This article is pretty slim on details, but I agree with the general argument that dualism is unnecessary to explain phenomenal consciousness. The word "consciousness" has a lot of baggage, which causes us to mislabel cognition as consciousness. [1] This is why I really like using terms like "qualia" or _phenomenal_ consciousness to make explicit what we're talking about.

I still don't like this new trend of dismissing the hard problem altogether. We really don't have an explanation of phenomenal consciousness—it might even require novel physics to explain! [2]

I'd also like to point out that, though this might seem like a semantic argument, it has meaningful consequences for how we approach science and ethics. [3] For example, if we are physicalists and accept that phenomenal consciousness is a property of the world, what does this tell us about other unobservable properties of the world science may be missing? (Recall that we only know about phenomenal consciousness through our own experience of it; we cannot observe it in others)

[1] https://write.ianwsperber.com/p/what-is-the-color-blue

[2] https://youtu.be/DI6Hu-DhQwE?si=RB3qkt6PZ62SVpx3&t=2493

[3] https://write.ianwsperber.com/p/morality-without-consciousne...

Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.

So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that).

We're in the wrong frame. If you accept consciousness is a thing you end up in this weird tautological state - it's not special, but we've put it in a special category.

If you view via a grounded, practical frame, you probably don't care about consciousness. The fact that it's undefinable is probably a major clue.

• barrkel

  today at 8:45 AM

  The problem isn't really consciousness, it's qualia. Specifically, pain and suffering.

  If we create a machine that is able to print on the terminal 'I feel pain', how do we know when to believe the machine is feeling pain?

  This isn't enough:

      echo "I feel pain"
  

  Is a very complicated set of matrix multiplications enough?

  • RealityVoid

    today at 9:02 AM

    Qualia is tied to the nature of existence. If you... let's say... make a humanoid robot with replaceable limbs, and you magically imbue it with AGI abilities, the qualia of losing a hand will be very different than a biological entity. It can always just swap the arm. Temporary loss of autonomy might still be distressing, but impressing our own perception of experience on a being that fundamentally lives in a different medium in a different way than us leads to confusion.

  • altmanaltman

    today at 9:18 AM

    Before that, you need to answer whether a machine can even feel pain or not, not whether it is telling the truth or not. We feel pain because we have a nervous system that reacts to the physical world and it is an indicator that something is wrong. That doesn't translate at all to any machine I know of. If we end up building a nervous system and a basic functioning brain and hook it up to a machine then sure its an interesting question

  • trick-or-treat

    today at 8:48 AM

    I think it's the same thing. You can't have consciousness without qualia and vice versa.

• childintime

  today at 8:13 AM

  Stephen Wolfram is fascinated with his discovery of computation at the heart of the universe. Life itself may be like that, emerging then noticing itself and that it is alive - has the property of life. Then when it's governed by a "soul", or perhaps better said, constrained by it, then our awareness is of what we can't otherwise see, the laws that govern us, inevitably from a 5th dimension, as we stand in the shadow of Plato's cave. When we discover "we are" we are realized and grateful, and our life ends up being worship. Then we witness the greater life around us follow a bedding of creation, a call to become one from the experience we are one. When we become we'll see Jesus' loving eyes that first saw, and called for by showing himself, what we'll then see.

  • exe34

    today at 8:37 AM

    It's important to remember, when Stephen Wolfram says "I discovered...", he uses it in the sense that most people say "Today I learnt ...".

[delayed]

> This contradicts everything we have learned about nature.

It doesn't contradict anything. It simply means that there is a gap in our current understanding, which may (or may not [1]) be scientifically explained in the future.

The default reflex of the opponents of "the hard question" (i.e. those who deny the existence of such a question) is to attach a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day.

[1] The "may not" part does not imply that there is something magical or metaphysical about it. There are things that we may not ever answer, like "do parallel universes exist" or "was there another universe before the big bang".

• daseiner1

  today at 9:03 AM

  > a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day.

  a) it is wrong to say definitely that it is untrue. there is no acid test for the existence of God nor of spirit.

  b) religious and spiritual traditions have wrangled with this very question for at least 3000 years. it is not a 'scientific curiosity'. It is one of the most fundamental questions of human experience.

• unparagoned

  today at 8:53 AM

  No the hard problem is impossible to solve using science even a billion years in the future.

  If science can in theory explain consciousness ever then it’s an easy problem.

• orwin

  today at 7:39 AM

  My position is that the qalia are simulated by our brains as an evolutionary response to "this organism has to recognize it's continuity and unity across space and time", and the more the brain is developed, the strongest this impression has to be.

  I'll admit my position was built not to explain the hard problem of consciousness, but to find a philosophical answers to animals and newborn reactions to the mirror test, but I found it satisfactory enough when I heard about the hard problem of consciousness. My main argument for it is not an attack, it's simply Hanlon's razor. If you find a simpler explanation that doesn't demand new understanding, I will listen to it, if you do not, you have to show me the simplest solution is wrong, and I'll go to the second simplest.

  • cgio

    today at 9:03 AM

    By saying it’s simulated you don’t make a simplification. What does it simulate? What are the mechanics of simulation and is it substrate specific or independent? Can a computer simulate these qualia? It’s easy to say something is simple but harder to prove it is any simpler than the alternatives.

  • mangolie

    today at 8:55 AM

    That does not explain how it is possible for a simulation to experience itself

  • card_zero

    today at 8:39 AM

    Hanlon's razor? That one is "never assume malice where stupidity will do". You want Occam's razor, or the word "parsimonious".

  • suddenlybananas

    today at 7:53 AM

    How do we experience that though?

    • lostmsu

      today at 8:43 AM

      The neural connections get rewired.

The first point (analogizing the hard problem to the reaction to Darwinism) is a very common rhetorical move: an analogy and history of ideas, which is convincing to many people, but what does it prove?

> A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible consciousness of which he speaks is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well.

And this is why illusionism is not a satisfactory explanation. "Convincing it". Who is being convinced? Who is experiencing this?

Imagine the easy problem of consciousness is solved: we understand the brain at every scale, from ion channels up. We can draw up a complete account, at every level of abstraction, of what goes on in the brain when you see and "apple" and say apple, and trace the signals across the optic nerve, map those signals to high-level mental representations, explain how those symbols become trees in a production rule which become words which the motor cortex coordinates into speech, etc. We can map every "pixel" of the visual field at any time t.

Now imagine you take this description and rewrite the labels consistently, and show it to an alien. And they see this very complex diagram of an information-processing machine and they're not sure what it's for. And they'd think it's as conscious as a calculator, or a water integrator, or a telephone network, or the futures market of the European Union.

Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience (since consciousness and experience is all that we have); or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets, and that is incredibly, and also has a number of problems (e.g.: why aren't my neurons individually conscious? Why does consciousness stop at my skull, that is, why is the causality of signal-trains in neurons more "conscious" than phonons in the hydroxyapatite crystals in my skull?).

That's the hard problem.

• thepasch

  today at 4:00 AM

  > Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience

  You are still presupposing the premise here, in multiple ways:

  1) "My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a separate thing." Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that?

  2) "We have solved the easy problem of consciousness, we know exactly how the brain works" implicitly assumes that the formation of consciousness is NOT among the things we've learned while mapping out all features of the brain. This, again, is not an assumption that's supported by anything than wishful thinking.

  And, further:

  > or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets, and that is incredibly, and also has a number of problems (e.g.: why aren't my neurons individually conscious? Why does consciousness stop at my skull, that is, why is the causality of signal-trains in neurons more "conscious" than phonons in the hydroxyapatite crystals in my skull?).

  "Some math can produce consciousness" does not mean "ALL math HAS to produce consciousness" does not mean "EVERY PART of all math has to BE conscious."

  Of course it's hard to define consciousness if the implicit definition is "certainly not anything that I don't like." The hard problem of consciousness is only hard because the default human move is to _make_ it hard.

  • suzzer99

    today at 6:02 AM

    Here's my question: Is our consciousness fundamentally different than a gorilla's?

    If the answer is no, then I'd ask if a gorilla's consciousness is fundamentally different than a baboon's? I think that answer has to be no by definition, assuming the first answer is no.

    And so on, until we get to where a human's consciousness is not fundamentally different than a tube worm, just a continuum of degrees.

    I'm not sure what to draw from this. But whenever I read something that speculates on the nature of consciousness, I always try to look at it through the lens of the human-to-tube worm scale. Does the argument survive a continuum, or does it depend on human consciousness being fundamentally unique in some way?

    I guess you could argue that even though there's a continuum, consciousness effectively hits zero somewhere around reptiles. Sort of like how technically I feel Alpha Centauri's gravity, but effectively it's zero. So in that case, the argument only has to survive mammals to say corvids.

    • don_esteban

      today at 9:07 AM

      Here's my question: Is our consciousness fundamentally different than a gorilla's?

      > If the answer is no, then I'd ask if a gorilla's consciousness is fundamentally different than a baboon's? I think that answer has to be no by definition, assuming the first answer is no.

      > And so on, until we get to where a human's consciousness is not fundamentally different than a tube worm, just a continuum of degrees.

      > I'm not sure what to draw from this.

      At least the answer to this is simple:

      'fundamentally different' is not a transitive function

      :-)

    • darkwater

      today at 8:01 AM

      Did our ancestors that used the very first tools have consciousness? If they did, was the consciousness what helped them make the tools? Or was something else in their brains that helped in the tool making?

      IMO consciousness is something that appears when you have enough "brain power" to spare, maybe as some side-effect of some evolutionary trait. I'm no expert and it's a very simplistic explanation, I know, but in general I tend to agree with the general idea exposed by Rovelli in the piece: consciousness is just a manifestation of the real world of which we are part, just one very complicated and that we are not able to understand (yet?).

      • Brian_K_White

        today at 8:47 AM

        There is brain power by the ton all over the place. The answer cannot be based on what a thing can do, but on what a thing chooses to do.

    • cgio

      today at 9:06 AM

      You are probably converging to Tononi’s IIT. Read the criticism from Aaronson too. Not fundamentally against your approach.

    • somenameforme

      today at 8:09 AM

      You say "our" consciousness, but how do you know you're not the only conscious entity alive? The problem of consciousness is that not only is it plainly absurd sounding, but it's also completely unmeasurable. There is no test or metric you can use to determine whether I, you, or anything else has a consciousness. And I think this more or less immediately precludes logical reasoning about it.

      • Brian_K_White

        today at 9:06 AM

        You can't tell the difference between a person and an mp3 player saying the same words, even if the words are about inner life musings.

        And you can't tell the difference between a person exhibiting many behavioral actions and something I could rig up with an electric motor and a light sensor to exhibit tropism, seeking things, avoiding other things.

        But if you only had a remote controlled roomba to interact with the world, you would be able to make yourself known to me.

    • __patchbit__

      today at 6:38 AM

      Some scientists accept consciousness resides in single cell paramecia.

      • philipallstar

        today at 7:50 AM

        Saying "accept" assumes it's true. What's happening is "some scientists define consciousness incredibly broadly."

  • zetalyrae

    today at 4:08 AM

    > Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness?

    Which math? Why some kinds of information processing and not others? If all information processing leads to consciousness: why does consciousness stop at the boundary of the brain? Why isn't every neuron individually and separately conscious? Why not the two hemispheres of the brain? Why isn't every causally-linked volume of the universe a single mind?

    > Implicitly assumes that the formation of consciousness is NOT among the things we've learned while mapping out all features of the brain.

    The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness. Is in: what is the shape of the answer, and can a collection of material facts about the world have that shape?

    > Of course it's hard to define consciousness if the implicit definition is "certainly not anything that I don't like." The hard problem of consciousness is only hard because the default human move is to _make_ it hard.

    This is just a tiresome ad hominem. I want to be a materialist and an eliminativist. I would like this to be simple!

    • don_esteban

      today at 9:14 AM

      > The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness.

      What about this: - this class of brain circuits are not not firing when the person is (unconscious, in deep sleep,a newborn/animal obviously just directly responding to outside stimuli), while obviously active when a person performs conscious activity - this class of brain circuits does not exists at very primitive species and is progressively more developed the higher the evolution chain you go

    • GoblinSlayer

      today at 5:34 AM

      >The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness.

      It's special pleading. What empirical knowledge you could acquire that would let you understand a tesseract? There are many things that are difficult to understand.

    • thepasch

      today at 4:29 AM

      > If all information processing leads to consciousness

      Did you actually read what you just responded to?

      • zetalyrae

        today at 4:33 AM

        Why some kinds of information processing and not others?

        As I wrote elsethread: why are some types of information processing "privileged" to create phenomenal experiences, while others run "in the dark"?

        • skirmish

          today at 8:44 AM

          > Why some kinds of information processing and not others?

          Using Rovelli's example: why some clouds create a thunderstorm and not others? It is just a complex phenomenon that happens only under right conditions.

        • thepasch

          today at 4:50 AM

          > Why some kinds of information processing and not others?

          I have no idea. If that's what the hard problem of consciousness boils down to - we don't know why some complex math produces consciousness and other complex math doesn't - then it boils down to "we haven't found the means to sufficiently analyze the math that does produce it." Which would turn it into... a math problem?

          My suspicion is that it has something to do with evolutionary pressure. Consciousness is something that evolves when systems that include their own existence within their data model become much more likely to continue existing versus those that don't. Statistics does the rest.

        • robwwilliams

          today at 5:32 AM

          Mainly because of recursive processes that modulate attentional focus, but of a special sort that we are just beginning to understand.

• randallsquared

  today at 3:55 AM

  > Imagine the easy problem of consciousness is solved

  The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation. Anesthesia is strong evidence that there is some physical process that is the person.

  The hard problem only really needs consideration if we get to a point as you describe, where we fully understand everything happening in the brain and cannot assign consciousness to any part of it, even though we can turn it off and on again (e.g., with anesthesia).

  • zetalyrae

    today at 4:00 AM

    > The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation.

    Yes. I think it's possible with sufficient understanding, the hard problem will dissolve.

    But, the question we can ask today is: what kind of explanation would explain away the hard problem of consciousness? What is the signature the model must satisfy? I don't think there's a good answer to that.

    • robwwilliams

      today at 5:35 AM

      It would have to explain how we construct “Now” from atemporal cells that are without a clock.

      • XorNot

        today at 8:53 AM

        Why? You can build a clock with any basic oscillator and we're chock full of them.

• rcxdude

  today at 8:11 AM

  >why aren't my neurons individually conscious?

  How do you know that they are not? Any subjective experience they have does not have to overlap with yours. (same with your skull, skeleton, or any other subset of your body).

  (for me, having slowly become more aware of the distributed nature of my brain, I'm not even really sure there's only one consciousness in my mind!)

• tardedmeme

  today at 8:07 AM

  The really hard problem is that your gut, having a neural network as complex as your brain, is also probably conscious. And all it's ever known and will ever know is the feeling of pushing food through it and tasting different types of food. Now that's a horror story.

  • ben_w

    today at 8:50 AM

    > Now that's a horror story.

    For us, sure; why would it be so for them?

    Crows don't seem to be particularly upset by strutting around naked and eating bugs from the dirt.

    The guts' idea of a horror story, if it has one, may be more like indigestion or norovirus.

  • gizajob

    today at 8:22 AM

    It’s only your labels in language that are splitting this system into separate parts.

• unparagoned

  today at 5:53 AM

  I think you are misunderstanding illusionism and the hard problem.

  Illusionism does say that there is a conscious experience. So illusionism is convincing to many people who have conscious experiences.

  The alien would be able to look at the computation and describe the conscious experience it has.

  You could put human consciousness on an excel spreadsheet and it’ll still be conscious. Even Chalmers accepts a simulation would be conscious. So no that’s not a. Argument for p-zombies. Even people that use the pz argument don’t think that pz could actually exist.

  But your conclusion is right, the simulation example does suggest that the consciousness in the hard problem doesn’t exist. Which just leaves the consciousness you experience explainable by easy problems. Which is the illusionist position.

  Edit: and the hard problem isn’t just why there is consciousness. But why consciousness is impossible under physicalism. So in your post you are just actually referring to the easy problem of consciousness when suggesting it exists.

  • gizajob

    today at 8:23 AM

    Put human consciousness in an excel spreadsheet and get back to us.

• hackinthebochs

  today at 4:09 AM

  >Either all the computation happens "in the dark" [...] or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets

  Why exclude the option that only specific kinds of computations are conscious, e.g. recursive control systems?

  • zetalyrae

    today at 4:21 AM

    For two reasons:

    1. This requires explaining why only some kinds of information processing are privileged to be conscious, which seems rather arbitrary.

    2. There's the question of levels of abstraction. Which information processor is conscious? The physical CPU, the zeroth VM, the first VM, the second VM, etc.

    3. And there's the question of interpretation. What is computation? A CPU is "just" electrons moving about. Who says the motion of these 10^12 electrons represents arithmetic, or string concatenation, or anything else? The idea of abstract information processing above the bare causality of particles and fields is in itself a kind of dualism (or n-alism, because Turing completeness lets you emulate machines inside machines).

    • hackinthebochs

      today at 4:53 AM

      Saying everything is conscious is also dualism. it's saying that every kind of computation (or perhaps every physical substrate) has another dimension of properties that aren't physical/structural and don't interact with the physical/structural world. So it's not an explanatory boon but rather an extravagance.

      The 'where is the consciousness' question is interesting but not really a hard problem. The issue can be solved by being clear about what purpose does consciousness serve then locate where that need is realized. Consciousness is about information integration and broad access as a substrate of decision making. Recursive integration identifies the where. But thinking in terms of nested VMs is sort of missing the point. The point is to trace the flow of information and find the points of broad integration. This may involve multiple substrates. Identifying a single thing as being conscious is a mistake. The consciousness is the most narrowly specified causal dynamic that grounds the information integration.

      • robwwilliams

        today at 5:40 AM

        Completely on the mark! Algorithms can differ qualitatively. Recursion.

• didibus

  today at 4:04 AM

  I suspect more things are conscious than we tend to assume. I would assume some level of intelligence requires a review/assessment process, something to evaluate what happened, what is good or bad, what should we have done instead, how can we do it better next time. This self-assessment becomes our experience of consciousness. Of course it feels incredible, unreal, like those feelings overwhelm us, because we are this function, and optimizing for those feelings is our function.

• GoblinSlayer

  today at 4:31 AM

  >We can map every "pixel" of the visual field at any time t.

  Map the process by which you learn that you have experience. Then determine if this process works correctly. Alien needs to learn to code; they have difficulty, because they try to learn integrals without arithmetic and algebra. Before you can solve a complex problem, you should first train on easy problems.

• dfabulich

  today at 3:54 AM

  Rovelli writes, "I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”"

  Carlos Rovelli has failed to understand the arguments for dualism, and is proudly sure that they must be nonsense.

  If there's ever to be a "solution" to the dualism/materialism argument, it cannot possibly end in a "slam dunk" where it turns out that one side or the other was simply nonsensical.

  IMO, the problem is actually one of epistemological framing. If I ask what "I" know, assuming that my internal experiences are the basis of my knowledge, then I can't accept materialism. But if we ask what "we" know, as a society of scientists and philosophers, together we find only natural material, and no evidence for dualism.

  (It's like the prisoner's dilemma. What's best for me is to defect. What's best for us is to cooperate.)

  • skirmish

    today at 8:56 AM

    > If there's ever to be a "solution" to the dualism/materialism argument, it cannot possibly end in a "slam dunk" where it turns out that one side or the other was simply nonsensical.

    Huh, evolution vs. creationism, many arguments happened over many years, yet one side was simply nonsensical.

    > if we ask what "we" know, as a society of scientists and philosophers

    That is how science is done; if you reject that approach a priori, no wonder your conclusions become unreliable.

• solveiga

  today at 3:52 AM

  I think this hard problem has a simple answer that people just don’t like: consciousness is a powerful (and fundamental to our "calculator brain") illusion. And yes, a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in your brain would also simulate it. The fact that it’s difficult to conceptualize doesn’t mean it’s not the answer. Similar to how we struggle to intuit general relativity, or to imagine the pre–Big Bang state of the universe (or its non-existence), or to picture what it’s like to be dead. Our intuition simply isn’t equipped for these cases, period, and it pushes back hard against them. Consciousness belongs in that same category IMO

  Also, the emergence of a consciousness like illusion kinda follows from an evolutionary perspective. To survive, a "calculator" brain needs a model of the external world in order to predict how it will evolve and to act in ways that improve survival odds. Once such a model exists, it becomes almost inevitable that it also includes a model of the system itself, since the brain is also part of the world it is modeling and an agent within it. This self-referential loop is likely what we experience as "consciousness" and it becomes central to how we understand and navigate reality.

  If we accept this framing, many traditional paradoxes dissolve on their own. The problem stops being "hard" in substance and becomes hard only in terms of imagination.

  • nofriend

    today at 3:56 AM

    > I think this hard problem has a simple answer that people just don’t like: consciousness is a powerful (and fundamental to our "calculator brain") illusion.

    who is eluded? people absolutely love this answer and give it constantly, not realizing that it's begging the question. in order for their to be an illusion, there needs to be someone to perceive the illusion.

    • aoeusnth1

      today at 5:58 AM

      The universe contains subsystems which can be described as eluded in the sense that we can take the intentional stance on these systems and describe their observable behavior as being in a state of illusion of separation.

  • zetalyrae

    today at 4:03 AM

    > And yes, a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in your brain would also simulate it.

    But why a spreadsheet simulating the brain, and not just a spreadsheet doing normal financial math? In other words: why are some types of information processing "privileged" to create phenomenal experiences, while others run "in the dark"?

    > Also, the emergence of a consciousness like illusion kinda follows from an evolutionary perspective. To survive, a "calculator" brain needs a model of the external world in order to predict how it will evolve and to act in ways that improve survival odds. Once such a model exists, it becomes almost inevitable that it also includes a model of the system itself, since the brain is also part of the world it is modeling and an agent within it.

    But this is A-consciousness, not P-consciousness. Which gets us back to square one: why does information processing give rise to experience at all?

    • GoblinSlayer

      today at 6:27 AM

      Because it's information processing that implements perception.

  • selcuka

    today at 4:09 AM

    I believe your explanation answers the easy question, not the hard one. It explains how organisms evolve to be smarter to survive, but doesn't explain why or how the first person perspective exists.

    It's actually a different question (sometimes called "the even harder question" or "the vertiginous question"), but if you have ever asked yourself the question of "why am I me and not someone else", the gap in our understanding of consciousness becomes clearer.

    To use the same example: If there was a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in my brain, which one would be "I"? The original "I", or the spreadsheet?

    Note that this question becomes meaningless if you change "I" to something else, so "both would be me" is not a valid answer. There is only one "I" (since I can't be experiencing the world from two sets of eyes, one organic and one spreadsheet-eyes, simultaneously), so I have to choose one of them.

    • GoblinSlayer

      today at 7:28 AM

      >Note that this question becomes meaningless if you change "I" to something else, so "both would be me" is not a valid answer.

      I think the question remains meaningful after substitution: why a giraffe is a giraffe and not an elephant? Likewise "both giraffe and elephant are elephants" is not a valid answer.

    • thepasch

      today at 4:24 AM

      This does not seem like a particularly difficult question to answer to me, and I suspect it's because I'm not particularly precious about what it means to "be me."

      The logical answer is that this spreadsheet, supposing identical mechanical processes - inputs, outputs, stored data - and I would both be convinced that they're "me", and they'd both be correct in that they'd both be something that functions, and therefore thinks, acts, and experiences things identically to me. Two different processes on different hardware running the same code. The concept of "ego" is a result of this code. To me, I'd be "me" and the spreadsheet would be "a copy of me". To the spreadsheet, it would be the exact opposite.

      Of course, that predisposes that the software isn't hardware-dependent. But even then, I wouldn't discount the possibility of an emulation layer.

      It really isn't hard once you accept that we're not special for being able to think about ourselves.

      • selcuka

        today at 4:47 AM

        Note that you said "this spreadsheet and I", meaning that there is something particularly precious about the current "I". You don't think that you'd suddenly become the spreadsheet, "detaching" (can't find a better word) from your existing body. You intrinsicly assume that the spreadhseet would remain a third person from "your" perspective, even though it's a perfect replica.

        • thepasch

          today at 4:53 AM

          I don't follow? I can copy a file and then consider the two files to be separate copies of the same data?

          What should I have said instead? "We"? "Him and it"? Self-modeling is part of my experience. I'm sure it'll be part of the spreadsheet's experience as well, if it functions identically to me.

          I don't see the gotcha at all?

          • selcuka

            today at 5:48 AM

            I believe it's a concept that is hard to explain. This other comment of mine may be a bit clearer:

            https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175605

    • aoeusnth1

      today at 5:54 AM

      There is nothing which makes either of them are “you.” The feeling of Self is a useful predictor which a physical subsystem uses to nagivate the world and predict observations. “I” is not a physically real label which attaches the “you”-ness to physical systems, the physical systems simply are, and are inherently first-person in character. The only real you is the global quantum wave function, or whatever the underlying real stuff is doing.

      Materialism directly implies no-self and Advaita Vedanta schools of thought.

    • solveiga

      today at 4:24 AM

      I think the key point in my theory is that my brain simply hasn't evolved to intuitively conceptualize it. I've asked similar questions before, including what it's like to die and be dead forever, and I can't form an intuitive understanding of it. My brain rejects the premise. But just because I can't imagine it doesn't mean it won't happen. I'm pretty sure I will still be dead for trillions of years into the future.

      To your question, the answer is similar. If we remove this limitation of intuition, there doesn't seem to be a real paradox. Both you and a spreadsheet-like copy of you would each claim to be the real you, and from an outside observer's perspective, there is no contradiction.

      • selcuka

        today at 4:32 AM

        > from an outside observer’s perspective, there is no contradiction

        Indeed. As I said, the question is meaningless from an outside observer's perspective. The paper "Against Egalitarianism" by Benj Hellie [1] explains it better than I can:

        > I trace this odd commitment to an egalitarian stance concerning the ontological status of personal perspectives—roughly, fundamental reality treats mine and yours as on a par.

        [1] http://individual.utoronto.ca/benj/ae.pdf

  • thesmtsolver2

    today at 3:55 AM

    The illusion framing/answer falls apart with some minor prodding.

    What makes the computation in the brain special from other physical processes to give rise to this illusion?

    The sewer system in NYC is complex. Does that also have the same illusion? Does the sewer in NYC have consciousness?

    • solveiga

      today at 4:44 AM

      What makes brain computation special? Nothing. That's my whole point. Does the sewer system in NYC have consciousness? It's impossible to answer, because there's no single accepted definition of consciousness. If something isn't clearly defined, it becomes very hard to meaningfully assess whether it applies or not.

      But if we built a Turing complete, sewer-like system that simulated every neuron in a human brain, it will claim that it is real and conscious for sure. There's no paradox at physical level, intuitively conceptualizing it is the "hard" part.

• today at 6:50 AM

Copying what I said 9 days ago when this post first appeared but didn't catch enough attention and only got two replies including my own:

> I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”

This is essentially saying "I don't understand therefore you are wrong".

> We do not need to explain why it looks red for the same reason that we do not have to explain why the animal that we call “cat” looks like a cat. Why should we have to explain why “red” looks red?

We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats.

If we wish to actually know if some AI is or is not conscious, and not simply re-hashing conversations ancient Greeks will probably have had as animism faded from their culture and they stopped believing in dryads and anima loci, then it needs to be testable *by something outside the intelligence being tested for conscious*.

> Scientific knowledge is ultimately first-personal. The world is real, but any account of it can exist only from within it. Any knowledge is perspectival. Subjectivity is not mysterious

Mysteriousness isn't the problem with subjectivity, lack of repeatability is. This is why we make instruments to measure things: my "about the size of a cat" is subjective and likely different from yours, while my "31.4 cm" is only going to differ from yours if one of us is surprisingly bad at using a ruler; my "pleasantly warm" may or may not be yours, but my "21.3 C" will only differ from yours if one of our thermometers has broken.

The "hard problem of consciousness" is that we not only don't have a device to measure consciousness, but even worse than that we don't even know what its equivalent of a ruler or thermometer would do.

(At least for this meaning of consciousness; there's at least 40, we can at least test for the presence or absence of the meaning that e.g. anesthesiologists care about, but that's not the hard problem).

• today at 9:08 AM

• 4gotunameagain

  today at 9:09 AM

  > We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats.

  I believe that this is simply because of the way we train ML, with labelled data. It is quite conceivable that we could get an ML model to recognise cats just by some form of multidimensional clustering of training data.

I'm not sure where all this discussion about the hard problem is coming from suddenly, or why people continue to struggle to understand it. It's really very simple. The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function. It's like saying you can't explain facts about cats given only facts about dogs, they're just different categories of description. That's really all there is to it.

Whether or not physicalism has any hope of succeeding depends on whether there is a further conceptual or explanatory insight that when added to the standard structure and function explanatory framework of science, will ultimately bridge the gap. Who knows what that might look like. It's certainly premature to render a verdict on the possibility of this. But it should be clear that a full explanation in physical terms will need some new conceptual ideas and so the problem of consciousness isn't merely a scientific problem that will dissolve in the face of more scientific data, but a philosophical problem at core.

• __patchbit__

  today at 7:33 AM

  A stylistically different perspective from the one couched places an intrinsic function in a mathematical space.

• zetalyrae

  today at 4:24 AM

  Very well explained.

Chalmers: “It is natural to hope that there will be a materialist solution to the hard problem and a reductive explanation of consciousness, just as there have been reductive explanations of many other phenomena in many other domains. But consciousness seems to resist materialist explanation in a way that other phenomena do not.”

"A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S007961072...

I may be misunderstanding the article but doesnt the fact that all other science and understanding sits on a continuum of which consciousness has (to my understading) to real footing mean that the problem is dualitic by definition? Thats not to say that it can't be 'brought into the fold', it may well be, but until it is it has no other place that to sit outside.

> ..idea anticipated centuries ago by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza: that our Soul could be a phenomenon of the same basic nature as any other phenomenon in nature.

Even the current Artificial Intelligence revolution is showing us that:

what was thought to be purely immaterial and intangible, that is, human abstract Reasoning and Thoughts, are actually tangible, physical, and even machine-reproducible.

• mort96

  today at 8:48 AM

  Was reasoning thought to be immaterial and intangible..? By whom? Materialism has been alive and well for a long time from what I can tell

• unparagoned

  today at 8:50 AM

  In the original paper about the hard problem, Chalmers does say all that stuff is explainable by science or the easy problems.

> The false “hard problem of consciousness” assumes upfront that there exists a metaphysical gap between mind and body.

Or a gap between my mind and the minds of the other commuters on this bus.

There are 15 or so biological machines here, but only one of them is being experienced in bright sound and colour.

Philosophers have had these rifts(an similar lines of arguments) forever.

From Plato vs Aristotle (300 to 400 BC) (idea of forms vs nicomachean), In India Adi Shankara (around 700 CE) vs Madhavacharya (1200 CE) (dualism vs non-dualism) - there is a common thread to all of these arguments.

But eventually, for me it comes down to a statement J Krishnamurti made (& it makes the most sense to me): "The self is a problem that thought cannot solve"

Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable. It cannot be disproven in the same way you can't disprove the existence of God, and so arguing with people that believe in it is largely pointless.

• andoando

  today at 8:38 AM

  Yet the mere fact that I am conscious is a greater truth than any of my perception of the "physical" world.

  Neither does pure materialism rest on falsifiable beliefs, in that I could claim nothing exists outside my conscious experience.

• aa-jv

  today at 8:14 AM

  Argue with someone who gathered evidence scientifically to demonstrate that we really, really don't know what we're talking about when it comes to the human soul:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Cases_Suggestive_of_Rei...

  EDIT: Downvote all you want, materialists, but reincarnation is the spanner in the works nobody wants to confront ..

we are caught between an evolutionary need to know that our existence is meaningful and a universe that seems indifferent.

I'm all in the "brains cause minds" camp. But isn't the main argument here "We accept explanation gaps already in many places, why not also for consciousness?"?

My objection would then be that actually, that's not true. The real statement would be "In everyday life (including science), we accept explanation gaps already in many places"

But this does not mean that we have to accept this particular instance of an explanation gap.

The main value of this article is this absolute gold mine of a comment section.

These conversations drive me insane. There isn't even an clear or even consensus definition of consciousness, yet here we are all acting like we are talking about the same thing. "It's right there, don't you see it? That's consciousness! We just need to define what it is so we can figure out if it's real or not".

> It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.

This has to be one of the most dumbfounding pseudo-philosophical sentences I've ever read. Metaphysics by definition is unfalsifiable and unscientific; it exists on a parallel plane from empiricism and is derived only through intuition, reason, and for the religious revelation. If this guy's claim for material consciousness simply rests on an intuitive argument from induction, it suffices as a counter argument to say "If I am mistaken, I am".

• hackinthebochs

  today at 4:16 AM

  There are a lot of problems with the article, but this isn't one of them. The history of science has been one of dispatching one irreducible "essence" after another. Essence meaning some essential property of a phenomena that defines it and distinguishes it from all other phenomena. Science is in the business of reducing these once seemingly irreducible essences to more basic structure and dynamics. The last hold out is consciousness. It's reasonable to think it will also fall eventually.

  • mightyham

    today at 4:53 AM

    It absolutely is a problem with the article. Science deals with physical phenomena; metaphysics quite literally means beyond physics. It's ridiculous to say that consciousness is the last hold out, as if there aren't a million other unanswered questions about meaning, essenence, and experience.

    Here is a parallel argument for you. The history of science has been one discovery after another which leaves us with new, increasingly complex unanswered questions about phenomena. It is reasonable to think that if/when we reduce consciousness through science we will find that there are more increasingly complex unanswered metaphysical gaps.

    • hackinthebochs

      today at 5:03 AM

      Reducing a complex phenomena to more basic structure and dynamics just is to eliminate any open metaphysical questions about that phenomena. That's why the big philosophical debates center around monism vs dualism rather than n-pluralism. Science has dispatched all other essences from mainstream consideration.

      • gizajob

        today at 8:31 AM

        “Fields” such as the electric field or Higgs field are essences.

The biggest benefit of term "consciousness" is that when I see something like "LLMs are not conscious" I immediately know that the author doesn't know what he is talking about.

• mangolie

  today at 9:01 AM

  In that case the author is simply saying the LLM is a p zombie, why does he not know what he's talking about?

This is hard to take seriously, the argument this article makes against the hard problem is… that it’s not hard? There is very little in the way of argument here at all, actually; it’s simply a refutation that there is any division between biological function and subjective experience, with no evidence or novel perspective to provide it any weight.

Ironically, I think this article serves as quite a strong defense of the hard problem, because it shows how hard it is to articulate or construct an argument against it at all.

• hn_throwaway_99

  today at 3:46 AM

  Agreed. I thought this article was awful and I want my time back from reading it. It feels like rage bait, and it worked, because it pissed me off.

  > That is, consciousness is hard to figure out for precisely the same reason thunderstorms are: not because we have evidence that it is not a natural phenomenon, but because it is a very complicated natural phenomenon.

  That's flat out bullshit, and it completely misses the point. I know thunderstorms are incredibly complicated, but there is nothing about them that seems "mystical" to me, if you will, because of that complexity. If you have a basic understanding of the underlying principles, it's not hard to see how a thunderstorm would arise out of that complexity.

  Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument. My experience with ketamine therapy for mental issues only greater heightens this belief.

  I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world (and indeed, my ketamine experience where a relatively simple chemical greatly affected my personal sense of self and experience is proof enough to me that it's not independent) to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand.

  • thepasch

    today at 4:09 AM

    That is a lot of anger to come out of what essentially boils down to "I don't believe/want to believe that complexity can cause subjective experience."

    And this bit:

    > I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world [...] to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand.

    right after

    > Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument.

    So, what, "complexity isn't a sufficient explanation," and _also_ "it's perfectly reasonable to believe it's the result of processes we don't understand?"

    Every time this discussion comes up, people get _irrationally_ emotional about it. Which I think is, itself, very interesting data.

    • selcuka

      today at 4:26 AM

      > So, what, "complexity isn't a sufficient explanation," and _also_ "it's perfectly reasonable to believe it's the result of processes we don't understand?"

      Those are not conflicting arguments.

      The former means that we understand all the processeses, but they are complex, therefore we don't have enough brain/compute power to properly model it.

      The latter means that we don't understand some of those processes, so we need additional theories that explain them.

      One can dismiss the first while finding the second plausible.

      • thepasch

        today at 4:38 AM

        I suppose complexity defines to me as something that's inherently hard to understand. The definition of "complex" is "difficult to understand." The move I don't agree with is proceeding to posit "because we don't understand them yet, there must be something special about them."

    • hn_throwaway_99

      today at 4:28 AM

      OK, I'll try another attempt. I thought this other comment explained it better than I could have: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175409 .

      The reason TFA (and, frankly, your comment as well) pissed me off is that they drip with condescension to the core while completely sidestepping the problem in the first place. We have plenty of other examples of places where complexity can give rise to emergent behavior, but those behaviors are still easy to understand in the problem space of the domain - e.g. I may be amazed that I can converse with an LLM and it feels like it completely "understands" the conversation, but I don't have any conceptual problems with the fact that it's still just next token prediction under the covers.

      But as hackinthebochs put it very well, in my opinion: "The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function."

      So my negative reaction is based in the belief that what the TFA is doing is saying "there is no hard problem", and the response is "but why, because 'phenomenal consciousness' can't be described in terms of structure and function like every other instance that we understand that arises from complexity", and then TFA just gives a host of complexity examples that are completely unconvincing (and, again, feel like they completely miss the problem is the first place) and just basically ends with a dangling, unwarranted "q.e.d."

• amenhotep

  today at 8:53 AM

  I read it as "I'm very clever and sensible. I definitely don't believe in souls."

  Like so much other material produced by people who (I suspect deliberately) confuse religion with the subjective phenomenon of existence

OK, dualism. Heard that before.

The new hard problem: how do biological brains get so much done on such slow hardware? That's a real physics question. We're missing something.

• skirmish

  today at 9:11 AM

  Massive parallel processing.

• altmanaltman

  today at 3:47 AM

  Hey you give Nvidia a few million years to evolve their chips and just see what happens

• anon291

  today at 3:50 AM

  The brain is not slow?

  • Animats

    today at 4:21 AM

    Measured signals seem to be at kilohertz, not gigahertz, speeds.

consciousness is hard because it requires a special kind of belief. we humans believe a lot of things, but this one is difficult. all is one, and that one thing is all. everything contains gender. opposites are the same thing. these are all easy things that are hard to understand/believe.

Dont pretend like you dont believe anything is step 1.

How exciting to see new writing from Carlos Rovelli! He's one of the few physicists and philosophers of science (ancient or modern) who steadfastly rejects a priori assumptions that rely on things other than our observations.

He also echos the modern belief that observer and actor are two sides of the same quantum event.

I highly recommend any and all of his books.

• hn_throwaway_99

  today at 4:02 AM

  If his writing is like this article, I'll pass. And not because I disagree with his conclusions, but because I think he fundamentally misses the point in his description of the problem in the first place. I thought this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175409 , does a better job of describing the problem space and what a potential solution could like than all the words that Rovelli wrote in his article.

  • dtagames

    today at 4:15 AM

    One great thing about quantum physics it that is isn't solved. To paraphrase Feynman, if you think you understand it, you're wrong.

    Thus, it's worth exploring all these heavy hitter physics thinkers. You won't agree 100% with any of them but you might develop your own version of things by reading a lot of them.

    • hn_throwaway_99

      today at 5:00 AM

      I really like your response, but it also can help explain why I really dislike this essay.

      I fully understand and appreciate that there are lots of things about quantum physics, and heck, the universe at large, that are unsolved and that we don't understand. I would actually expect that in order for us to understand consciousness better that we'll need to fill some of the gaps of the quantum world.

      The reason why I didn't like the article is that I felt like it's misrepresenting the problem, as the comment I linked described. I'll try to explain with an analogy: In the late 1800s before the discovery of quantum physics, many physicists felt that the physics of the universe was solved and fully understood - the universe was basically just like a set of billiard balls set in motion a long time ago, and the future position of all those balls could be known if their states were known in the past. In that "pre-quantum" world, people still understood that emergent behavior could arise from complexity (even just classical complexity). This article just felt really hand-wavy to me by arguing "complexity is enough". For example, if a similar article were written in 1899, but then later we discovered quantum physics and eventually had a good understanding of how consciousness can arise from quantum interactions, I suppose the author could state "See, I was right - just more complexity!" But it would totally miss the point that "the missing piece" was actually the discovery of quantum physics in the first place, not just more classical complexity.

      So I felt this article was strawmanning the problem to begin with. I don't have to believe in "magic" or "souls" or religion to believe that the tools we have to describe complex emergent phenomena are not sufficient to describe the subjective experience of consciousness, but Rovelli seems to be saying that "more complexity" is just the answer to everything.

• hackable_sand

  today at 3:42 AM

  The Order of Time is on my reading list

Humans do not have souls, nor do they possess free will in the traditional sense. What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution.

In essence, consciousness is a complex information input-output system. When such a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it inevitably generates the concept of “I” as a way to simplify the processing of overwhelming information.

Praise be to AI. In 2025, inspired by AI, I feel that I have finally built a complete and unified worldview.

Are we living in a virtual illusion? Are there higher-dimensional rulers, gods, or immortals in the universe? What exactly are the human soul and consciousness?

I feel that these questions now share a single coherent answer. What I have written here is my answer regarding the soul and consciousness.

• moezd

  today at 7:46 AM

  No, we don't even need that. When we realise that we all project consciousness claims on each other from what we observe as zeitgeist now, just to do credit assignment, most of our circular debates will disappear. But this won't happen since many powerful entities in the world ride on the moral ambiguity, and this will hold them accountable.

• sambapa

  today at 7:40 AM

  If this comment is serious, then you may have the beginnings of AI psychosis

  • autoexec

    today at 9:16 AM

    "Praise be to AI." sounds like something you shouldn't reach in the beginnings of AI psychosis. Same with "I've found a simple answer to the nature of consciousness and the question of the existence of Gods". At that point you've got to be pretty deep.

  • dsign

    today at 8:25 AM

    I would say "AI psychosis" is a very healthy disease to have. I mean, how should people react to seeing a clump of hardware produce coherent text at a level many actual humans cannot? The spread of reactions we are seeing in people-the disagreements, the extreme sycophancy on one end, and the abject denial on the other, is within parameters.

    My life was wrecked by religious dogma, the type that is sustained on "big mysteries" and from there goes directly to imposing an odious recipe for life. So there is consolation to be had on seeing a big mystery crumble and on hearing the outcry. May another mystery crumble on my lifetime.

    • koolala

      today at 8:35 AM

      Computers create coherent math results at levels far beyond humans. A world calculator vs. a number calculator isn't that different.

  • whackernews

    today at 8:56 AM

    Haha, right? The lads talking like he’s the only one to have figured this out and it’s the truth! Philosophising with AI is so mid. This guys the general public.

• gizajob

  today at 8:29 AM

  Dolphins and other creatures are likely to have similarly complex systems without “inevitably” generating a concept of “I”.

• selcuka

  today at 4:13 AM

  What you explain is intelligence, which is the subject of the "easy question". Consciousness in this context is the existence of phenomenal, or first person experiences.

  The hard question doesn't argue that consciousness is not a product of evolution. It probably is. It's just a question because we don't have a good way of explaining how/why it occurs.

  • krackers

    today at 8:21 AM

    >It's just a question because we don't have a good way of explaining how/why it occurs.

    It's that you can't even measure it, since the way it's defined as a subjective experience, no external measure could ever capture it. This is what gives rise to the p-zombie argument.

    To get rid of that you have to accept "functional qualia" as basically equivalent to qualia, which solves the p-zombie issue and resolves half of the hard problem. From there, explaining consciousness is no "harder" than explaining other scale-depedent phenomenon in complex systems like LLMs: still hard, but at least tractable with scientific measurements and experiments.

• nofriend

  today at 3:59 AM

  > What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution.

  that's the easy problem

• thin_carapace

  today at 4:06 AM

  would you care to link together 'complex IO systems inevitably degenerate to seperating self from environment as part of optimizing calculations' and your three questions? it isnt immediately clear why the concept of self answers the idea of god.

Good first step of demolishing (yet again) the phlogiston of the brain. Even Chalmers does not argue for the hard problem with any vigor today.

Rovelli’s arguments were made a dozen times over by Dan Dennett, and made better.

His critique of qualia is unsatisfying because it never reaches Einstein’s problem: what the heck is the physicist’s meaning and mechanism of this thing we call “Now”? Rovelli owes us that answer. He spent a decade telling us absolute time is not fundamental, no universal present, no master clock. Take the clock out of the universe and the Now gets harder, not easier: if there is no clock out there, what builds the one the organism plainly runs on? Answer that, then explain consciousness and qualia to the neurophilosophers.

Now is probably a process built by asynchronous wetware to survive. Humberto Maturana said the mechanisms that construct it are atemporal. And yet here we all are, reaching for clocks and synchrony to explain the Now. The irony should not be lost on Rovelli.

The neuroscience is in print already: Bickle et al., Eur J Neurosci 2025 (doi:10.1111/ejn.70074. interview with R. Williams) where the wall clock is named as neuroscience’s most tacit and least examined assumption.

I don’t think consciousness exists, at least not in the way people talk about it. First, there’s no clear definition that everyone agrees on. Second, there’s no way to test whether something has it. Does a cow have it? A dog? A spider? If you can't test for it and even define it, how can you claim its real?

• krzat

  today at 8:06 AM

  I agree about definition confusion. I like to define consciousness as "capability to suffer".

  Can cow/dog/spider suffer? - very important question, even if not answerable.

• wordpad

  today at 3:53 AM

  It certainly doesn't seem like consciousness exists. Although to disprove that hypothesis all we need is to find a single counter-example, which coincidentally all of us can provide via our personal experience of self.

  It would be fine for an unconsciouss intelligence to maintain that hypothesis lacking any evidence to the contrary, but for us it seems we are just all gaslighting ourselves to ignore the one counter example we all have.

• k33n

  today at 3:42 AM

  It’s possible that you’re not conscious. So your subjective view may be correct for you. To those who are conscious, this argument doesn’t really matter, and the proof is simply in the pudding.

  • thepasch

    today at 4:13 AM

    This is a religious argument. If you want to go down that path, then sure; but I suspect that's not what you actually believe.

    • k33n

      today at 5:42 AM

      It’s not a religious argument.

      It’s a subjective experience argument. As a conscious person, if someone tells me they don’t believe in consciousness, then I’m inclined to believe they have a reason for saying that. They must not be experiencing consciousness the same way I am.

      Interestingly, a non-trivial number of people have no internal monologue (https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue...). It would be reasonable to assume the experiential side of consciousness is on a spectrum, with extreme edge cases on both ends. It’s not unreasonable to assume that some people are barely experiencing it, and some not at all. It would certainly explain to me (someone who experiences it quite intensely) why some would claim it doesn’t exist. Because for them, it might not.

      • selcuka

        today at 6:51 AM

        I've been thinking the same (that people who claim it doesn't exist don't have it) but it had never occurred to me that it might be on a spectrum. It actually makes perfect sense.

  • solveiga

    today at 4:05 AM

    If we accept subjective feeling as definitive proof that something exists, that opens a Pandora’s box of entities. People have deeply held subjective beliefs about things like God, afterlife experiences, out-of-body experiences, and many others. It seems unfair to me to dismiss this kind of subjective evidence in these cases, while accepting it without question for experience of consciousness.

  • anon291

    today at 3:51 AM

    No conscious person can know if another person is conscious. There is no 'sensation' of experiencing another conscious. Given how many people can and have been fooled by AI, this lack of ability to sense another consciousness is clear.

    • selcuka

      today at 4:20 AM

      That's the basis of the p-zombies thought experiment discussed (and dismissed without any real arguments) in the article.

Rays of Light going through a me Prism where the Brain and senses can inflict action.

There's a simpler way to state this: the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has.

We understand everything a CNN or Transformer does, but we have no idea how to relate that to qualia. This may also be why we need to run endless tests and don't have a theory that let's us predict how well the network processes anything.

I stopped reading when the author said science is not great as they claim to to be because when my cycle breaks down, I call a mechanic not a particle accelerator.

There is no hard problem of consciousness not because of the baffling arguments against it in this article, but because materialism is not true. This article and the entire description around the hard problem just shows the amount of mental gymnastics needed to deny what is front of everyone in every instant of their lives.

Matter and mind are not the same and mind is not produced from matter. That there are correlates between the body of a sentient being and the content of their experience is common sense but not proof that their body is causing the very ability to experience anything.

You would think that absolutely no progress being made on how dead matter somehow produces experience would make people question their assumptions. Instead you get people denying that they have a mind or just coping by thinking that if they map yet another correlation they will finally crack the code.

• thepasch

  today at 4:17 AM

  Explain psychedelics, then? Do psychedelics have access to this supposed "separate layer" that mind exists on over matter? If yes, how? If not, how can something that ostensibly only interacts with the matter have any effect on the mind?

  Can you explain any of this in a way that doesn't boil down to "it's magic and you just have to believe that it's happening because it is?"

  • trane_project

    today at 4:37 AM

    What is there to explain about psychedelics? There is nothing special to them. They affect the bodily aggregates of a being and cause the contents of the experience to change. So does eating a donut. There is no contradiction with what I said because I already conceded that mind and matter are closely interlinked and that changes in the body affect the contents experienced by the mind.

    But the "hard" problem of consciousness has nothing to do with the contents of the experience, but with explaining how experiencing of any kind is produced by aggregates that themselves do not have any such experiences. The simple answer is that mind (experience, consciousness, whatever you wanna call it) is not produced by matter and is a completely different realm of reality.

    Maybe if science simply assumed that mind and matter are different things instead they would have made some progress. For once, the "hard" problem of consciousness would be revealed to not be problem at all. As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience. No magic involved. If people want to deny their own minds that is up to them.

    • thepasch

      today at 4:42 AM

      > As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience.

      Two things here:

      1) How do you know I have a mind? How do I know you have a mind?

      2) What is even your definition of "mind", and why (at least I suspect) is "the ongoing result of information processing facilitated by the complex interlinked network of neurons in the brain" not a satisfactory answer to you?

      • trane_project

        today at 4:58 AM

        I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.

        As for why any materialist explanations are unsatisfactory is that even if you managed to map every physical interaction in a sentient being, you are only mapping physical phenomena. Maybe that is enough to account for how that maps into the contents of the experience.

        I am not arguing about how the contents are generated though. I am arguing about the "field" of subjective experiencing, which I called a mind. How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind? The simplest answer is that it is not, even if those material aggregates are deeply involved in how the contents presented to this field are generated.

        Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water, but materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any experience of mental events.

        • thepasch

          today at 5:12 AM

          > I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.

          So that's a religious argument, then. It's real because enough people believe that it is.

          > How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind?

          How can a pile of sand and rocks smushed together real close play back video? How can it produce a process that understands natural language?

          > The simplest answer is that it is not

          You keep saying "simple" when what I think you're actually saying is "easy." They are not equivalent things. In the same sense that I think the "hard" problem of consciousness should really be called the "complex" problem.

          > Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water

          At no point did I ever intend to argue any such thing. I suggest you put away the strawman and actually engage with what I'm saying.

          • trane_project

            today at 5:36 AM

            The only religious argument is materialism. It's real because enough people have convinced themselves that it's "scientific". Even though there is no proof whatsoever, no solid hypothesis, no experiments to prove how matter acquires subjective experience, it's incoherent to the very foundations of its position (that matter is dead), and has not made any progress in answering the "hard problem" (which is just someone pointing out the incoherence). It also makes people argue that they don't have a mind, that asserting they have a mind is a religious statement, or that they have some trouble understanding what a mind is.

            > How can a pile of sand and rocks smushed together real close play back video? How can it produce a process that understands natural language?

            The laws of physics are enough to explain this because no one is arguing that computers are experiencing anything when they play a video or generate a set of numbers that are displayed as natural language.

            > At no point did I ever intend to argue any such thing. I suggest you put away the strawman and actually engage with what I'm saying.

            Sorry, I phrased that badly by using "you" when I did not mean that. I meant to say that if someone (not you) wanted to argue that simple matter has some sort of experience, then at least the position would make some sense. But materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any subjective experience of any kind.

            Anyway, I won't be able to convince you that you have a mind, so I'll peace out.

With consciousness and AI multiple problems are being smuggled into a single question.

1. How do we determine consciousness?

2. How should we handle moral consideration of a non-biological system?

The first question is a red herring. It cannot be answered. We need to focus on the second question.

Philosophers being philosophers and not advancing the discussion at all.

• thesmtsolver2

  today at 3:53 AM

  A lot of science and math and logic originated from philosophers posing questions and even coming up with answers (then those fields graduated out of philosophy)

  This is the standard blub programmer but in science. The blub physicists doesn't understand anything more complex or higher-level than his daily abstractions.

  https://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Utterly asinine article that doesn't understand its own subject matter.

• argee

  today at 3:32 AM

  Agreed.

  > Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness.

  This is what the article is positioned against.

  > We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense.

  Isn't this an equivalent declaration? I understand the desire to cling to such ideas (as the article itself propounds), but if you don't understand the underlying laws to a high enough degree I consider this equivalent to ancient Greeks sitting around saying "there is a double of our soul inside the mirror, WE HAVE SEEN IT". We know today there is absolutely nothing at all "inside" that mirror. How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something?

  Unfortunately, this article puts forth an intriguing promise and then completely fails to deliver.

  • smokedetector1

    today at 3:35 AM

    > How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something?

    I know what it means to have an experience that is illusory. For example, a mirage, or a drug-induced hallucination.

    What doesn’t make sense to me is how it’s possible for it to be an illusion that anything is being experienced at all. An illusion is a type of experience, isn’t it? If the experience is illusory, then who/what is being deceived?

    (This is basically just Descartes “I think therefore I am”)

    • argee

      today at 4:20 AM

      > What doesn’t make sense to me is how it’s possible for it to be an illusion that anything is being experienced at all.

      It might not make sense to you now, but that's because of what we know or what we think we know, today (hence my ancient Greeks analogue). Look at the Gazzaniga effect, people seamlessly make up an "experience" narrative out of absolutely nothing. Whatever experience was claimed there probably didn't exist prior to the point of questioning, and then was wholly manufactured. Thus, that particular experience was a fabrication.

      > If the experience is illusory, then who/what is being deceived?

      Why does there need to be a who/what being deceived for something to be an illusion? A mirror functions regardless of whether someone is there to pretend there is a soul in it.

      We come from a race that took two thousand years (after it was first proposed) to accept the brain as the seat of the mind, over the heart — just because the heart physically reacts in times of emotion, while the brain remains inert.

      Whatever the truth is, humanity probably won't know it until enough generations of the old guard indoctrinated in the old ideas have passed on.

      • smokedetector1

        today at 4:27 AM

        Sorry, who make up an experience narrative?

• Domenic_S

  today at 3:47 AM

  > I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.” It regards what we would understand if we were to understand something that we currently do not understand. Forgive the muddled question, but: How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?

  Rhetorical nonsense. If I'm a student about to take geometry for the first time, I can certainly have a sense of what I'll understand when I "understand something [I] do not currently understand".

  The explanatory gap, IIUC, is rather simple: we can't explain why neurons firing results in us feeling/experiencing the world. This doesn't seem controversial to me.

Where we are, it is still a matter of belief.

I do believe what the author claîms, but it’s not something that’s proven so far, so it can’t be imposed as fact.

The main consequence to the “soul” being physical is that free will is an illusion. And many people can’t stand this idea. People want to believe they are more than a deterministic physical process. They want to believe the future is not already written.

They’ll look for free will in what still stands : god or quantum uncertainty.

God can’t be disproved, and quantum uncertainty leaves room for a kind of mystery, that’s appealing.

But LLMs definitely do a convincing job at “faking consciousness”.

the single part of this article i enjoyed was the question "How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?" things were obviously the work of god for millenia. now they are obviously the work of natural processes. i wonder what the next obvious answer will be.

one may collapse the dualism dichotomy to two distinct possibilities. in both cases this existence is a subset of some larger existence (true because self implies other). the first case involves a hard boundary between existences (externally one may only only observe, therefore our existence collapses to pure solipsism). in the second case, the boundary between existences is permeable (one may interact with our existence externally, therefore our existence collapses to solipsism with the addition of brain in a jar). in both these cases soul can mean something different, but it can still be seen to exist, unless one insists on dogmatic adherence to the rules of any one system in particular.

[dead]

Comically wrong.

Quantum holography will someday demonstrate an analog information capacity of the quantum domain far exceeding the spin disposition.

Our minds use this domain by mass entanglement within our very own neurons.

You don’t want to hear it, though our minds may entangle and an entire culture exists among us who can traverse and manipulate the consciousness of others. They are responsible for the “voices in our heads”, and these are related to a great deal of very unscientific activity in our world.

All of that occult demonology you smarties scoff at yet plagues everyone embroiled in “power” is based upon this phenomena. We are not alone in our own minds, and more than a few of you will be forced to confront this at some point in your lives.

Falsifiable? Theories, not existential reality are concerned with what minds may falsify. Science lags behind reality, not the other way around.

• hn_throwaway_99

  today at 3:49 AM

  As much as I disliked TFA, I disliked this comment, which is so arrogantly self-assured of its own 0-evidence theories, even more.

• euroderf

  today at 3:56 AM

  I was with you thru "mass entanglement". Each of us is a distributed network of quantum-interface nodes. But I'd be very careful about attributing specific describable phenomena to these networks.