I like the point that a zombie in a zombie world would conclude the same thing the a conscious being does in this world. Have to remember that one.
Myself, I think the hard problem of consciousness is a psychological block, a case of our own collective conceit in struggling to contemplate that the way we process information is subject to the same rules as everything else.
There may well be things that are unknowable. The universe may have its own Godelian sentences, limits on what it (or systems within it) can know. But looking at the history of science, our ability to know what in particular is forever unknowable doesn't seem to have a good tract record. Thinkers have trouble imagining the ingenuity of future scientists. In other words, we should be as humble in judging what is or isn't knowable as we should in judging whether we can know it all.
Agreed - I personally would hope scientific incompleteness is not true, and future scientists figure this all out, but I also think the idea is important enough to represent well.
Nice work, enjoyable read, thank you. Regarding the section on philosophical zombies, I wonder whether the claim that p-zombies could “imagine” anything is nonsensical? I understand these theoretic entities to mimic humans in every way except that they don’t have any subjective experience, no qualia — something I suspect necessary to be able to imagine/think at all. P-zombies are merely meat-puppets running an algorithm, right? Perhaps they don’t even work as a thought experiment because they are not possible even in principle.
An interesting thought! If we define imagination as necessarily containing a subjective component, then yes - although this then applies to almost everything mental. But from a more broad functional definition of imagination, it seems, at least to me, like they could do something equivalent (neurally or just behaviorally). E.g., a zombie could write a philosophy paper about the zombie argument.
I think it’s at least an open question, whether philosophical zombies are a possibility. Vervaeke would argue that consciousness plays a role in human intelligence and makes an evolutionary argument for it, relating it to what he calls “relevance realization.” Basically, he posits that some of “adverbial” qualities which make consciousness non-material, like it’s “hereness” and “nowness” allow for the mind to kind of immediately (and subconsciously) understand parts of experience in relation to the “whole” of experience.
I think this argument is tricky, though. And possibly falsifiable with advancements in AI. It depends on how you want to qualify intelligence and relevance realization. And it would also seem to demand material evidence that the human brain has some kind of sensitivity to the non-material mind — like “consciousness receptors” or something — or that there is a domain of non-material intelligence which is somehow entangled with the material intelligence of the brain.
But the p-zombie argument may have problems too. How certain are we that consciousness is not, in some sense, an elan vital which, when absent, would have our p-zombies be more like p-vegetables.
Could AI positively confirm the existence of p-zombies? Can we make p-zombies? What would the difference be between a human-like android and a human, besides the underlying hardware?
Maybe it’s a question that demands experimentation, or at least a very solid formal proof. I wouldn’t personally accept “Well I don’t see why it couldn’t be possible.” as a convincing argument.
Would questions of autopoietic ethics and love inform our intuitions in qualifying p-zombies? (Love is always absent in these inquiries, I notice.)
Can we learn something from the psychonauts who put themselves into altered states of consciousness, including states which could be described as p-zombie adjacent? (Experiences which are reported to be void of what-it’s-like-to-be-something-ness, for example.)
But, more to the end of your inquiry, does a theory of scientific incompleteness require the p-zombie argument to be true? I think not. If true, incompleteness. If not true, incompleteness. And perhaps we’ll discover that p-zombies are categorically unprovable and unfalsifiable, which would also lead to incompleteness. I think :)
Maybe a Zombie could have a functional equivalent of imagination, but i'm less sure there is such an equivalent for introspection... You say that "...no utterance or behavior or experiment could tell the difference between a zombie and a non-zombie. Nor any amount of self-reflection or introspection". I find the second sentence here unconvincing - surely introspection is itself experiential, and therefore introspection is the proof that you yourself are not a zombie. Of course the zombie says he introspects and finds he is conscious, but from the first person surely there is no functional equivalent of introspection with which to discover that you can't tell if you are or are not a zombie.
Exactly what I was thinking. Everything a zombie called "conceiving" would have to be turned into its behavioral equivalent, which would not be "conceiving" as we understand it. Then again, you could say the entire zombie argument is then circular, or you could be generous and say it's an intuition pump (I think it works much better that way).
That's an interesting thought. I think it's just because macroscale causation exists (and then you can get the rest from some sort of Dennettian notion of elbow room in terms of the counterfactuals you as an agent have access to). But I'm open to more radical ideas.
Perverse that Dennett could so condescendingly dismiss realism about qualia as the last residue of discredited “soul-stuff” dualism and human exceptionalism while in the next breath defending realism about the far more anthropocentric and faith-laden construct of free will.
Is scientific incompleteness orthogonal to, or entangled with, the bracketing out of subjective experience? It reminded me of this recent book, “the Blind Spot”, which I haven’t read yet - I wonder if you have?
I always love it when you turn your attention to consciousness! And I deeply appreciate your rare willingness to be comfortable with scientific uncertainty (so many scientists seem hellbent on certainty). Forgive me if I'm missing your position (here or elsewhere), but are you willing to consider that incompleteness might point to the need for a metaphysical understanding different from materialism? --i.e., could consciousness be more fundamental than material?
I think the interesting thing about viewing the issue of consciousness as being a product of scientific incompleteness is that it gets around having to answer direct questions about materialism or dualism or what's more fundamental. I think you could argue for those things! For sure, and many have. But at least for the view I've sketched out here: if there were some angel who lived in a world of pure idealism, maybe they too would have some sort of necessary incompleteness regarding their own consciousness. So then the question of substance or ultimate nature ends up just being something inaccessible (or like "unask the question").
However, I should say that this thesis does play nicely with the Kantian sense that there is something unexperienceable which informs or has some relation to experience, and that is a very good point. It just is not the same.
Yes. Kant's idealism is not about the possibilities of explaining the world, but about whether we experience it without our own cognitive apparatus aiding in its construction. I.e., under Kant's idealism, you could have a complete system of the experienceable world, but the experienceable world would be just that and only that. It would not be the world outside of experience (because how could you ever experience such a thing)
Consciousness arises from materialism, not the other way around. Something has to first exist in order to be perceived. Similarly, scientific incompleteness arises from consciousness, not necessarily the other way around. It is still worthwhile to scientifically interrogate consciousness, but scientific limitations mean limitations in describing consciousness if it is not paired with equally robust philosophy. Consciousness does not need to exist outside the purview of science, as it is all derived from something material to begin with.
But is it? I think the point Erik makes is that nothing can ever be 'proven', thus 'known' by us, including your position that consciousness arises from materialism.
also, if materialism is just a framework arising from an obligate function of the… —gap and the observer (i.e. consciousness trying to de-observe and thus get to reality) then materialism (even if its guess is true) is still a outcome of consciousness, and therefore may not escape the observer issues, especially with regard to consciousness.
There is an old joke, usually attributed to Russell:
What is matter? Nevermind. What is mind? No matter.
There might be a 'science' of the mind someday, one might say there already is. The problem with that is at present no one would call it 'a science' since nowadays a 'science' has to be a physical science, the basic physical science being, unsurprisingly, called 'physics'. In order to be a science like 'physics' one must have a definition of the word 'physical', which is clear and sharp and draws white lines that one knows which side of the line is 'physical'.
I'd say lots of present day confusion comes from the wrongheaded present day belief that the definition of the word 'physical' was something some scientist discovered after he had stopped going to church or something similar. The 'science' which it would be thought of today as in scare quotes, is metaphysics. It's a fuzzy word too, but at the brass tacks level, it's arguing about what the word 'physical' means. Since the present day definition of the word physical comes from philosophizing, Eric is right that the last page or so in the Assayer about tickling is part of the argument, since it's not thought to come from an argument, the thinking on this score will always be bad until that changes.
The hard problem of consciousness, in the way it is usually thought of, is harder than hard, it's impossible. Physical science is about the physical, not the ghost but the machine, it cannot talk about the ghost qua the ghost, it doesn't do that. If the 'solve' is supposed to be physical science solution, where the effect is physical as well as the cause, the problem is unsolvable.
You are absolutely right: "The hard problem of consciousness, in the way it is usually thought of, is harder than hard, it's impossible." Consciousness is fundamental, one cannot explain how consciousness arises from the brain activity, because the brain as a physical object is already being experienced in consciousness. Trying to explain (my) consciousness as an activity of my brain is like a serpent eating its own tail. Trying to explain how consciousness arises from the brain activity of other people is mixing two different levels of representation: other people's brain activity (if I observe it by means of suitable equipment) is just a representation in (my) consciousness, a picture within a picture, a story within a story... (see "Goedel, Esher, Bach" by Hofstadter for further insight). But such a view faces the problem of solipsism.
There is a way to avoid solipsism as follows. Wave function as a representation of a quantum state which in my interpretation is consciousness. There are many possible wave functions/quantum states. One is such that I experience myself being a person A, experiencing the world that includes a person B as a picture in (my) consciousness. Another wave function (quantum state) is such that I experience myself being the person B, experiencing the world that includes the person A. There is a common cross-section world of both persons (and all other persons) that they interpret as an objective world. In both cases there is the "I", first person's experience, "me feeling". Consciousness is fundamental, the "external" world is a part of consciousness, and yet in this setup there is no solipsism. Objective reality is the Hilbert space of all quantum states, which are the states of different possible streams of consciousness.
"On the other hand, if it is valid only with the premise of consciousness, then any conscious being can always make the zombie argument, and then notice that whether or not they are a zombie cannot be resolved by introspection or empirical evidence, indicating incompleteness. The existence of consciousness appears to be the kind of true fact that cannot be proven from the inside.",
the conscious being knows they're conscious through their immediate subjective experience. The difficulty comes in proving that they're conscious, or transmitting that information to someone else. Any argument they produce could have equally been produced by a p-zombie, and any scientific model of the universe they create does not require consciousness.
I initially thought internal introspection could allow a conscious being to prove to themselves that they are conscious without a spoken or explicit argument. I'm now unsure if introspection can be used, because if we take consciousness to supervene on the physical and have no causal influence upon it, then the computations done through introspection that produce the chain of reasoning would also have to be performed in a p-zombie, hence invalidating its conclusion.
They are still able to immediately know that they are conscious, however, so I don't think the conclusion is quite as strong.
Excellent read! I'm a graduate student in pure mathematics. I wish my university had more (any) courses in set theory, logic, and this Gödel type stuff. Alas, my school is far too applied overall to have any such courses. I think it's worth considering that some self-referential statements are determinable. The simplest example I can think of is "This statement is true." Because of that, it's tough to say which things are incomplete and which things are not yet determined. Unless we can prove something is incomplete, we cannot know if it is or isn't, even if it seems we don't have a way to show completeness.
Something interesting you brought up was the relation of the "mind-body problem" to the incompleteness of science. Is it clear that there is a distinction between the two? For instance, if we are incarnated souls, can our physical bodies (or just the physical world for that matter) impact whichever other level of existence the soul originates? If we are in a simulation, can we as a simulation impact the machine which is doing the simulation? In our world, the infinitely simpler simulations we run do impact our computers—the more things to simulate at once, the more power is used. Is science incomplete solely because it fails to account for this other level of existence? Clearly, science as we understand it today, is not even capable of sustaining thoughts, theories, and hypotheses about non-material (corporeal/simulation) things.
And, another question, is a Gödel statement actually a paradox? "The proof to this statement is the Gödel number of this statement." It is self-referential; it is self-proclaiming. Is it paradoxical? I personally don't see how, but perhaps I'm just more accepting of a paradox as truth than others. (After all, I am a Lutheran.)
Similarly, I don't see how scientific incompleteness would be a paradox. There have always been things which science cannot tell us. What does it matter that they're not all "trivial," and that some things are undecidable in a more complicated and abstract sense?
"If it is indeed a fact that there are questions about the universe that are true but cannot be proved, this unfortunately recommends no particular religion, points you to no higher mysteries."
Is this not a higher mystery? The highest mystery of them all? Even if we can never prove the true answer, that does not mean we cannot obtain the true answers. It does not mean we cannot ponder them.
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter inspired me to shift my focus from metaphysics to philosophy of mind and consciousness at the University of Edinburgh for my master's of science. This is a great introduction to the problem--I'm excited to read more! Definitely subbing. I'm also working through a series on the philosophy of mind. I start with Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat" if anyone's interested in reading more on this topic. https://agapesophia.substack.com/p/a-reflection-on-reductionism-art
The following statement is not particularly a challenge to the argument presented in this article, but the way the debate was presented at the beginning.
The idea that all of things are discoverable except for consciousness seems to be a classic example of The Problem of Grue. What is this? I’ll tell you:
Imagine two miners are looking for emeralds and have predictions about what emeralds in the future would look like. One miner says given that all the ones that we’ve found thus far (let’s call this before time t) have been green, this gives increased likelihood to all emeralds being green. It sounds like he’s correct in saying this: every single emerald counted thus far has increased the likelihood of the claim: all emeralds are green. Another miner doesn’t agree: he says that all the data has pointed to the conclusion that all emeralds are grue (a phenomena like green but states that things before time t will be green and all found after will be blue). This claim is plausible for the same reason that the first one is: namely, every emerald found thus far has increased the odds of the claim being true that all emeralds are grue.
While one can say that these two are totally equal, there seems to be something extremely unsatisfying with the second response (in which all emeralds are grue). Many philosophers attribute this difference to simplicity - there is something simpler about the term green than blue. This simplicity should take huge weight in our epistemics about scenarios about prediction.
Similarly, I argue that we’re playing the same game here. We can posit that at the end of the rainbow everything will fit the law of physics, or we can argue that there is some mysterious thing that doesn’t fit the law of physics. While I agree that these are both plausible in principle, I think that we should give much higher credence (probability of belief) in the first one given its simplicity.
Amazing ending, made me open the text in a new tab. Then I got it, of course. Something incomplete & unknowable can, in theory, be populated with anything we can imagine. Souls, all-knowing giraffes, whatever we might fancy. But if we can imagine it, then it's not really unknowable. So maybe that's proof that all we can imagine is, by definition, not true. Any answer we think might populate the great fog will be wrong.
I am very impressed by how restrained the essay is. I was expecting the usual "proof by Godel incompleteness" that so many folks of the crank type swear by (before adding quantum mechanics-based arguments).
So sure, science is incomplete. So we can afford to imagine things and make thought experiments.
I might have missed this in my scroll through the comments, but we could accept that science is inconsistent rather than incomplete. Graham Priest has made a compelling case that we should accept many paradoxes at face value and the resulting inconsistency (as well as developed logics that can accommodate inconsistency). I highly recommend In Contradiction (for the direct case and formal articulation) and Beyond the Limits of Thought (for a historical philosophical application).
Now that's a great cliffhanger ending...
Agree! I was about to say the same thing but you did it for me.
I like the point that a zombie in a zombie world would conclude the same thing the a conscious being does in this world. Have to remember that one.
Myself, I think the hard problem of consciousness is a psychological block, a case of our own collective conceit in struggling to contemplate that the way we process information is subject to the same rules as everything else.
There may well be things that are unknowable. The universe may have its own Godelian sentences, limits on what it (or systems within it) can know. But looking at the history of science, our ability to know what in particular is forever unknowable doesn't seem to have a good tract record. Thinkers have trouble imagining the ingenuity of future scientists. In other words, we should be as humble in judging what is or isn't knowable as we should in judging whether we can know it all.
Agreed - I personally would hope scientific incompleteness is not true, and future scientists figure this all out, but I also think the idea is important enough to represent well.
Curious as to why you hope it isn’t true? Apparently Sisyphus was happy and content in his striving. 🤷🏻♀️
Nice work, enjoyable read, thank you. Regarding the section on philosophical zombies, I wonder whether the claim that p-zombies could “imagine” anything is nonsensical? I understand these theoretic entities to mimic humans in every way except that they don’t have any subjective experience, no qualia — something I suspect necessary to be able to imagine/think at all. P-zombies are merely meat-puppets running an algorithm, right? Perhaps they don’t even work as a thought experiment because they are not possible even in principle.
An interesting thought! If we define imagination as necessarily containing a subjective component, then yes - although this then applies to almost everything mental. But from a more broad functional definition of imagination, it seems, at least to me, like they could do something equivalent (neurally or just behaviorally). E.g., a zombie could write a philosophy paper about the zombie argument.
I think it’s at least an open question, whether philosophical zombies are a possibility. Vervaeke would argue that consciousness plays a role in human intelligence and makes an evolutionary argument for it, relating it to what he calls “relevance realization.” Basically, he posits that some of “adverbial” qualities which make consciousness non-material, like it’s “hereness” and “nowness” allow for the mind to kind of immediately (and subconsciously) understand parts of experience in relation to the “whole” of experience.
I think this argument is tricky, though. And possibly falsifiable with advancements in AI. It depends on how you want to qualify intelligence and relevance realization. And it would also seem to demand material evidence that the human brain has some kind of sensitivity to the non-material mind — like “consciousness receptors” or something — or that there is a domain of non-material intelligence which is somehow entangled with the material intelligence of the brain.
But the p-zombie argument may have problems too. How certain are we that consciousness is not, in some sense, an elan vital which, when absent, would have our p-zombies be more like p-vegetables.
Could AI positively confirm the existence of p-zombies? Can we make p-zombies? What would the difference be between a human-like android and a human, besides the underlying hardware?
Maybe it’s a question that demands experimentation, or at least a very solid formal proof. I wouldn’t personally accept “Well I don’t see why it couldn’t be possible.” as a convincing argument.
Would questions of autopoietic ethics and love inform our intuitions in qualifying p-zombies? (Love is always absent in these inquiries, I notice.)
Can we learn something from the psychonauts who put themselves into altered states of consciousness, including states which could be described as p-zombie adjacent? (Experiences which are reported to be void of what-it’s-like-to-be-something-ness, for example.)
But, more to the end of your inquiry, does a theory of scientific incompleteness require the p-zombie argument to be true? I think not. If true, incompleteness. If not true, incompleteness. And perhaps we’ll discover that p-zombies are categorically unprovable and unfalsifiable, which would also lead to incompleteness. I think :)
Maybe a Zombie could have a functional equivalent of imagination, but i'm less sure there is such an equivalent for introspection... You say that "...no utterance or behavior or experiment could tell the difference between a zombie and a non-zombie. Nor any amount of self-reflection or introspection". I find the second sentence here unconvincing - surely introspection is itself experiential, and therefore introspection is the proof that you yourself are not a zombie. Of course the zombie says he introspects and finds he is conscious, but from the first person surely there is no functional equivalent of introspection with which to discover that you can't tell if you are or are not a zombie.
For all we know, Chalmers is a zombie, yet he wrote what he wrote...
Exactly what I was thinking. Everything a zombie called "conceiving" would have to be turned into its behavioral equivalent, which would not be "conceiving" as we understand it. Then again, you could say the entire zombie argument is then circular, or you could be generous and say it's an intuition pump (I think it works much better that way).
Brilliant!
I have an intuition that free will is only possible because of paradox.
That's an interesting thought. I think it's just because macroscale causation exists (and then you can get the rest from some sort of Dennettian notion of elbow room in terms of the counterfactuals you as an agent have access to). But I'm open to more radical ideas.
You lost me on Dunettian notion of elbow room. Google is no help and my background is wholly inadequate to elaborate on my intuition.
Ah, a mistype on my end might have been the confusion. Reference to this: https://www.amazon.com/Elbow-Room-Varieties-Worth-Wanting/dp/0262540428
Perverse that Dennett could so condescendingly dismiss realism about qualia as the last residue of discredited “soul-stuff” dualism and human exceptionalism while in the next breath defending realism about the far more anthropocentric and faith-laden construct of free will.
well said
We could also call it a Koan, I suppose?
Is scientific incompleteness orthogonal to, or entangled with, the bracketing out of subjective experience? It reminded me of this recent book, “the Blind Spot”, which I haven’t read yet - I wonder if you have?
https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5740/The-Blind-SpotWhy-Science-Cannot-Ignore-Human
I actually hadn't seen that. Looks like it's new this year. I'm familiar with some of the authors, so definitely worth checking out on my end.
yeah that's what I am also wondering, thanks the book ref
I always love it when you turn your attention to consciousness! And I deeply appreciate your rare willingness to be comfortable with scientific uncertainty (so many scientists seem hellbent on certainty). Forgive me if I'm missing your position (here or elsewhere), but are you willing to consider that incompleteness might point to the need for a metaphysical understanding different from materialism? --i.e., could consciousness be more fundamental than material?
I think the interesting thing about viewing the issue of consciousness as being a product of scientific incompleteness is that it gets around having to answer direct questions about materialism or dualism or what's more fundamental. I think you could argue for those things! For sure, and many have. But at least for the view I've sketched out here: if there were some angel who lived in a world of pure idealism, maybe they too would have some sort of necessary incompleteness regarding their own consciousness. So then the question of substance or ultimate nature ends up just being something inaccessible (or like "unask the question").
However, I should say that this thesis does play nicely with the Kantian sense that there is something unexperienceable which informs or has some relation to experience, and that is a very good point. It just is not the same.
Yes. Kant's idealism is not about the possibilities of explaining the world, but about whether we experience it without our own cognitive apparatus aiding in its construction. I.e., under Kant's idealism, you could have a complete system of the experienceable world, but the experienceable world would be just that and only that. It would not be the world outside of experience (because how could you ever experience such a thing)
Consciousness arises from materialism, not the other way around. Something has to first exist in order to be perceived. Similarly, scientific incompleteness arises from consciousness, not necessarily the other way around. It is still worthwhile to scientifically interrogate consciousness, but scientific limitations mean limitations in describing consciousness if it is not paired with equally robust philosophy. Consciousness does not need to exist outside the purview of science, as it is all derived from something material to begin with.
But is it? I think the point Erik makes is that nothing can ever be 'proven', thus 'known' by us, including your position that consciousness arises from materialism.
also, if materialism is just a framework arising from an obligate function of the… —gap and the observer (i.e. consciousness trying to de-observe and thus get to reality) then materialism (even if its guess is true) is still a outcome of consciousness, and therefore may not escape the observer issues, especially with regard to consciousness.
There is an old joke, usually attributed to Russell:
What is matter? Nevermind. What is mind? No matter.
There might be a 'science' of the mind someday, one might say there already is. The problem with that is at present no one would call it 'a science' since nowadays a 'science' has to be a physical science, the basic physical science being, unsurprisingly, called 'physics'. In order to be a science like 'physics' one must have a definition of the word 'physical', which is clear and sharp and draws white lines that one knows which side of the line is 'physical'.
I'd say lots of present day confusion comes from the wrongheaded present day belief that the definition of the word 'physical' was something some scientist discovered after he had stopped going to church or something similar. The 'science' which it would be thought of today as in scare quotes, is metaphysics. It's a fuzzy word too, but at the brass tacks level, it's arguing about what the word 'physical' means. Since the present day definition of the word physical comes from philosophizing, Eric is right that the last page or so in the Assayer about tickling is part of the argument, since it's not thought to come from an argument, the thinking on this score will always be bad until that changes.
The hard problem of consciousness, in the way it is usually thought of, is harder than hard, it's impossible. Physical science is about the physical, not the ghost but the machine, it cannot talk about the ghost qua the ghost, it doesn't do that. If the 'solve' is supposed to be physical science solution, where the effect is physical as well as the cause, the problem is unsolvable.
You are absolutely right: "The hard problem of consciousness, in the way it is usually thought of, is harder than hard, it's impossible." Consciousness is fundamental, one cannot explain how consciousness arises from the brain activity, because the brain as a physical object is already being experienced in consciousness. Trying to explain (my) consciousness as an activity of my brain is like a serpent eating its own tail. Trying to explain how consciousness arises from the brain activity of other people is mixing two different levels of representation: other people's brain activity (if I observe it by means of suitable equipment) is just a representation in (my) consciousness, a picture within a picture, a story within a story... (see "Goedel, Esher, Bach" by Hofstadter for further insight). But such a view faces the problem of solipsism.
There is a way to avoid solipsism as follows. Wave function as a representation of a quantum state which in my interpretation is consciousness. There are many possible wave functions/quantum states. One is such that I experience myself being a person A, experiencing the world that includes a person B as a picture in (my) consciousness. Another wave function (quantum state) is such that I experience myself being the person B, experiencing the world that includes the person A. There is a common cross-section world of both persons (and all other persons) that they interpret as an objective world. In both cases there is the "I", first person's experience, "me feeling". Consciousness is fundamental, the "external" world is a part of consciousness, and yet in this setup there is no solipsism. Objective reality is the Hilbert space of all quantum states, which are the states of different possible streams of consciousness.
the mathematics is not the territory
For this section,
"On the other hand, if it is valid only with the premise of consciousness, then any conscious being can always make the zombie argument, and then notice that whether or not they are a zombie cannot be resolved by introspection or empirical evidence, indicating incompleteness. The existence of consciousness appears to be the kind of true fact that cannot be proven from the inside.",
the conscious being knows they're conscious through their immediate subjective experience. The difficulty comes in proving that they're conscious, or transmitting that information to someone else. Any argument they produce could have equally been produced by a p-zombie, and any scientific model of the universe they create does not require consciousness.
I initially thought internal introspection could allow a conscious being to prove to themselves that they are conscious without a spoken or explicit argument. I'm now unsure if introspection can be used, because if we take consciousness to supervene on the physical and have no causal influence upon it, then the computations done through introspection that produce the chain of reasoning would also have to be performed in a p-zombie, hence invalidating its conclusion.
They are still able to immediately know that they are conscious, however, so I don't think the conclusion is quite as strong.
Excellent read! I'm a graduate student in pure mathematics. I wish my university had more (any) courses in set theory, logic, and this Gödel type stuff. Alas, my school is far too applied overall to have any such courses. I think it's worth considering that some self-referential statements are determinable. The simplest example I can think of is "This statement is true." Because of that, it's tough to say which things are incomplete and which things are not yet determined. Unless we can prove something is incomplete, we cannot know if it is or isn't, even if it seems we don't have a way to show completeness.
Something interesting you brought up was the relation of the "mind-body problem" to the incompleteness of science. Is it clear that there is a distinction between the two? For instance, if we are incarnated souls, can our physical bodies (or just the physical world for that matter) impact whichever other level of existence the soul originates? If we are in a simulation, can we as a simulation impact the machine which is doing the simulation? In our world, the infinitely simpler simulations we run do impact our computers—the more things to simulate at once, the more power is used. Is science incomplete solely because it fails to account for this other level of existence? Clearly, science as we understand it today, is not even capable of sustaining thoughts, theories, and hypotheses about non-material (corporeal/simulation) things.
And, another question, is a Gödel statement actually a paradox? "The proof to this statement is the Gödel number of this statement." It is self-referential; it is self-proclaiming. Is it paradoxical? I personally don't see how, but perhaps I'm just more accepting of a paradox as truth than others. (After all, I am a Lutheran.)
Similarly, I don't see how scientific incompleteness would be a paradox. There have always been things which science cannot tell us. What does it matter that they're not all "trivial," and that some things are undecidable in a more complicated and abstract sense?
"If it is indeed a fact that there are questions about the universe that are true but cannot be proved, this unfortunately recommends no particular religion, points you to no higher mysteries."
Is this not a higher mystery? The highest mystery of them all? Even if we can never prove the true answer, that does not mean we cannot obtain the true answers. It does not mean we cannot ponder them.
it is rash to throw things into the gap
Personally, I stop thinking and start feeling and acting.
Wonderful essay Erik, thank you.
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter inspired me to shift my focus from metaphysics to philosophy of mind and consciousness at the University of Edinburgh for my master's of science. This is a great introduction to the problem--I'm excited to read more! Definitely subbing. I'm also working through a series on the philosophy of mind. I start with Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat" if anyone's interested in reading more on this topic. https://agapesophia.substack.com/p/a-reflection-on-reductionism-art
The following statement is not particularly a challenge to the argument presented in this article, but the way the debate was presented at the beginning.
The idea that all of things are discoverable except for consciousness seems to be a classic example of The Problem of Grue. What is this? I’ll tell you:
Imagine two miners are looking for emeralds and have predictions about what emeralds in the future would look like. One miner says given that all the ones that we’ve found thus far (let’s call this before time t) have been green, this gives increased likelihood to all emeralds being green. It sounds like he’s correct in saying this: every single emerald counted thus far has increased the likelihood of the claim: all emeralds are green. Another miner doesn’t agree: he says that all the data has pointed to the conclusion that all emeralds are grue (a phenomena like green but states that things before time t will be green and all found after will be blue). This claim is plausible for the same reason that the first one is: namely, every emerald found thus far has increased the odds of the claim being true that all emeralds are grue.
While one can say that these two are totally equal, there seems to be something extremely unsatisfying with the second response (in which all emeralds are grue). Many philosophers attribute this difference to simplicity - there is something simpler about the term green than blue. This simplicity should take huge weight in our epistemics about scenarios about prediction.
Similarly, I argue that we’re playing the same game here. We can posit that at the end of the rainbow everything will fit the law of physics, or we can argue that there is some mysterious thing that doesn’t fit the law of physics. While I agree that these are both plausible in principle, I think that we should give much higher credence (probability of belief) in the first one given its simplicity.
gruesome
Amazing ending, made me open the text in a new tab. Then I got it, of course. Something incomplete & unknowable can, in theory, be populated with anything we can imagine. Souls, all-knowing giraffes, whatever we might fancy. But if we can imagine it, then it's not really unknowable. So maybe that's proof that all we can imagine is, by definition, not true. Any answer we think might populate the great fog will be wrong.
I am very impressed by how restrained the essay is. I was expecting the usual "proof by Godel incompleteness" that so many folks of the crank type swear by (before adding quantum mechanics-based arguments).
So sure, science is incomplete. So we can afford to imagine things and make thought experiments.
I call that throwing stuff into the gap. It has a long history. Along with handwaving.
Great essay, although a few more pauses with musical inserts would have been helpful. Will require a re-read tomorrow.
I might have missed this in my scroll through the comments, but we could accept that science is inconsistent rather than incomplete. Graham Priest has made a compelling case that we should accept many paradoxes at face value and the resulting inconsistency (as well as developed logics that can accommodate inconsistency). I highly recommend In Contradiction (for the direct case and formal articulation) and Beyond the Limits of Thought (for a historical philosophical application).
we do that anyway, we cannot live without it