Good read on consciousness

[The Grand Nudger]

Illusionism may be wrong...but it's not incoherent.  In attention schema theory, it's hypothesized that the thing we call consciousness might come about in a machine or organism in the same manner and for the same reasons that a body control schema would.

Hypothesized, but how would you even demonstrate that, given the difficulty of doing so with other human beings?

Demonstrating existent and evolved control schemas in organisms (and human organisms) is trivially easy.  That part isn't hypothesis, it's an observed feature that drives well understood behaviors which we build into machines for commercial application.  We try all sorts of things to figure this stuff out.  Mind altering substances and stimuli, physical interruption (ie, snip snip until someone wholly loses the experience of x), mental interference (attention exhaustion tests).  As I mentioned before - this thing that you think makes no sense has observational data and experimental support.  ASTm specifically, is an evolutionary theory of the mechanics of the report - and it's maintained by some that if the mechanics can be described without ever finding or needing to refer to this phenomenological experience stuff...maybe it's not there, no matter how much we insist.  Assuming we did find that tomorrow and some other explanation became available - it would still be a valid and productive theory for how a non conscious machine could appear to observers and to the machine itself, to be conscious, as well as how lower organism™ without that thing we find manage to produce similar behaviors.

Otoh, insisting that a description is wrong because it doesn't include some asserted thing, rather than for it being an inaccurate description of the process which generates the effect, is wrong headed. The famous "I see you've left no place for god in your model" quote comes to mind. The illusionists are suggesting that they don't need the ghost to explain why we think it exists, no more than a magician needs magic to explain pulling a rabbit from a hat. Hence, illusionism. That it is one thing with a very real set of properties a, inaccurately representing itself as another thing with an illusory set of properties b.

Again, the problem isn't with value or practicality, it's with whether or not illusionism makes sense. My understanding so far is that illusionism states that the qualia we experience isn't real, it's a trick of the brain. If this is a proper description, then this is stupid, because the fact that we experience it is what makes it real. It may not be real in the sense that physical objects are real (whereby we're able to see those from a second/third-person-perspective), but it is real in the sense that we can each directly experience our respective consciousness from first-person-perspective, and it is real in a way that is different from how physical objects are real.

Then there's no problem, because it does make sense. If it's not real in the sense that physical objects are real, then all forms of realism are false and illusionism is true by fiat. First person perspetive, part of the illusion. There's no person in there to posess a perspective, and feel what it;s like to have perspective - though there very much is a perspective apparatus in access cognition that swirls around the instantiation of the associated sense organs. We see from "our eyes" the kinds of things our eyes would see (and things that aren't there, and sometimes we fail to see the kinds of things we normally would which are), not another persons eyes, for fairly obvious reasons.

There's no "little man" to see. You experience the qualia, you don't see it. Unless you're a p-zombie, of course.

The "you", is the little man™, and you invoked it a few words after you said there wasn't one.  That, doesn't make sense.  Ultimately, though, this may boil down to problems with semantics and how talking about these things with words based on folklore in ignorance of the operation of the brain creates the appearance of issues where none exist. There is nothing wrong with suggesting that our brains are unconscious machines from start to finish. Illusionism doesn't change anything about you. Knowing how the sausage is made doesn't change the sausage or stop us from eating it. Rather than insisting that it doesn't make sense, or that it cannot possibly be true because reports of consciousness just must be [insert your anecdotal report of the operation of your own brain here]...can you explain why you think that even if it did make sense and is possible..it isn't true?

Any assertion that leans on a you experiencing something would first need to provide the you - and it would be an additional step to show that whatever this you was were actually capable of the full list of phenomenological experiences it reports. Let me ask you this, suppose that we fnd something even remotely close and..for the most part, things are real and do work as described - but we find a few reports of phenomenological experience that we have reason to believe the organism would be incapable of genuinely reporting? Which is to say..sure, real us, with real experiences, but we physically -couldn't- be having this set of experiences that we, nevertheless, report. What then? Would we just say.."well..it's just the one, or two, or twenty, or profligate billions. These others are still legit and we don't suspect them at all."

I'd just love to push this over the "does it make sense" hump, you know? That way we can say what we think about an idea x isn't or may not be true. For example, within realism, between emergentism and dualism - I think that dualism is false..because we can't find any other stuff, haven't needed any other stuff as of yet, and would include whatever stuff could interact with brain stuff as The Same Stuff even if it were new unknown stuff (at present).

Between emergentism and pan-psychism, a much finer distinction than the above, I trend towards emergentism - I do believe that any organization of matter which is meaningfully and functionally equivalent to a brain should be able to do brain stuff, no matter what kind of stuff it is - but I note that not all arrangements of matter are equivalent in ability or potential function. I don't think that it's possible for a dust cloud to be conscious, no matter how many gajillions of particles of dirt are arranged in a complex pattern (or incredibly useful arbitrary). I would personally expect to find consciousness wherever it could exist - for it to be relatively common - if it's a natural phenomenon - but not ubiquitous.

As for illusionism - I'll criticize AST specifically. If reports of consciousness are a matter of useful illusions - and if we should expect to find them because we should expect to find utility in the cognition of successful organisms - then I can think of a whole hell of alot more useful delusions than any of us possess. Why don't we find those? I know, to some extent, that proponents of the theory can point to novel mental states and strange outliers that would satisfy - but as an evolutionary theory centered on the utility of the very thing, we're either just at the dawn of consciousness on this planet on a wider scale (with a baseline assembled but many useful states still the sole possession of particular genetic line not well represented in the popultion as of yet).....or...something is amiss.