mind, the concepts of control and autonomy are what need to be revisited. We conflate the two: we are autonomous IF we are able to exert control on the environment. However, I think the reality might be that autonomous systems are more similar to an API in the sense that we can interact along the boundary but through the API we cannot exert control over the internal structure of the system (through knowledge or physical control).

I'm not sure the article really adds up. The hard problem of consciousness in a normal definition is:

>to explain how and why organisms have qualia or subjective experience. (from Wikipedia)

(or "why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all" in the article)

He then supposes this "assumes upfront that there exists a metaphysical gap between mind and body". But there probably isn't so he jumps to:

>So, there is no “hard problem of consciousness.”

But that doesn't explain how/why there are qualia and the like.

I personally think how/why qualia it a real hard question but scientifically tractable.

A little guessing. You can assume we evolved - much evidence - and so consciousness has survival / reproductive functionality. The brain has billions of sensory, memory and other neurons and they have to compress that data down to something a creature can act on - should it feed of run away etc. So conscious awareness is probably something like a situation summary you can act on.

One interesting thing is there is a lot of unconscious awareness and actions going on - when you walk across a room the nervous system has to process all sorts of stuff about your body position and coordinate dozens of muscles but you are normally not consciously aware of it, so presumably the conscious bit of you brain is some small portion linked to the thinking talking and remembering bits.

I think much of the subtlety of conscious experience is because there is a lot of unconscious things underlying it. You see say a red apple and it's linked to memories of apples, instincts for food, evolved associations with red, your mood and the like. It all gets reduced in something like a lossy compression to what you are aware of.

I think that having a point of view (having an "inside") has a great deal to do with survival. You probably don't need a brain to have a subject. You probably just need dynamics with the right causal structure.

When you look at a cell, you can clearly see how the dynamics are existential and already do the work of classifying inputs as "good" or "bad" (eg: paramecium encounters acid, this triggers an electro chemical cascade in the membrane cortex which results in the organism quickly changing direction away from the bad gradient). There's no mind obviously in the human sense, but the fact remains that this system has developed into something that can discriminate between good and bad for itself, because without this integration, it wouldn't exist.

The cell is as close to a machine as possible. But it's not a machine because people make machines to have specific purposes. Each part is already labeled and designed. You can shut down a machine that's running, and start it back up with very predictable behavior (since you designed it).

The cell is a process that uses physical matter to keep its own possible futures available. Machines also support processes and goals, but these are externally imposed. The cell's ultimate goal is to continue being the reason for its own existence. Maybe this is where all goals come from.

So I guess experience is what happens when you have enough layers above this machinery that you you are no longer connected directly to the world, "you" can only meet the world through internally generated/classified electrochemical states from the body. These states have valence because the system is already organized around maintaining these states within metabolic limits. Think...hunger. You don't feel hungry. You ARE hungry. Hunger is a part of how "you" are constituted.

It seems that, until we have a falsifiable test for consciousness, these exercises are pointless. All we have is the ability to externally observe behavior and we can't judge what happens inside someone (or something's) mind. BTW, we don't have a good definition of mind either.

That there's nothing magical or supernatural in our minds and our consciousness is a given, otherwise, this becomes a very silly debate where everyone will have a strong position that can be neither proven nor disproven.

Maybe we are able to constrain what consciousness (or a mind, or a soul) is by figuring out everything it isn't. Does it have a mass? Can we measure its entropy?

We can, to a certain degree, identify images from the visual cortex. What else about the internal state of a brain can we extract? We did that to a fly's brain the other day - a very confused simulated fly that must have been wondering why its world had so low a resolution.