What do you think about consciousness?
Everyone's got a theory
You’ve heard me talk about consciousness a lot. After all, it’s been one of my main intellectual focuses for almost two decades now. In graduate school, I worked on developing aspects of Integrated Information Theory, the most popular mathematically formal approach to measuring consciousness that exists in neuroscience. My novel, The Revelations, is about the hunt for a scientific theory of consciousness (with a murder mixed in). And I just wrote an essay laying out the evidence for the (at-least-worth-considering) provocative thesis that science itself might be incomplete, with consciousness being a main culprit.
Personally, I still hold out hope that there will be a scientific answer to consciousness! It is very possible that somewhere in Borges' infinite library there sits a book, and in that book there is a paragraph with the right words in the right order, and that simple paragraph contains everything you need to deduce a scientific explanation of consciousness. One measly paragraph would be enough! I would collapse in joy, weeping, if I ever read such a thing.
But when it comes to consciousness, it’s still such a nascent field that you don’t have to be an expert to have opinions about it. Unlike a physics “Theory of Everything,” consciousness is far more immediate, both in that we’re all intimately familiar with it, and also in that the field itself still doesn’t require any deep technical expertise to have fun speculating about (or even, arguably, contributing to).
After being subjected to years of my rambling on the subject, it’s time I hear from you all.
What are your favorite theories of consciousness? Do you adhere to any? Do you have your own? Thoughts on places to start? How, exactly, do subjective experiences arise from a gelatinous structure of cells puffing little chemicals at one another?
Will the problem ever be solved, or will it one day just be dissolved? And if AI isn’t conscious, then what do you even need consciousness for, anyways?
All levels of analysis are welcome. Feel free to speculate wildly, and I’ll offer feedback on the more promising / interesting proposals.
I'd love to write a whole essay to properly respond to this.
I have settled on mysterianism & predicate dualism. I think that consciousness is inherently invulnerable to scientific methods being that it is subjectivity itself, and you can't view it objectively. It simply lies outside of the domain of science.
I think attempts to explain consciousness are probably doomed and maybe even misguided, because consciousness is fundamentally distinct thing from the material world, and there is no way to explain it in terms of material phenomena. In other words, I am a strong believer in the explanatory gap and the hard problem, so much so that I think the most sensible position is that material reality and subjective consciousness are ontologically distinct. This is also partly informed by my experience in meditation. I believe if you actually look at consciousness you can realize that it is absurd to think that it is simply something that can be explained in terms of a specific set of physical circumstances. Even if you could identify the exact circumstances that produce consciousness, you would still be left with the question: why does consciousness appear? Why is there something that it is like to be those circumstances? Why don't those circumstances simply exist and carry out computational functions and direct behavior etc all with no subjective experience?
Finally, my most out-there position wrt to consciousness is I believe that interactionism is plausible--it is at least possible that free will exists, and that consciousness is the causal mechanism for free will, i.e. reality is not causally closed (it opens up into consciousness, anyway--why can't it go the other way?). This makes sense to me as a reason for the evolution of consciousness in the first place. It makes more sense to me than couching consciousness as a causal dead end/epiphenomenonal accident, anyway. To me, the princess of bohemia-type criticisms of interactionism are misguided because although yes it is impossible to explain how consciousness produces effects in the material world, *it is also impossible to explain how the material world produces consciousness, and yet--we are conscious!*
I'll change my opinion as soon as someone writes that paragraph, Erik. But I think it is telling that we can't even *conceive* of an actual explanation for how material phenomena give rise to subjective consciousness. It's not that we can't identify the correct explanation, we can't even think of a possible explanation. We can only come up with descriptions of phenomena associated with consciousness, not how these phenomena actually make something that is like to be them.
I'm a proponent of Pete Mandik's qualia quietism and meta-Illusionism. Not only do I not think that there is a hard problem of consciousness, I don't even think that if a person is thinking clearly about the matter that it would seem that there is a hard problem of consciousness. I think that the sense there is a hard problem stems from misconceptions about language and phenomenology that people largely acquire by engaging in academic philosophy. Consciousness is probably not any particular thing. It is no particular phenomena at all. Rather when we speak of consciousness we are referencing an amalgamation a various aspects of our psychology and the ways in which we theorize and speak about our psychology. Adequately breaking down all these sub components will eventually result in dissolving all these seemingly mysterious aspects of consciousness and developing a sufficiently clear set of tractable problems that they can eventually be solved in a way amenable to the empirical sciences. Nothing about consciousness is going to turn out to fall outside the scope of what we learn empirically.
Qualia quietism is a view according to which the terms and concepts that typically feature a discussion of qualia or phenomenal states consist of a viciously circular set of mutually interdefining terms that have no clear or conceptually distinct content such that we can say anything meaningful about them at all. Essentially the very notion of qualia or phenomenal states is meaningless and there is nothing substantive to say about them. It's not simply that they don't exist but that there isn't even a coherent concept to consider the existence of. I think something like this is basically correct and that a lot of the philosophical discourse on consciousness is completely misguided. This position at least on my view is closely associated with illusionism and I typically treat it as roughly being in Illusionist camp. I think views that deny the existence or meaningfulness of qualia are pretty much the only serious contenders for a viable account of consciousness.