Mindfulness or Mindlessness?

[Angrboda]

Why do you think functionalism is true compared to biological naturalism, Angrboda?

I don't know that I do think functionalism is true. I don't understand it well enough to say that. But I think functionalism is very misunderstood by its opponents, particularly Searle. As a person with a mathematics and computer background, I'm more sympathetic to it. Perhaps through familiarity, or perhaps due to a better understanding of its power. I think Searle's biological naturalism is just silly. It's fundamentally anti-reductionist. If a biological structure has a reducible physical structure, then that structure can be simulated. It comes down to Searle's assertion that simulations can't duplicate reality, which undercuts all his arguments, as imagining any scenario is simulating it. If simulation can't duplicate the relevant features of biological consciosness, then imagining a Chinese Room can't foresee all the properties that the Chinese Room would have if it were actual. He wants to have his cake and eat it, too. In the case of his simulation of the Chinese Room, he doesn't need an actual Chinese Room, just a simulation. In the case of the brain, he does need an actual biological brain, as a simulation is unsatisfactory. He can't have it both ways.

[The Grand Nudger]

Now, if Searle is right, there wouldn't need to be a 1:1 reduction, because "redness" may be some artifact of neural structure or something. So biological naturalism can explain qualia. Functionalism can't. That's the question. That's the bear. Which theory is more accurate? I don't know. Why do you think functionalism is true compared to biological naturalism, Angrboda?

You might have missed this, but it was a few pages back.  A sim doesn't have to look like anything, but it will look like -something-.  We might see red for another color, or another thing.  We might hear red instead of seeing it.  In whatever case, your question could be applied, but in every application the complaint could not credibly be that functionalist theories can't explain it, but that you think the explanation is or may be wrong.

To functionalists, who posit multiple realizability, it's doing the experience of red, however done and however experienced, that counts as the thing.  Not the specific bits and parts in the individual experiencer. Many functionalist theories of mind aren't even theories of human mind. If articial intelligence is possible, multiple realizability is true. If machine consciousness is possible, multiple realizability is true. If there's any other conscious creature anywhere on earth or in the universe..multiple realizability is true. The only state of affairs where multiple realizability could even be false..is if we are the sole conscious agents in the cosmos and it's completely irreproducible any other way.

[Jehanne]

...
Science cannot at present explain the hard problem of consciousness, at least until science & technology someday, if ever, artificially creates consciousnes, say, the AI Singularity.  Until then, if ever, why not just say that the problem is unknown, perhaps, unknowable?  As with the "God of the gaps" your posts seem like the "soul of the gaps".

Then, the question becomes... do we have enough science and technology brain-power here and now (on this forum) to work it out.

I'm up for it if you are.

Well beyond my pay grade. In any case, electricity and magnetism several centuries ago were viewed as being mysterious, even magical; today, no one thinks of those phenomenon in that way. In five hundred years, the same may be true of consciousness.

[The Grand Nudger]

To add more to the above, because I'd love to be able to put a pin in at least one thing...and using our body model example from earlier....

Why does it have to look red? Why does the body model have to look like the body?

It often doesn't and doesn't have to- in either case. There are people who don't see or experience red as red, and your roombas body model doesn't actually look like it's body. The first roombas didn't use one at all. They had direct collision sensors, which is why they sucked so bad - now, you only find direct control systems on budget models...and there are model based control systems that are all different from each other on competing mid and high end brands. Human beings have about 2.5million (or 4 billion..depending on how you look at it) years of r/d advantage over a roomba. Does that help?

If it does, to push further still..to a functionalist, a body model may be a phenomenal concept incorporating data about the physical dimensions of a thing and the relationship of those dimensions to it's environment. A mind may be a model which attends to whatever collection of phenomenal concepts a system possesses. The applications for machines, as I mentioned before, write themselves..and the exploration of human consciousness to see if this is the case is known as the phenomenal concept strategy. This, I think..ties into why I don't think mystery is an accurate description, I suppose. I think it's just as much an unknown as you, Vulcan, but the very last bit of this excerpt will speak directly to that.

PCS advocates typically subscribe to[2] what Chalmers has called "type-B materialism",[3] which holds that there is an epistemic but not ontological gap between physics and subjective experience. PCS maintains that our concepts are dualistic, but reality is monistic, in a similar way as "heat" and "molecular motion" are two different concepts that refer to the same property.[2] However, phenomenal concepts are different from other concepts in that they incline us to see an epistemic gap.[2] PCS suggests that physicalist explanations "cannot feel satisfactory [...] since the concepts used in the physical explanation don't entail any applications of the phenomenal concepts in terms of which the explanandum is characterized."[4]

PCS would help physicalists answer the knowledge argument because upon seeing red, Mary would have new thoughts about phenomenal concepts, even though those thoughts would only re-express physical facts she already knew. Likewise, we can conceive of zombies even if they aren't possible because when we think about their functional/physical characteristics, we don't also conjure thoughts about phenomenal concepts.[4]

David Papineau coined the term antipathetic fallacy to refer to the way in which we fail to see phenomenal experience in brain processing. It is the opposite of the pathetic fallacy of seeing consciousness in non-minds.[5]
[/i]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenal...t_strategy

[emjay]

Now, if Searle is right, there wouldn't need to be a 1:1 reduction, because "redness" may be some artifact of neural structure or something. So biological naturalism can explain qualia. Functionalism can't. That's the question. That's the bear. Which theory is more accurate? I don't know. Why do you think functionalism is true compared to biological naturalism, Angrboda?

You might have missed this, but it was a few pages back.  A sim doesn't have to look like anything, but it will look like -something-.  We might see red for another color, or another thing.  We might hear red instead of seeing it.  In whatever case, your question could be applied, but in every application the complaint could not credibly be that functionalist theories can't explain it, but that you think the explanation is or may be wrong.

To functionalists, who posit multiple realizability, it's doing the experience of red, however done and however experienced, that counts as the thing.  Not the specific bits and parts in the individual experiencer.  Many functionalist theories of mind aren't even theories of human mind.  If articial intelligence is possible, multiple realizability is true.  If machine consciousness is possible, multiple realizability is true.  If there's any other conscious creature anywhere on earth or in the universe..multiple realizability is true.  The only state of affairs where multiple realizability could even be false..is if we are the sole conscious agents in the cosmos and it's completely irreproducible any other way.

It's interesting seeing you and vulcan discussing this in this thread... seems similar to the dance we've been having... but this post is helping me see your perspective a bit clearer now... how we seem to conflate our ideas of what we (individually) mean by qualia etc when we talk about it. You seem to be talking about Red, say, as being a placeholder in the system; that is, 'Red is real' in the sense of what it represents in the outside world (eg the ripeness of fruit), regardless of how it is individually represented in different organisms/systems? Eg Bananas, say, would be placeholder:Yellow... could call that it's signature... regardless of whether you and I experience that signature in different ways, such as swapped around colours - relative to each other's perceptions of those same colours - or even sounds.

Seems to me this could be the root of our misunderstandings and why we often end up talking past each other, when qualia is being talked about in different ways here? I don't disagree that red is real in that sense of a placeholder/signature (ie representing something in the outside world, that could be represented in different ways in different organisms, even within the same species... just down to individual differences or brain damage etc)... but when I'm talking about it in p-zombie terms, and I suspect vulcan is too from reading this thread, I'm talking about it in the other sense... that's the 'hard problem' I'm talking about, just the actual experience of qualia, different as it may be across different individuals.

[The Grand Nudger]

Sure, different ways of thinking about a thing produce different outcomes. I think a little further down on that page it also briefly mentions pzombies.

For instance, a person's phenomenal concept would have content of a phenomenal state, while the "schmenomenal" concept of a zombie would have content about a "schmenomenal" state. A zombie "is correct when he says that he is conscious, because he isn't saying that he has phenomenal states as we understand them. He is correct because he means that he has schmenomenal states, and he has them." So people and zombies can both have true beliefs justified in similar ways (same epistemic situation), even if those beliefs are about different things.[4]

This brings us back to the apathetic fallacy, where the only thing we appear to be objecting to when the pzombie claims that it's conscious, is the manner in which it's achieved it. That objection is evergreen between ourselves and any other non human conscious agent, and even between ourselves..as none of us are identical and do this the same way. We don't see consciousness in processing no matter how needlingly accurate the description of that processing is and even if that processing could reproduce every salient aspect of consciousness. Even if it weren't a pzmobie we were talking about...but a legit machine mind (however concieved of to make whatever distinction between mind and pzombie-ism one prefers)..it would still not do consciousness the way that we do/the way we think we do. It would have a third type of state, roombamenomenal states - even if that included things like body and attention control mechanisms which did absolutely everything our phenomenal mechanisms do.

[emjay]

Sure, different ways of thinking about a thing produce different outcomes...

I'm not saying I don't appreciate your different perspectives and don't find them interesting... that's certainly not the case... just that I want to always be sure we're talking about the same things, and not conflating similar ideas, as it looked like we were doing. That said, like I said, I recognise my own pzombie concerns... as I've framed them thus far (I'll try and understand what you're talking about here regarding 'schmenomenal' in this post and maybe get back to you on that some other time... I mainly just popped in to say this was an interesting thread and make that observation, but I doubt I have much to bring to the table here)... are basically just a philosophical rabbithole, perhaps with no resolution. So don't get me wrong, I'm not hung up on that... it's just a niggling thing... I'm just as interested in these other 'easy problems', it's just I don't want to be conflating the two.

[The Grand Nudger]

We love it when you pop in Em.

[emjay]

We love it when you pop in Em.

Thank you, that's very kind of you to say I'm never quite sure if I am that welcome because I know I'm annoying, a bit slow on the uptake, but that's what excessive video gaming will do to you I guess I just can't help it... it will take me a long time to parse that stuff about PCS or any other new concepts you, or others, introduce here... but it is still interesting, even if I process it at a much slower pace than you do. I mean, you just seem to be lightning fast in learning new concepts... kinda like Data or maybe Johnny Five ... but it takes me a lot longer for things to sink in, sadly.

[The Grand Nudger]

There are all sorts of fun ways to describe the issue (or potential issue) as some see it. Here's one I enjoy - that you might.

Imagine a race of dogs complete with dog philosophers of mind and dog scientists. They believe that they have a thing they call dognomenal content, or dognomenal states. This is rich and directly apprehended content meaningful to them and deeply woven into how they perceive the world and themselves along those lines you might expect for a dog. The feel of the atomic weight of an element, off the top of my head. The important thing to remember, is that whatever imagined dog experience you come up with, human beings absolutely don't have it, and don't even possess the required structures to have it..no matter whether we report a what-it's-like-ness to smell or can accurately give them the atomic weight of an element. We seem like them..but we're just not.

Would that race of dogs be justified in considering us dzombies? Are the dog brain scientists justified in not seeing dognomenal states in humans? Are the dog philosophers justified in believing that we are not conscious, on account of lacking those dognomenal states? Is the combined institution of dog science and dog philosophy justified in asserting that human processing cannot explain or even help to explain dog consciousness?