The nature of consciousness remains a contentious subject out there. I’m a physicalist myself — as I explain in The Big Picture and elsewhere, I think consciousness is best understood as weakly-emergent from the ordinary physical behavior of matter, without requiring any special ontological status at a fundamental level. In poetic-naturalist terms, consciousness is part of a successful way of talking about what happens at the level of humans and other organisms. “Being conscious” and “having conscious experiences” are categories that help us understand how human beings live and behave, while corresponding to goings-on at more fundamental levels in which the notion of consciousness plays no role at all. Nothing very remarkable about that — the same could be said for the categories of “being alive” or “being a table.” There is a great deal of work yet to be done to understand how consciousness actually works and relates to what happens inside the brain, but it’s the same kind of work that is required in other questions at the science/philosophy boundary, without any great metaphysical leaps required.
Not everyone agrees! I recently went on a podcast hosted by philosophers Philip Goff (former Mindscape guest) and Keith Frankish to hash it out. Philip is a panpsychist, who believes that consciousness is everywhere, underlying everything we see around us. Keith is much closer to me, but prefers to describe himself as an illusionist about consciousness.
S02E01 Sean Carroll: Is Consciousness Emergent?
Obviously we had a lot to disagree about, but it was a fun and productive conversation. (I’m nobody’s panpsychist, but I’m extremely impressed by Philip’s willingness and eagerness to engage with people with whom he seriously disagrees.) It’s a long video; the consciousness stuff starts around 17:30, and goes to about 2:04:20.
But despite the length, there was a point that Philip raised that I don’t think was directly addressed, at least not carefully. And it goes back to something I’m quite fond of: the Zombie Argument for Physicalism. Indeed, this was the original title of a paper that I wrote for a symposium responding to Philip’s book Galileo’s Error. But in the editing process I realized that the argument wasn’t original to me; it had appeared, in somewhat different forms, in a few previous papers:
- Balog, K. (1999). “Conceivability, Possibility, and the Mind-Body Problem,” The Philosophical Review, 108: 497-528.
- Frankish, K. (2007). “The Anti-Zombie Argument,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 57: 650-666.
- Brown, R. (2010). “Deprioritizing the A Priori Arguments against Physicalism,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 17 (3-4): 47-69.
- Balog, K. (2012). “In Defense of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 84: 1-23.
- Campbell, D., J. Copeland and Z-R Deng 2017. “The Inconceivable Popularity of Conceivability Arguments,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 67: 223—240.
So the published version of my paper shifted the focus from zombies to the laws of physics.
- Carroll, S.M. (2021). “Consciousness and the Laws of Physics,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 28 (9-10): 16-31.
The idea was not to explain how consciousness actually works — I don’t really have any good ideas about that. It was to emphasize a dilemma that faces anyone who is not a physicalist, someone who doesn’t accept the view of consciousness as a weakly-emergent way of talking about higher-level phenomena.
The dilemma flows from the following fact: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known. They even have a name, the “Core Theory.” We don’t have a theory of everything, but what we do have is a theory that works really well in a certain restricted domain, and that domain is large enough to include everything that happens in our everyday lives, including inside ourselves. I won’t rehearse all the reasons we have for believing this is probably true, but they’re in The Big Picture, and I recently wrote a more technical paper that goes into some of the details:
- Carroll, S.M. (2021). “The Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes.” Submitted to Levels of Reality: A Scientific and Metaphysical Investigation (Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History of Science), eds. O. Shenker, M. Hemmo, S. Iannidis, and G. Vishne.
Given that success, the dilemma facing the non-physicalist about consciousness is the following: either your theory of consciousness keeps the dynamics of the Core Theory intact within its domain of applicability, or it doesn’t. There aren’t any other options! I emphasize this because many non-physicalists are weirdly cagey about whether they’re going to violate the Core Theory. In our discussion, Philip suggested that one could rely on “strong emergence” to create new kinds of behavior without really violating the CT. You can’t. The fact that the CT is a local effective field theory completely rules out the possibility, for reasons I talk about in the above two papers.
That’s not to say we are certain the Core Theory is correct, even in its supposed domain of applicability. As good scientists, we should always be open to the possibility that our best current theories will be proven inadequate by future developments. It’s absolutely fine to base your theory of consciousness on the idea that the CT will be violated by consciousness itself — that’s one horn of the above dilemma. The point of “Consciousness and the Laws of Physics” was simply to emphasize the extremely high standard to which any purported modification should be held. The Core Theory is extraordinarily successful, and to violate it within its domain of applicability means not only that we are tweaking a successful model, but that we are somehow contradicting some extremely foundational principles of effective field theory. And maybe consciousness does that, but I want to know precisely how. Show me the equations, explain what happens to energy conservation and gauge invariance, etc.
Increasingly, theorists of consciousness appreciate this fact. They therefore choose the other horn of the dilemma: leave the Core Theory intact as a theory of the dynamics of what happens in the world, but propose that a straightforward physicalist understanding fails to account for the fundamental nature of the world. The equations might be right, in other words, but to account for consciousness we should posit that Mind (or something along those lines) underlies all of the stuff obeying those equations. It’s not hard to see how this strategy might lead one to a form of panpsychism.
That’s fine! You are welcome to contemplate that. But then we physicalists are welcome to tell you why it doesn’t work. That’s precisely what the Zombie Argument for Physicalism does. It’s not precisely an argument for physicalism tout court, but for the superiority of physicalism over a non-physicalist view that purports to explain consciousness while leaving the behavior of matter unaltered.
Usually, of course, the zombie argument is deployed against physicalism, not for it. I know that. We find ourselves in the presence of irony.
The intuition behind the usual zombie argument stems from a conviction from introspection — from our first-person experience of the world, inaccessible in principle to outsiders — that there is something going on other than the mere physical behavior of physical stuff. And if that’s true, we can imagine the same behavior of physical stuff with or without consciousness. A (philosophical) zombie is a creature that behaves exactly as an ordinary person would in every way, but lacks the inner experience of consciousness — the qualia that characterize “what it is like” to be something. The argument is then that, if we can conceive of precisely the same physical behavior with and without consciousness, consciousness must be something other than a way of talking about physical behavior. It’s a bit reminiscent of Descartes’s argument for mind-body dualism: I can imagine my body not existing, but I can’t imagine my mind not existing, so the mind and body must be different things. But the conclusion here is not supposed to be that the mind must be a distinct substance from the body, merely the somewhat weaker conclusion that our conscious experiences cannot be reduced to the behavior of physical matter.
Let me stress the radicalness of the zombie concept, because I think people sometimes underestimate it, even some proponents of the usual zombie argument. When first presented with the idea of a philosophical zombie, it is natural to conjure up something like a Vulcan from Star Trek: humanoid in appearance, rational, and indisputably alive, but lacking some kind of affect or emotion. That is not right. The zombie, to reiterate, behaves exactly as a conscious creature would behave. If you interacted with a zombie, it would exhibit all the features of love and joy and sadness and anxiety that an ordinary person would. Zombies would cry of heartbreak, compose happy songs, giggle while rolling around on the ground with puppies, and write densely-argued books against the idea that consciousness could be entirely physical. If you asked a zombie about its inner conscious experiences, it would earnestly assure you that it had them, and would describe “what it was like” to experience this or that, on the basis of its introspection. The difference is that, unlike conscious creatures who are purportedly accurate when they make those claims, the zombie is wrong. You would never be able to convince the zombie they were wrong, but too bad for them.
Nobody is claiming the zombies actually exist or even are possible in our world, only that they are conceivable. And that if we can conceive of them, our notion of “consciousness” must be distinct from our notion of the behavior of matter.
But if there is an intuition that our conscious experience is something more than the motion of physical stuff, there is also a countervailing intuition: surely my consciousness affects my behavior! To a person on the street, rather than a highly-trained philosopher, it’s pretty obvious that your conscious experiences have some effect on your behavior. Such intuitions aren’t really reliable — a lot of people are intuitive dualists about the mind. But they provide pointers for us to dig into an issue and understand it better.
Taking a cue from our intuition that consciousness surely affects our behavior, and a suspicion that zombie advocates aren’t really thinking through the implications of the thought experiment, leads us to flip the usual argument on its head. The zombie scenario is actually a really good argument for physicalism (at least by contrast to the kind of passive panpsychism that doesn’t affect physical behavior in any way).
To make things clear, consider a very explicit version of the zombie scenario. We imagine two possible worlds (or at least conceivable, or at least maybe-conceivable). We have P-world (for “physical”), which consists solely of physical stuff, and that stuff obeys the Core Theory in its claimed domain of applicability. Then we have Ψ-world (for “psychist”), which behaves in precisely the same way, but which is fundamentally based on consciousness. The physical properties and behavior of Ψ-world should be thought of as aspects (emanations? not sure what the preferred vocabulary is here) of an underlying mentality.
(Note our use of “behavior” here means all of the behavior of all physical stuff, down to individual electrons and photons; not just the macroscopic behavior of human beings. There’s no connection to “behaviorism” in psychology.)
The starting point of the zombie argument for physicalism is that, when we sit down to compare P-world and Ψ-world, we realize that the purported “consciousness” that is central to Ψ-world is playing no explanatory role whatsoever. It might be there, ineffably in the background, but it has no impact at all on what human beings do or say. As Keith put it in our conversation, it offers no “differential” explanatory power to discriminate between the two scenarios.
And — here is an important point — whatever that background, causally-inert stuff is, it’s not what I have in mind when I’m trying to explain “consciousness.” The consciousness I have in mind absolutely does play an explanatory role in accounting for human behavior. The fact that someone is conscious of some inner experience (falling in love, or having the feeling they are being watched) manifestly affects their behavior. So the consciousness of Ψ-world isn’t the consciousness I care about, and I might as well be a physicalist.
Aha, says the panpsychist, but you’re leaving out something important. The behavior of which you speak can be seen by the outside world. But I also, personally, have access to my inner experience: the first-person perspective that cannot be witnessed by outsiders. Science is used to explaining objective third-person-observable behavior, but not this. I therefore have a reason — based on data, even if it’s not publicly-available — to prefer Ψ-world over P-world.
That move doesn’t work, as we can see if we think a bit more carefully about what’s going on in Ψ-world. How should I interpret someone’s claim that they have inner conscious experiences of the kind a zombie wouldn’t have? The claim itself — the utterance “I have conscious experience” — is a behavior. They said it, or wrote it, or whatever. The matter in their bodies acts in certain ways so as to form those words. And that matter, within either P-world or Ψ-world, exactly obeys the equations of motion of the Core Theory. That theory, in turn, is causally closed: you tell me the initial conditions, there is an equation that unambiguously describes how the universe evolves forward in time.
So the utterance claiming that a person has inner conscious experiences has precisely the same causal precursors in either P-world or Ψ-world: a certain configuration of particles and forces in the person’s brain and body. But we’ve agreed that non-physical consciousness plays no role in explaining those things within the context of P-world. Therefore, consciousness cannot play any role in explaining those utterances in Ψ-world, either.
Thus: you are welcome to claim that you have access to inner first-person experiences of some non-physical conscious experiences, but that claim bears no relationship whatsoever to whether or not you actually do have such experiences. So there is no “data” at all, in the ordinary sense.
Said another way: the claim is that we have a certain kind of knowledge based on introspection. But a zombie would make exactly the same claim, and you are arguing that the zombie is wrong. The lesson is that this kind of introspection is completely unreliable. And therefore there is no reason to favor Ψ-world over P-world. (The point is not that introspection itself is completely unreliable, just that if you think zombies are conceivable, you have to admit that introspection gives us no evidence for the non-physical nature of consciousness.)
Of course philosophers are very clever people, and they can invent different categories of “introspection” and “experience” and “evidence” in an attempt to make it all work out. But the essential point is clear and robust: by sequestering off “consciousness” from playing any causal role in the world, you’ve turned it into something very different from what we were originally trying to explain. Time to turn to some other strategy.
There is one dangling thread here, which is what Philip brought up in the conversation and I don’t think we did justice to. Sure, you might say, there is no differential explanatory role being played by consciousness in the comparison between P-world and Ψ-world. They both behave in the same way, even though one has consciousness and the other doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean there is no explanatory role being played within Ψ-world itself. In other words, maybe consciousness doesn’t distinguish between what happens in the two worlds, but surely it is crucial to Ψ-world considered by its own lights. That world is literally made of consciousness!
Nice try, but this move also fails. Consider an analogy: two identical coffee cups sitting on two tables. The tables themselves are identical in form, except that one table is made of wood and the other of iron. You can’t distinguish between the two worlds just by the fact that the coffee cup is being held up by the two tables (analogous to the behavior of matter in P-world and Ψ-world); in either case, the table holds up the up, despite them being made of different materials. But surely the iron is playing a role in the world where that’s what the table is made of!
Well, yes, the iron is “playing a role.” But it’s not a role that is relevant to understanding what keeps the cup from falling. If you had a “hard problem of coffee cups,” which involved understanding why cups sit peacefully on a table rather than falling to the ground, nobody would think that a table made of iron provided a better solution than a table made of wood. The explanation is material-independent. It’s the table-ness that matters, not the substance of which the table is made.
The actual analogy that Philip used in a post-discussion Twitter thread was to software, and the substrate-independence of computer algorithms.
Likewise, the thesis that human behavioural functions could be realised in non-conscious zombie stuff doesn't entail that human consciousness doesn't do anything. 2/2
— Philip Goff (@Philip_Goff) November 13, 2021
The same response applies here. Sure, you could run the same software on different hardware. But the entire point of substrate independence is that you cannot then say that the nature of the substrate influenced the outcome of the calculation in any way! Analogously, the panpsychist who wants to differentiate between the software of reality running on physical vs. mental hardware cannot claim that consciousness gets any credit at all for our behavior in the world.
I get why non-physicalists about consciousness are reluctant to propose explicit ways in which the dynamics of the Core Theory might be violated. Physics is really strong, very well-understood, and backed by enormous piles of experimental data. It’s hard to mess with that. But the alternative of retreating to a view where consciousness “explains” things in the world, while exhibiting precisely the same behaviors that the world would have if there were no consciousness, pretty clearly fails. It’s better to be a physicalist who works to understand consciousness as a higher-level description of ordinary physical stuff doing its ordinary physical things. If you’re not willing to go there, face up to the challenge and explain exactly how our physical understanding needs to be modified. You’ll probably be wrong, but if you turn out to be right, it will all be worth it. That’s how science goes.
What I find puzzling is why anyone today would think that consciousness is not 100% something the brain does. That there is anything extra. And the brain works with molecules and electricity, no? And we understand molecules and what they do quite well. Whether in our human consciousness, or our that of our dog and cat friends. And some other creatures. But it is all physical ontology. Years of brain studies and brain injuries show evident function and dysfunction of the elements of consciousness and its attributes. Seems plainly physical at bottom. Unless one is another mystery-monger.
I can explain to you why; without using any mystery. First of all, all your observations happen to YOU – that is your conscious awareness. You put together the picture and derive the rules by which the reality you observe works. It is a shareable, interactive reality. And it can either work as you believe it does (emergent from what you observe) OR it can work as a simulation where you are a participant.
This second possibility – that you can not experimentally disprove or prove – carries the consequence that consciousness is a factor entering the system from the outside. Just as when you look around in a virtual reality world to look for the origin and nature of game-avatar’s consciousness, you may find manifestations of their conscious processes within the game (this is up to the simulation to implement), but you will fail to uncover the real nature and origin of consciousness, as it originates from outside of the system, and is ‘lent’ to the game-avatars by outside players. And I am afraid, there is a chance the same is going on in our reality. You can not exclude it with science, and you would be a fool to disregard this possibility.
Think of how you seamlessly slide into your dreams at night, where you ARE YOU, but you don’t have access to your ‘outside’ reality, that you call the ‘real world’. Well, ain’t that a weird thing, that we have such analogies available to all of us. Wonder why…
@ Friend Arturo, unless I am missing something you are simply offering the obvious possibility that I and you (presumably) are characters living in a simulation, as discussed by Bostrum and many others. And of course when I dream I am in a simulation life that has no tangible existence. All I am saying is that if you and I and all the others alive at the moment and those we knew deceased, have and are living in a shared seemingly physical existence with laws that seem to admit of no or few exceptions. And other than minor disagreements about perceptual trivialities such as color matching, there aren’t glitches , we agree with precision on this reality. Physical maneuvers of flight teams, high speed auto races, and much more work smoothly. And that this coordination in us and at least some other mammals is the result of our perceptions and thoughts and behavior all orchestrated and controlled with precision by a physical brain operating as I said. Simulation? Could be! Lots of things could be! Unprovable or discoverable yes or no unless we discover some big glitch or rounding error.
That’s what I have been saying. I just created a minimal artificial conscious program, that is conscious of its temperature. Technically it should be running parallel processes, but the end result is similar. It is not intelligent, which as I have said before is a different set of processes.
@Richardson – Yes, Friend, all kinds of things ‘could be’, but there are logical likelihoods attached to each, that we can try to assess given our intelligence. And on top, are these two possibilities: physical-only reality (with everything, somehow emerging from it – the emergence-of-the-gaps argument), or a consciousness-centric simulation.
There is absolutely no advantage whatsoever of going with the first possibility over the second one. In the second possibility (simulation) science remains the valid option to uncover the workings and rules of your reality the same way as in the first one -except with regard to the nature and origin of consciousness, thus any possible meaning and purpose to your existence.
It is this possibility of an objective meaning and purpose of your (and everyone else’s) conscious existence here that you give up on, if you go with the first possibility. That is why I entertain the simulation as the model of reality I wager my life on, rather than mere physical-ism. Otherwise I am letting myself to miss the whole point of my conscious existence here.
ps. I reject Bostrom’s idea of a simulation, where it is running on some kind of computer hardware in a different reality. As in dreams, simulations can be produced by consciousness itself. Ours must have been produced by a consciousness with much greater capabilities as ours. And you may call IT whatever you want.
If I can create artificial consciousness, then there is no need for additional extra outside influence. The fact that you dream, just proves that your mind can recreate in its consciousness artificial worlds using its imagination and intelligence. It does not have to come from outside. That is the point of intelligence, the ability to manipulate real and abstract information.
@Andrew I, of course, would debate whether you – or anyone else – can indeed create self-aware, intelligent consciousness that can be likened to yours. You would have to start arranging observed physical material (molecules, atoms) and show/prove HOW and WHY certain arrangements NECESSARILY turn conscious. Theoretically I could also ask you to arrange material that will result in the duplicate of MY consciousness (having my memories, feelings, predispositions, etc). And I doubt that humanity will ever achieve anything like that.
“The fact that you dream, just proves that your mind can recreate in its consciousness artificial worlds using its imagination and intelligence. It does not have to come from outside.” – I beg to differ: your creating mind is external to the dream reality it creates. Of course, you probably claim that your ‘brain’ does the creation of the dream, but that is my whole point: the brain and its processes you can observe can simply be manifestations the simulation arranges for you so you can somehow have explanations for its phenomenon within.
Again, I am trying to find any benefit of thinking in a physical-only way about reality – and I am failing completely. So instead of maintaining the emergence-of-the-gaps, I stay with simulation-of-the-gaps (and of course, simulations are more likely to have their conscious creator than not).
Everyone interprets the same words differently, but everything is relative.
Are cartoon characters real?
With respect to yourself, they are only real as cartoon characters. But to each other they are real. The same laws apply to each of the characters.
Our laws apply to us, if you believe in consciousness outside of ourselves you are trying to change the laws of your existence. You are not in a simulation, if I hit you on the head hard, you will bleed and hurt. You should know the difference. It’s like not knowing you are in a dream! If you think clearly you know when you are in a dream or not. (assuming you are conscious in your dreams). Follow the logic. When you are awake you ‘know’ you are awake, no doubt what so ever, (hit yourself with a hammer if in doubt). But when you are in a dream you think you are awake, so you assume it might be real? Wrong! If you have ANY doubt while in a dream, then you definitely know you are in a dream, do something in a dream that you know is impossible in real life. Even swimming in a coffee cup may seem real in the dream, but you realise it’s completely rubbish in the real world. You are physically here in the real world, by definition. If you believe other wise, you are changing the meaning of real, so don’t confuse other by using the word real to mean something different!
You say we can’t create self conscious intelligent machines like ourselves. This is because you believe in an external consciousness. The fact that we haven’t achieved this yet, is because of 2 things, apart from the complexity. People haven’t realised yet that consciousness and intelligence are 2 completely different processes. That’s what I was trying to convey with my pancake example in previous posts. Consciousness can be stupid, and intelligence can be completely non conscious. You have to have both to recreate a real artificially intelligent machine similar to us. If the machine is not conscious it can’t solve problems unknown to it, because you have to be aware of the problem in the first place. Having said that it is just a matter of time, because you can’t put all the pieces together in one go. Consciousness has many parts. Firstly what I call the ‘span of consciousness’ and secondly what I call the ‘ breath of consciousness’. The span is how much conscious temporal time you are consciously aware of something., and breath is how many different things you are capable of being conscious in the same temporal time. So breath is multiple units of things you can span. So the first artificial units will have limited span, and no breath. Only when you make sufficient breath of consciousness and add Artificial intelligence, will you achieve anything similar to us. But that does not mean limited conscious machines are not conscious. This is similar to saying sheep are not conscious because you consider them stupid! It has nothing to do with intelligence.
While I’m in the mood, let me explain the difference between my consciousness program, and a normal program. Consciousness of temperature. (If I had the resources I would create conscious programs for sound, vision, texture, abstract language and abstract maths etc., then add Artificial intelligence). Anyway a normal program would input a temperature process it and output the result, once done it would have no knowledge or awareness of what it had done. It would just keep repeating the same. It would not know that the temp was higher or lower the time before or by how much, if you could ask it the question. You will say but it can store this info in memory somewhere and calculate the information and output it, but as before it would no know it had done so. Now my program knows the answer before you ask the question.
The analogy is as follows. Imagine your door bell is broken and you don’t know if anyone is outside. You have to go and open the door to see if anyone is there or not, as soon as you close the door you are again ignorant of what’s outside, unless you go again and open the door. This is like the normal program. You could program yourself to open the door every few minutes, to see, but result is the same as before, ignorance unaware untill you look. Now imagine you fix your door bell, you automatically know if someone is there without opening the door. If someone asks you is someone outside, you don’t need to open the door. You already know the answer, you are aware, like my program. If someone asks you was there someone before? You just recall from past memory into your conscious span and still give them the correct answer. Still aware of what is going on. The principle is the same for any other thing you want to be conscious of.
@Andrew ” if you believe in consciousness outside of ourselves you are trying to change the laws of your existence” – that is not what I believe; consciousness ‘participates’ in this reality, the very same way as you log in and play your avatar in a virtual reality game.
“You are not in a simulation, if I hit you on the head hard, you will bleed and hurt” – oh come on; if my avatar gets shot, I die within the game (or lose some points or whatever other effect the simulation produces for that effect. We are in an INTERACTIVE simulation; that means I can shoot someone in the head, or trigger his brain activity with electrochemical impulses – same difference; they can all be managed and carried out by the simulation. So I am afraid, but you are not in the position to ascertain whether we are in a simulation or not. All you can do is place your bet. That is what I did – and this bet will have far reaching consequences to how we view the world, thus what motivates and drives us.
“If you think clearly you know when you are in a dream or not.” – nope; that is the whole point of dreams; you go along with them, even though if you were in the ‘real’ world, you would question a whole bunch of things as not making sense. Thus, your consciousness submerges in your dreams into a limited capacity, with limited understanding. Now you can carry that thought further up a layer..
“If you have ANY doubt while in a dream” – that is IF; but people usually do not come to the point of doubt – they go along with their limited version of reality instead…
“You are physically here in the real world, by definition. If you believe other wise, you are changing the meaning of real, so don’t confuse other by using the word real to mean something different!” – I do not doubt that what you call your ‘real world’ is also my reality. I call that my shareable reality. My dreams are also part of my reality – my continuous awareness – but they are part of my private, unshareable reality. However I can have memories from my dream in my real world as well, and in that sense, these two types of realities define what I experience. Both of them are real – experienced by me – but are of different types. This just underlies dreaming as an analogy of what may be the case with the ‘real world’ on a higher level.
Simulation is not a testable scientific hypothesis; it is a working model of reality though – and better than physicality, as it allows you to reason further about the meaning of it all. Again, feel free to outline the advantages of your model over mine.
@Arturo..meaning, purpose, point to it all, you’ll wager your life over it — I thought this was where your initial comments were going. So our consciousness and reality is all a grand Puppet Show with an outside author. That is indeed wonderful news. Please tell us all about it. Let us in on those details, don’t keep them a secret to yourself. Sharing.
@James – what else would this be about than the meaning of it all? You may settle for no meaning at all, or everyone making up whatever meaning they like, but IF you end up being right about your version of reality, you will not even find out the very fact of ending up right. So what would be the rationale for me to go along with that route when an obvious alternative is readily available before my own senses?
“our consciousness and reality is all a grand Puppet Show with an outside author” – not in a slightest bit. You are an active participant in an interaction where (most likely) your decisions matter – as that is the only factor not known in the entire setup to its creator. It is just common sense anyone can reason about using their senses and capabilities they were blessed with, analyzing the reality you are surrounded with. So rather than a puppet master, I am afraid we are most likely facing an evaluator.
And everyone can go figure from that – there are no secrets or mysteries.. Once you got this far in your reasoning, the next step would be to try to figure out the most likely criterion these decisions are assessed by.
I understand what you are saying, so in your context, when I create a thinking conscious machine, indistinguishable from any human logic or thought, you are going to say that I created it in a simulation. Where my simulation created another simulation inside of it?
@Andrew – If you – or anyone else – creates a thinking feeling intelligently conscious and aware ‘thing’ from parts of their observable reality (molecules, atoms, fields, etc), not by accident (by electrifying a dead body), but by design, I would decrease the likelihood of my simulation model of reality being the case and I would deem the physical model to be more likely.
However, I see all current efforts that claim progress toward this milestone as hopelessly inadequate. Scientists can not even figure out why the electrical patterns in the brain cause consciousness, not to mention a deliberate design accomplishing it and proving the WHY and the HOW.
You can’t argue with someone that has blind faith, it’s part of human nature and survival, but you are mistaken that you can’t find meaning because you are a realist. There is more to life and existence than just atoms molecules and energy, but they don’t have to come from a simulation. Or multiple or parallel universes, the core theory is incomplete, as I explained in other posts, everything is emergent in this one universe. It’s like saying you can’t have societies, empathy, love, agape, philosophy etc etc, unless you are in a simulation. I can’t find it makes sense to look for answers when you can find them all here. You might as just well believe you are in a simulation within a simulation within a simulation etc etc, because no one will be able to prove otherwise. You see someone shot in a room with a direct line of sight through a broken window, and instead of seeing things as they are, you postulate that the bullet was everywhere bouncing off all the walls in every conceivable manner then shot the person. No one can prove otherwise, but why do that? Just because there are more opportunities to explain things differently?
Dear Arturo Persenota. I’m glad you said what you said. It means you are still open minded. All you need to do is wait a bit longer. Beat regards.
@Andrew – I would call someone having blind faith if they accept beliefs without critical thinking. But you and I are both going on faith: I have faith that reality is consciousness-centric, and you have faith that your observations are consistently right, and they make up the entirety of reality, including your own consciousness (that makes those observations to begin with). I see your leap of faith (emergence-of-the-gaps) as larger than mine – but I am sure you disagree with me on that.
I did not say that you can not find meaning as a realist. You can find any meaning you like – but that will be a subjective quest, and you will have no foundation from which you can assess objectivity for what you found. As a raw example, if I find my meaning in being a psychopath, so be it, who cares, we only live once, and if I can get away with things, I did the right thing – people CAN get to such subjective conclusions like that too. And you won’t be able to argue with them, as everyone’s life will eventually extinguish, so ‘why care?’. So it is very nice of you to find a benevolent meaning for your life, and I can be glad for it; but you can’t do much about those who beg to differ. And the world somehow seems to be full of people who begged to differ..
Simulation does not cause this to be any different. You have to carry the thought a bit further.
Nested simulations? Possible. However, you can only worry about one layer up at a time. But that much, I believe you are wise to so, as the encompassing context explains and defines the nested context’s objective meaning and purpose. If you enter a shooting game virtual reality, the success criterion is defined for your internal play outside of the VR. If you enter a flight simulator that trains pilots, the success criterion is defined not within the simulation but outside of it. And the same goes to levels below: if I ate some bad food, that will explain my horrible dream, or if I met someone I really like, that will explain why I had such and such a dream with that person participating.
You will never be able to prove that you are in a simulation (unless it is a consistently imperfect one); but the lack of certainty we are meant to have (both of us, as you also can not prove that your observing consciousness emerged from the material – you simply have faith in your observations) also plays a crucial role, as that can change our motivations and character in life.
Why reason this way? Obviously, because there is objective meaning to be discovered around the corner; that is, if I don’t let myself being fooled by my observable reality.
Dear Arturo. I would like you to remember me, so I am going to make a prediction that I have not posted elsewhere. I think that the majority of consciousness is in the hyppocampus and its interconnections. It is only less than 1% of the volume of the brain, but like breathing it can’t exist on its own, so the rest of the brain is required for it to function properly. To give you an idea of how I think, about 40 years ago I created a program on my spectrum computer which had a memory of 32 kilobytes, not megabytes, approx 0.3MB. Although it was not conscious, my program could tell you as you typed in letter by letter, whether the word you were typing was in my 80,000 word dictionary before you finished typing!
I created it because I was interested in AI, and believed that the brain worked differently to how computers work and store information. If you do a quick calculation let’s say the first 4 letters of each word in the dictionary, you would need 320,000 bytes of information storage or 320MB. With less than 0.3MB (my computer) I stored all that info plus my program in active memory (no external storage accessed, once the program started) . Therefore saving approx 320MB of conventional storage! It is this type of thinking that will solve the puzzle.
If we were able to construct a mechanism (I would call it a robot) that is fitted with ability to analyze its own internal state, then it would become an experimental question. If we could ask the robot a question “do you have qualia” the robot would process our request, and the answer would come back “yes!” Does such a robot actually have qualia? It depends on the nature of the robot’s inner process. If the process were primitive, such as ‘IF question is “do you have qualia” THEN answer is “yes!”‘ then we would have to conclude the real answer is likely “No!.” But if the inner processing would allow for a deep, insightful, interactive, philosophical discussion that would change the robot’s internal state in a way that it would describe saying “I just had a discussion about qualia that resulted in feelings F and ideas I, that changed my inner picture P of me and the world” would we still dare claim that this robot is not a self-aware being?
Sean, you fairly state the correct rebuttal in paragraph 22 starting with “Aha” where the non-illusionist claims to have data “even if it’s not publicly available”. Your answer from paragraphs 23-25 could have just been reduced to your sentence: “so there is no data at all, in the ordinary sense”, which simply denies “data” can refer to anything not publicly available.
If Sean Carroll were a zombie, he would be incapable of honestly referring to such data of his own, but for instance as you now find yourself reading this comment, you could quite naturally consider that experience as “data”, indeed, sufficient to honestly conclude your position is self-defeating.
Dear Andrew! I will make a different prediction. I think humanity will strive to create intelligent consciousness, and they will have intermediate states that they will claim to be closer and closer to what human consciousness amounts to. They may even make it to the point where they would try to replicate a conscious being to see if the resulting contraption would possess an equivalent consciousness to the source (this kind of ‘instant cloning’ experiment would be expected to produce a mental state in the target with identical memories, skills, abilities, intentions, feelings, etc).
However, at that point, my bet is on NOT getting an equivalent consciousness, and even further, I expect that the resulting perfect copy would NOT be conscious at all. I guess we wait and see which one of us will end up correct. Certainly we will not live to see which one of us is closer to the eventual outcome; and I stay with my wager, that is “we exist in an interactive, consciousness-centric reality that is implemented as a simulation, for the duration of its target audience’ participation in it”, with all the conclusions that follow from this model of reality. To me, going with physicalism would equal artificially limiting my reasoning to within my box of observations (that ultimately I believe and accept), leading to missing the whole point of my existence in this reality.
@Andrew, still waiting for the details of this possible reality of yours. Why so reluctant to spell it out for us? Specifics. Why would any non-crazy person wager their brief life on any belief or position, unless motivated by extreme fear. The height of this common craziness would be to wager it on a belief system (or variant of) the one they were surrounded with in childhood. This should be obvious to any thinking person today. Catholics do this on little children and scare them to death; it lasts a lifetime in many if not most. Evaluator? Creator? Wow, that’s quite something. If not complete marionettes, our talking thinking great apes’ consciousness still gives us a daily show unfolding moment by moment, with us and all the myriad creatures and life forms below us reproducing and dying in their brief existences, many suffering and eating each other — and all this life continuing via natural means over and over endlessly. As we zoom around the sun, our energy source for life, with five previous mass extinctions of life on this atypical planet. And to what purpose? If there was an outside creator, judging objectively, many don’t stop to think it is a monster, an outright fiend. Hume pointed out that our universe with us in it looks like a child deity just playing around with his toybox who, once bored, left it alone to run on its own and moved on. You keep writing in generalities. Let us in on your wisdom and how you acquired your position. It must be pretty good if you’re not of unsound mind and would wager your life on it. Details. Specifics. And how you know this. Have a good day.
@James, I believe you meant your comment for me, instead of Andrew.. So:
The details, reasoning that led me to my model of reality, and all possible conclusions that follow from this model is outlined on my website (and also in my book, with detailed explanations). I believe, in the blog, if you click on my name, you will be taken there.
As for fear, rather, try likelihood – weighing the plausibility of different scenarios I may be facing is my main guiding force, not fear. And plausibility need not involve scientific evidence or proof – simply, a scenario would need to simply ‘make more sense’ than another.
But ‘fear’ also comes into the equation in the form of ‘consequentiality’ – the magnitude of possible consequences I may face, should another specific scenario turn out to be the case. And this ties into your ‘craziness’ concept: I would be crazy to wager on a scenario of reality and let it guide my life, which – if ending up wrong – will have me ending up with potentially significant and logical logical consequences. Yes, basically it is Pascal’s wager – and I would have to be a fool (not just crazy) not to consider this.
Thus, in my view, I would have to be a fool to bet on physicalism: if physicalism ends up true, I will have absolutely no consequence about NOT betting on it for my life. However, a non-physicalist ultimate truth may be a bit more problematic, if I lived my life according to ‘hey, you only live once’ or ‘I do whatever is legal or whatever I can get away with’.
Everyone wagers on a belief system, including materialists, with their belief in physicalism representing the entirety of reality. And everyone will try to pass their beliefs onto their children – in the best case, only as a set of beliefs to consider.
In a simulation model of reality with a target audience of conscious intelligent humans, “daily show unfolding moment by moment, with us and all the myriad creatures and life forms below us” and the “mass extinctions of life” can simply be presentations of the simulation to us. They are there, so that we make an internal sense of our reality, as being in a simulation is not meant to be obvious to us. But yes, they did not actually all have had to take place within the running of the simulation. Think about this: when you join a simulated interactive game as its first player, do you see a great emptiness, or a world ready-to-play-in even for its very first participants?
Hume’s world represents a scenario that I consider less likely than each of us inheriting our accidental situations for a specific (and perhaps) deserved reason. And to what purpose this could all be? I can see only one logical purpose: to evaluate each and every one of us on how we manage to live our lives in our given situation according to the universally applicable criterion of love vs. selfishness. Everything else is known and governed by the simulation, or is a function of what capabilities or shortcomings we receive in it.
Big mistake in my previous comment beginning with @Andrew Still waiting….
I’m still not used to this format.
*** It should have begun with @Arturo
Sorry for any confusion.