Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[emjay]

First thing's first, no offence mate, but I don't think I can handle this conversation twice over, so if it's okay with you, can we keep this interlude brief? These sorts of conversations take a lot out of me, and I didn't realise how hard it would be to explain what to me is a perfectly simple and intuitive concept.


Beyond what I've said to polymath, I don't know how to answer this. Conscious experience is just something that is evident and different from nothing... there's the perception of something, anything. Even if you go deep down to the rawest level of it... forget colours or any other specific qualia, there is just at the very least the perception of change... there is something say over here on your visual field that is different from something over there... or change of perceptions over time. There is something there... that requires an explanation. And sure you can pretend it doesn't exist or write it off as an illusion, but I don't think that's helpful. I'm open to it being an illusion in some sense, but in the main sense of awareness of something, anything, of change, of time... of something different than nothing, it's not an illusion; there is something there needing an explanation. So I don't know what to say really; if you truly think it's possible to doubt the presence of your own conscious experience, then have at it if it helps you sleep at night, but I don't think there's anywhere for us to go in conversation.

But, again, if a zombie is physically identical to a conscious person, they would *also* perceive differences in their visual field. They would still react to pain. They would still be awed by a sunset.

What ese is required to be conscious?

They would ?perceive? them physically, in the sense of all the physical interactions and changes that correspond with it, both inside the brain and outside of it with the environment. But even using the word perceive there still doesn't feel quite right to me; to you it seems perception means information processing in a certain way, which is both the low level description in terms of the purely physical interactions in the environment and brain, and a higher abstract level of description at the level of information or processes... basically an aggregate or summary level of description, which consciousness could in some sense be said to be.

It's a bit of a paradox for me; on the one hand I appreciate the analogy of a computer when looking at the concept of different levels of description being one and the same thing... ie at the lowest level you have the physics and matter, through storing only zeroes and ones, then through progressive layers of abstraction and transformation... just as neurons in the brain hierarchically transform and abstract information... through low level languages, to high level languages, all the way up to the 'shiny', to use a similar metaphor to the one you guys have been using, bells and whistles of a multimedia experience on your computer. But as useful as that analogy in showing the identity/equivalence of different levels of description, I still feel it misses the mark somehow where it comes to consciousness. On the one hand, all the levels of abstraction there are equally physical and represented by the same underlying physical state, but on the other, the bells and whistles of a computer (in this case ultimately represented physically by a screen with LEDs in a certain configuration of electrical activation as part of this computer system), still seem to require an outside observer/perceiver to have any meaning.

So I guess my question is this; in the case of a running computer, in the absence of an observer to give it meaning, in your opinion what sort of existence do those abstract levels of information/processing have? Granted I accept that that computer analogy, though good for elucidating identity of different levels of description, might not be the best basis for asking about consciousness, since a) it's not assumed to be conscious itself, and b) the interaction of observer observing any level of it from the outside, is not, necessarily, the same thing as it being perceived from the inside as it were... not sure either way on that. But if the computer analogy is bad here, I'll just try and apply it to the brain itself; you have the underlying physical state, and then through the complex, dynamic, and ever-changing structure and connectivity of the brain, neurons do what they do best and encapsulate, abstract, and transform information... many to one relationships of neurons allowing complexity of information represented to increase exponentially. But where do you draw the line, where phenomenal consciousness is concerned? Any of those levels of abstraction could be considered information by an outside observer, but I think it's fair to assume that not all abstractions/information in the brain, nor levels of those abstractions, become what we think of as phenomenally conscious, so given that lack of a one-to-one correspondence between information processing and subjective phenomenal awareness - not just selectively in the brain but also in say the computer example, where there is information processing and abstraction, but not even assumed subjective phenomenal awareness.

I'll answer the bottom bit first... how can you have 2 without 1? Because the brain and body is a physical system that obeys the laws of physics, and it's my contention that everything in consciousness has a neural representation, and therefore to the extent that consciousness is some sort of mirror/emergent property of the brain and/or its information processing, it only represents what is already represented neurally in the brain, and is therefore seemingly superfluous, dragged along for the ride as it were, but with no causal power of its own... a sideshow as it were. So it's my contention that it's at least theoretically possible for there to be such thing as a PZ; something that ticks along as the physical and biological machine that it is, but without that sideshow. It's not that I believe PZ's are definitively a thing, and as I said there'd be no way to detect one anyway even if they did exist, but more that I can't rule them out as a logical possibility. Ie in my view, there's nothing about the brain that necessitates the presence of phenomenal consciousness, therefore making it seem superfluous, and therefore making the possibility of its lack something I can't rule out.

And that seems, to me, to be similar to saying you can have molecular motions and temperature is superfluous and 'carried along for the ride'. There could be no 'actual temeprature' even though everything is identical.

That makes no sense to me.

I would say the difference is in perspective, like for that computer analogy above, you saying molecular motions and temperature are identical, just different levels of description of the same thing, makes perfect sense just as it does for that computer example... it makes sense for anything we can objectively observe in the physical world... but those assigned meanings come from an outside perspective looking in, which to me seems to be a categorically different thing from what we're trying to explain which is subjective phenomenal awareness. Ie using your example, the molecular motions would be the underlying physical state, and temperature or any other informational interpretations/abstractions, at any level of description, would be akin to the different types and levels of processing in a computer, but from the outside, none of them saying anything about, as Thomas Nagel would put it, what it's like to be any of those states. Indeed for most of them we don't think there is anything that it is like to be them... not temperature, not the different levels of informational processing in a normal computer... but for one thing in the entire universe, we do think there is something it is like to be it, and that is subjective phenomenal awareness... consciousness. Basically it just seems to be a different thing that 'mere' information processing/abstraction alone cannot encapsulate.

As to the experience of the PZ... for one thing it wouldn't have experience, but it would still have the same neural representations as one that did... so if you asked it a question, it would still receive the same audio signals and process them in the same way, just not hear them as a phenomenal experience of sound, it would still neurally trigger the same memories, just not experience them in the mind's eye, because it has no mind's eye, it would still trigger the same brain areas involved in say planning and language, and the motor neurons involved in turning all of that into the behaviour of speaking to reply. As to the purely unprompted introspective... if the conscious can do it, so should the PZ, and again I see no reason why not; the brain is basically a black box, deeper than just direct inputs and outputs... as the behaviourists (hopefully) learnt long ago... ie we have a whole mental life ticking along under the hood (daydreaming, planning etc), not directly conditioned by external stimuli... and I'd contend that those processes involved in that are no different... they have their own neural representations to be activated, and do not require phenomenal consciousness. So in my view the PZ would daydream in the sense that it activates all the relevant neural representations, but it would not daydream in the sense of actually experiencing the phenomena of a daydream.

OK, I simply don't see that as possible. If your brain daydreams, so do you.

I guess at this point, I see it as a reductio ad absurdum in about the same ways as solipsism is an absurdity. It isn't a *logical* absurdity: it is logically possible I am the only thing in the universe and everything else is an illusion.

But the concept is still absurd.

Is it logically possible that I am the only conscious thing in the universe and everyone else is a zombie? Yes. It is logically possible.

But it is still absurd.

Don't get me wrong, I wish I could see it as you... and presumably GN also... do, that phenomenal consciousness is the absolute and inextricable complement of certain underlying physical configurations of matter, ie the neural correlates of consciousness, as well as the different levels and types of information processing/abstraction it represents. In practice I certainly have a similar, identity- ie mirror- based view of the brain and consciousness, but I just cannot take the same leap that you guys have taken to consider them completely inseparable from each other, even conceptually/hypothetically. I accept that that may be largely due to 'dualist baggage' distorting my view, but I've said that from the start. Put it this way, I'm still having great trouble wrapping my head around the Buddhist idea of non-self... it's not the same thing as this I know but it does similarly require fighting against deep dualist intuitions about the nature of the self and consciousness. I guess maybe I have been arguing the 'zombie argument' against physicalism all along without realising it, inasmuch as having these dualist assumptions that there is something fundamentally different between subjective experience and physical reality, the seemingly immaterial and material to put it bluntly. I guess to you, there is no distinction; subjective experience is just as much a part of physics as material reality? It's food for thought for me, and always has been, so please don't think I don't respect your/that viewpoint, it's just something that let's say from a Buddhist point of view, requires 'deep penetration' to truly understand and internalise, something I have not yet done, but maybe in the future I'll come round to that viewpoint.