Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

[nabraxas]

David J. Chalmers

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of "consciousness", an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state. Sometimes terms such as "phenomenal consciousness" and "qualia" are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of "conscious experience" or simply "experience". Another useful way to avoid confusion (used by e.g. Newell 1990, Chalmers 1996) is to reserve the term "consciousness" for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term "awareness" for the more straightforward phenomena described earlier. If such a convention were widely adopted, communication would be much easier; as things stand, those who talk about "consciousness" are frequently talking past each other.

The ambiguity of the term "consciousness" is often exploited by both philosophers and scientists writing on the subject. It is common to see a paper on consciousness begin with an invocation of the mystery of consciousness, noting the strange intangibility and ineffability of subjectivity, and worrying that so far we have no theory of the phenomenon. Here, the topic is clearly the hard problem - the problem of experience. In the second half of the paper, the tone becomes more optimistic, and the author's own theory of consciousness is outlined. Upon examination, this theory turns out to be a theory of one of the more straightforward phenomena - of reportability, of introspective access, or whatever. At the close, the author declares that consciousness has turned out to be tractable after all, but the reader is left feeling like the victim of a bait-and-switch. The hard problem remains untouched.

http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

[nabraxas]

Consciousness Explained (published 1991) is a book by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett which offers an account of how consciousness arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the brain.

The book puts forward a "multiple drafts" model of consciousness, suggesting that there is no single central place (a "Cartesian Theater") where conscious experience occurs; instead there are "various events of content-fixation occurring in various places at various times in the brain".[1] The brain consists of a "bundle of semi-independent agencies";[2] when "content-fixation" takes place in one of these, its effects may propagate so that it leads to the utterance of one of the sentences that make up the story in which the central character is one's "self". Dennett's view of consciousness is that it is the apparently serial account for the brain's underlying parallelism.

One of the book's more controversial claims is that qualia do not (and cannot) exist. Dennett's main argument is that the various properties attributed to qualia by philosophers—qualia are supposed to be incorrigible, ineffable, private, directly accessible and so on—are incompatible, so the notion of qualia is incoherent. The non-existence of qualia would mean that there is no hard problem of consciousness, and "philosophical zombies", which are supposed to act human in every way while somehow lacking qualia, cannot exist. So, as Dennett wryly notes, he is committed to the belief that we are all zombies—adding that his remark is very much open to misinterpretation.

A key philosophical method is heterophenomenology, in which the verbal or written reports of subjects are treated as akin to a theorist's fiction–the subject's report is not questioned, but it is not assumed to be an incorrigible report about that subject's inner state. This approach allows the reports of the subject to be a datum in psychological research, thus circumventing the limits of classical behaviorism.

Also Dennett says that only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained

see also:

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incpages/publctns.shtml

Qualia

When we see a red word on a page, our brain acquires all sorts of data about the wavelength of the light, the shape and size of the letters, and so on. But there is more to it than that: we also have an experience of redness, and this experience is over and above the mere data-gathering, which a computer could do equally well. This experienced red, along with experienced blue, cold, noise, bitterness, and so on are qualia, and it is very hard to give a fully satisfactory account of them. In particular it is hard to find any satisfactory place for them in the account of the world provided by physics. They are 'raw feels', we know they exist because 'there is something it is like' to see red, smell grass, and so on.

The problem of qualia has been at the forefront of recent discussions of consciousness, but somehow it nevertheless lacks the established respectability of some other philosophical issues: it is not one of the old philosophical chestnuts chewed over since the time of Socrates. Perhaps it only began to seem a mystery in its own right once a mechanical explanation of the general workings of the mind seemed possible, though whether this perception of mystery represents enlightenment or bedazzlement remains an open question. It is certainly an exceptionally slippery issue, and most of the literature on the subject is about establishing the existence and nature of the problem, rather than solving it.

The arguments for the reality of qualia take many forms and some have become very convoluted. A clear exposition of five is given by Chalmers. All the arguments, however, depend on the basic intuition that there is something involved in subjective experience over and above the simple mechanical, physical story, something which could in principle be taken away without affecting the course of that story at all.

There are three main ways to go on qualia. The first is the Dennettian path of scepticism: there are no qualia, the whole thing is a category mistake, or some other confusion or delusion. This approach avoids an immense number of problems, but it rides roughshod over the very powerful intuitive conviction that there is something more to seeing a red object than just acquiring the knowledge that it is, in fact, red. Instead of having to explain qualia themselves, we have to explain just why so many people find their existence undeniable .

The second course is to start explaining the physical process of perception in the brain and hope that somewhere along the line it will somehow amount to, or include an explanation of qualia. This approach is particularly appealing to scientists and engineers. Let's just build the robot; if we succeed we may have picked up our explanation of qualia along the way, and if we succeed without the explanation, maybe it doesn't matter anyway; the philosophers never explained how this stuff works in human beings, either, did they? But building the robot turns out to be more difficult than it seemed; and our purely physical theories of the brain, interesting as they may be, don't seem to provide the answer. Either we end up with a purely neurological theory which, whatever may be claimed for it, does not touch on the problem of qualia at all; or we end up reducing qualia to a special kind of flag or label which plays some role in an ordinary computational physical process. There might be such flags, and they might be well worth studying, but they aren't, in the original sense, qualia, and nothing we might say about them can possibly resolve the original problem.

The third path is to accept the full-blooded version of qualia: but this involves insoluble problems. Qualia aren't part of the normal physical process of cause and effect, but speaking and writing are: it follows, bizarrely, that nothing we may say or write about qualia can actually have been caused by them, or by our experience of them. Quite how bad this problem is depends on one's views about reference and causality, but it is very bad even in the best case, and in attempting to deal with it Qualians are driven towards hopeless philosophical positions such as dualism and epiphenomenalism. So far as I can see, there is no-one who accepts the full reality of qualia and who even claims to be able to clear up the mystery completely.

http://www.consciousentities.com/whole.htm#qualia

Edited February 10, 2010 by nabraxas

[reptyle]

accept the full reality of qualia and you will be able to clear up the mystery...and thus i claim to be complete. multifold naturalisation towards the nearest logical vantage point...witnessing only that which is revealed as per continuum of said experience in itself experiencing itself through itself.

[JDanger]

If we accept the full reality of qualia then we effectively place the rest of our theory of causality in second place. While this may seem unacceptable to some, it seems the most obvious choice. Philosophers somehow have a tendency to overlook the importance of our direct experience which is, after all, the fundamental source of our knowledge. That said, it's important to both accept the reality of qualia whilst bracketing it in such a way as to leave room for a reality that is not in one's immediate field of experience. If we don't, then we fall into the trap of not seeing the forest due to having too many trees in the way.

It's interesting that consciousness should be a problem. There would be no problem if it weren't for qualia existing in the first place; to find ourselves in a position where the very thing that allows the existence of a problem becomes the problem itself suggests that we've hit the bottom of the philosophical barrel. Cool.

There should also be a clear distinction drawn between which 'problem' of consciousness belongs to which domain of inquiry. The nature or essence of consciousness, ie., "what makes consciousness consciousness?" is in the domain of philosophy. Once we know what consciousness is, then the question of how it can arise from otherwise inanimate matter falls into the domain of science and brain-pokers. Any conscious being should intuitively know what consciousness is, since as Sartre points out, "consciousness is consciousness of." If you are conscious, that is, possess the property of consciousness, then you must be immediately conscious of your consciousness. You're also conscious of your surroundings and you are conscious that you are conscious of your surroundings, etc. The question of how consciousness comes into being from some arrangement of matter is due not to some incomplete grasp of what consciousness is, but an incomplete grasp of the physical substrate which allows consciousness to surface in the first place. If we keep pouring more resources into mind research, then we will come closer to answering our own questions. It may turn out that such untenable positions such as dualism or epiphenomenalism turn out to be true, after all.

As far as I understand it, we have buckets of evidence to suggest that consciousness is physically grounded (or at least influenced), but we have no physical entity that is consciousness. Somehow we're under the assumption that if we can poke a part of our brain and produce a certain change in consciousness, that consciousness must be something physical (hence the untenable position of substance dualism). But if we dispense with the assumption that consciousness is physical, we can still claim that consciousness can reflect changes in the conscious organism, so both dualism and epiphenomenalism are still open as options (epiphenomenalism also dissolves the problem of consciousness' causal power; our mind doesn't make our body move, our body moves and our mind responds). Until someone finds a chunk of brain that IS consciousness, both positions may still stand and we have no reason to reject the full reality of qualia.

[JDanger]

Anyway, here's a pretty good summary of the consciousness debate: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/

[ballzac]

I don't think we can unequivocally make the assumption that qualia is real. There is a likelihood, in my opinion, that qualia may be an illusion that allows an interface between conciousness and the capabilities of the mind. If we didn't have a sense of the experience of 'redness', we could not distinguish red from blue. But this doesn't mean that 'redness' is actually a thing in itself, other than the physical properties of red (specifically the wavelength of the light).

This is difficult to swallow because when we look at something red, it appears to us to possess that quality of 'redness', but if there is to be a connection between our ability to distinguish between read and blue, and our conscious mind, it will need to appear as such. You may conclude that this cannot be true because if the colours red and blue were suddenly swapped, you would be very aware of the difference. Your surroundings would be completely different. However, this may be largely due to the connections we feel between these colours and certain emotions or expectations. If the sky was suddenly red instead of blue, it would look rather ominous due to our expectations of what a red sky entails. Of course, the experience of qualia would be different, but this could still be a result of an illusion.

Qualia, as a general idea, is rather easy to define. But the subjective experience of qualia relating to a specific sensation is impossible to define. I will never know that your experience of redness and mine are the same. Perhaps this should be a clue to us that such notions of 'sameness' or 'difference' when talking about qualia as experienced by different people are meaningless, because qualia itself is just an illusion that gives the individual a way for the consciousness to differentiate between experiences.

[JDanger]

True, but qualia is by definition subjective. That doesn't make it an illusion. You can't have an experience then claim the experience wasn't real. Obviously there's a distinction between the experience itself, and the content of the experience ("I experience the apple as red" is not the same as "the apple is red.")

Qualia is subjective experience. You can't say subjective experience is not real, you can merely detract from the ontological validity of the experiential content.

[reptyle]

Spheres of reasoning, spiraling farther and farther from a unified vision of what is...qualia of the three fields.

[hamma]

Spheres of reasoning, spiraling farther and farther from a unified vision of what is...qualia of the three fields.

 

Consciousness, the level of perception, was the first split introduced into the mind after the separation, making the mind a perceiver rather than a creator. Consciousness is correctly identified as the domain of the ego. The ego is a wrong-minded attempt to perceive yourself as you wish to be, rather than as you are. Yet you can know yourself only as you are, because that is all you can be sure of. Everything else is open to question. The ego is the questioning aspect of the post separation self which was made rather that created. It is capable of asking questions but not of perceiving meaningful answers, because these would involve knowledge and cannot be perceived. The mind is therefore confused, because only One-mindedness can be without confusion. A separated or divided mind must be confused. It can only be uncertain about what it is. It has to be in conflict because it is out of accord with itself. This makes it's aspects strangers to each other, and this is the essence of the fear prone condition, in which attack is always possible. You have every right to feel afraid as you perceive yourself. This is why you cannot escape from your fear until you realise that you did not and can not create yourself. You can never make your misperceptions true and your creation is beyond your own error. That is why you will eventually choose to heal the separation.

The ability to perceive made the body possible, because you must perceive something with something. Perception involves an exchange or translation, which knowledge does not need. The interpretative function of perception, a distorted form of creation then premits you to interpret the body as yourself in an attempt to escape from the conflict you have induced. Spirit which knows, could not be reconciled with this loss of power, because it is incapable of darkness. This makes spirit almost inaccessible to the mind and entirely inaccessible to the body. Thereafter spirit is perceived as a threat, because light abolishes darkness merely by showing you it is not there. Truth will always overcome error in this way. This cannot be an active process of correction because, knowledge does not do anything. It can be percieved as an attacker but it cannot attack. What you perceive as its attack is your own vauge recognition that knowledge can always be remembered never having been destroyed.

"a course in miracles"

[klip247]

My understanding is that subjective perception is a very low-grade of perception due to a filtering of experience by the personality, ego and mind.. consciousness being the essence behind all of these operations. So in this context subjectivity is a conditioned perception of reality, therefore reality is not being interpreted in its true form via this type of perception.

There are supposedly levels of consciousness that grant access to view reality in its truer form, one of them being objective perception with yet a higher level that is called samadhi, this is a sanskrit term. Most of you probably already know this.

What I find shocking to some degree is that people expect other people to figure out what mind, consciousness, ego is... each of us are equipped with the tools necessary to make an investigation into our own composition (with the consciousness), there are various natural tools such as meditation, observation etc that aid us in this endevour.

We are particles of the universe capable of understanding and comprehending itself, the universe is non-intelligent? How could that be if we as particles of the universe are intelligent?

What is consciousness? We all have it right, animals have it, insects have it... how could we be using consciousness and not even understand it? Is this not purely because of ignorance?

[devance]

http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/100954-rule-13-lis-forum.html

Logic and science is great.

so leave at that as to the communist to see and the capatalists as propaganda.

The grunts must serve the state as they[bush inc or others] are in power so reasons must be found otherwise the ants[citizens of a nation might attack talking heads which on TV is a prostitute propaganda].

i got alot or respect for the japaneese.

Not a war race but a slave race[ by the upperclass] and even turned peasant warriors[ the mauser rifle w1 and w11] taught , but they can speak for their cultural history.

prospered well with only 50 years of peace as as nation.

A think the chineeses are alot more reaxed even under the communist politcal structure.

Its funny a china communist wanted the chineese space station to have all commise because as he said thats are our religion[[state control] don't think its going to work out.

[incognito]

i heard the most illuminating thing come from a celebs mouth the other day when i was working. well i read it so maybee wasnt from his mouth but u get the drift lol. no other than idol winner GUY SEBASTION LOL

anyways i dont know why it struck a chord , but maybee was somethin i needed to hear at that moment on that day.

he was saying that alot of rock stars , celebs are running around rooting and druggin and drinkin (which i figure he doesnt) trying to fill a massive hole, which they can never ever fill. That gaping hole can only ever be filled by god.

well ill be, wisdom comes from some random places!! i read this during a period of time where i was just doin that, rooting randoms, druggin just tryin to fill that hole. Id forgotten my spiritual self, my sense of (the good ol' cliche) God, id lost my spirituality! and it took Guy Sebastion to tell me that! lol

I do think a sense of your own spirituality is especially important to your functioning as a concious human being, and if u dont have it, your gonna look for all sorts of things to fill that need.

Thankyou Guy Sebastion

Edited March 8, 2010 by incognito

[holymountain]

can totally relate to that incognito. i see a lot of musicians who think they are living the dream but they are just empty inside. they get to root chicks and drink free booze and party on!! because thats what they think they are supposed to do and thats what they think will make them happy. a lot of them are doomed to miserable lives chasing that shit because they feel it justifies them as a musician. they don't realise that you can be satisfied by being disciplined and working on your art.. the way i see it is God is the ultimate creator. so when we are being creative we are participating in the act of creation, which is an act of God. and that's fulfilling enough for me.

we're all god but we've forgotten it. so we spend our whole lives looking for things to fill that mysterious gap that we can't quite put our finger on. material goods, status, drugs, sex, money etc we're told thats what we need to be complete. but the joke is we're already complete. we just forget to take the time to look around and realise.

i'd rather listen to what guy sebastian believes than what some spoilt rock star like axl rose believes...(listening guy's music is another thing though...)

[Chiral]

I dunno, if you can find your "real" niche in life, extracting day to day extreme enjoyment from it, you shouldn't have too many god holes to fill. People do drugs and fuck around for many reasons but I think it's mainly cause they aren't doing what they are, or might be good at.

Working doing your hobby or running your own business that you started from scratch selling things that mean a lot to you etc...occupy your mind with your passion, fill the voids with prosperity and humbleness, then you will only need a little god to smooth you over a touch.

edit ...what do all 3 of these famous Bogan Aussie role models have in common..?

Guy Sebastion

Daryl Braithwate

Jimmy Barnes

Jono loves them...

Edited March 8, 2010 by Chiral

[devance]

http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1006544/pg6#15856224'>http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1006544/pg6#15856224

http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1002092/pg3#15795831'>http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1002092/pg3#15795831

http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1

/message1007218/pg4#15859374