One topic I’ve always found fascinating is the philosophy of mind. Though my academic experience on the topic is limited to undergrad psychology and philosophy courses, one centered around the book The Mind’s I. Another book discussed in that class was Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. Certainly a title that promises a bit more than the book can reasonably deliver, a lot of what it does is try to put the shoe on the other foot, proof-wise, re those who insist that consciousness must be something non-physical or “irreducible”. Much of the book points out that many of the elements pervading conscious experience are in fact perceptual illusions. Conscious experience is not as expansive, instantaneous, or sequential as it seems: The actual level of detail perceived in a scene is very non-uniform, conscious perception of events at a particular time don’t happen right away, and the perception of an event can be influenced by an event that happens slightly later.
Dennett compares “the hard problem of consciousness” to “the hard problem of biology” allegedly requiring the discovery of some sort of elan vital, the problem of “how can a bunch of non-living matter be a living organism”. Ultimately, this decomposes into a series of easier problems. That hasn’t provided some hard line that gets crossed between “not alive” and “alive”, but the question of at what level does it become really, really alive is just not so interesting. Similarly, when you put together the functional details of cognitive operations: perception and self-perception, recall, knowledge encoding, abstraction, reasoning, etc., etc., Denett thinks the question of “okay but when does it become really, really conscious?” will be uninteresting. Certainly a bold claim.
I think there’s more of a conceptual jump to be made for conscious experience and Dennett is clearly jumping the gun on that one, and there’s an unlimited amount of back-and-forth you can do on who bears the burden of proof, but I do really enjoy that approach with regard to the Philosophical Zombie hypothetical, positing the at-least-conceptual possibility of an otherwise-identical world with no conscious experience. Putting aside the question of whether something imaginable must be possible, Dennett notes that saying you imagine something is more possible than actually imagining it and responds to those who say they can imagine the P-zombie hypothetical in a self-evidently possible and not self-contradictory way with “no you can’t”. Whether you think this is a brilliant bit of intellectual judo or a childish “no u” is a matter of opinion, but I do think it seems a bit unfair to demand mathematical proof that a scenario is impossible when the scenario itself is basically nothing but absurdities. The P-zombie scenario posits a world where everyone is going on making detailed, nuanced, evocative statements about (and writing philosophy papers on, etc.) experiences that not only they have not had but no one has.
The reason this is kicking around my mind again is that suddenly the world has a lot of systems that are doing a lot of functionally cognitive things. A recent overview on the topic has been bouncing around my head, it also touches on one of the essays in The Mind’s “I”, Thomas Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat? when it belatedly gets to an overview of terms. And jumping to that, emphasis mine:
[…] the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism[…]
We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence. It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing.
In 1974, that was theoretical. But now it’s not. We have machines now that are effectively P-zombies of a sort. Or so it seems. But despite the reasons to believe that, there are alternative explanations that provide reason for uncertainty.
Nagel ends the essay by calling for the sort of thing you’d need to fulfill Dennet’s idea. In order to explain consciousness:
We would have to develop such a phenomenology to describe the sonar experiences of bats; but it would also be possible to begin with humans. One might try, for example, to develop concepts that could be used to explain to a person blind from birth what it was like to see. One would reach a blank wall eventually, but it should be possible to devise a method of expressing in objective terms much more than we can at present, and with much greater precision.
Dennett would, I think, have suggested that this process might be more straightforward1 and less ultimately obstructed than this suggests.
I’m no one in particular to listen to on this topic, but my intuition is that these things all come bundled together: You don’t get unconscious self-perception or non-subjective perception. Objective/subjective duality is like wave/particle duality. Hofstadter’s “strange loops” (which he suggests are key to self-perception) are like standing waves. This isn’t quite panpsychism and ever time I say the phrase “neutral monism” I get mercilessly savaged by a pack of angry philosophers. Probably deservedly so. Still, if you buy that you just don’t get P-zombies, what should you think of LLMs and their soon-to-be-not-so-hypothetical descendants?
- “What is it like to be a bat?” “Loud.” ↩︎
