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Notes -
They are not.
The laws of physics were not handed to us by God, nor are they logically necessary a priori truths. We can imagine them being different with no threat of logical incoherence.
When you said in your other post:
it seems to me that you were suggesting that, whatever the ultimate nature of this reality is, it is therefore the only coherently conceivable reality. But this simply strikes me as a failure of imagination.
For any conceivable set of phenomena - a spaceship moving 3 gajillion km per second in a universe that is otherwise like ours, a Rick and Morty crayonverse, etc - it is easy to construct a set of "laws" that would generate such a reality. Instead of the universe being governed by simple law-like equations, you can imagine it as being governed by a massive arbitrary state table instead. At each time step, the universe simply transitions from one state to the next. The contents of each state are arbitrary and have no necessary relationship to each other; the only regularity is the continual transition from one state to the next. The "laws of physics" for this universe would then look like:
and so on. There is no contradiction here, so there is nothing incoherent. It's certainly unparsimonious, but "unparsimonious" is not the same thing as "incoherent".
Can you explain what you mean by this? Are you saying that all claims and arguments that people make about qualia are gibberish, or are you just reiterating your distaste for the concept of p-zombies here?
I'm concerned that this may be circular reasoning. Sure, if qualia just are defined as the casual chain of your brain states, then yes, obviously any purported p-zombie would have to have qualia too and the concept of p-zombies would be incoherent. But that's precisely the claim that's at issue! Qualia aren't just defined as the causal chain of your brain states - not in the way that a triangle is defined as having 3 sides. We can easily imagine that qualia have nothing to do with brain states. We can imagine that they're something different instead - we can imagine that they're properties of a non-spatiotemporal Cartesian soul, for instance. We can coherently imagine this, so we can coherently imagine p-zombies as well.
For what it's worth: I don't think that p-zombies are possible in reality (at least it's not something I'd bet on), but I am a believer in the Hard Problem. I don't think that qualia can be made to fit with our current understanding of physics. I don't think we're ever going to find that qualia falls out as a natural consequence of e.g. quantum electrodynamics; I think it would be a category error to think otherwise. I am sympathetic to (without full-throatedly endorsing) Bernardo Kastrup's view that consciousness is what is most fundamental, and "matter" is derivative and/or illusory. Alternatively, I'm also sympathetic to panpsychist views that posit consciousness as a new fundamental property alongside e.g. spin and charge. None of these views entail that p-zombies are actually possible.
Not exactly. I am saying that there is only one way a reality exactly like this can conceivably work, and «our reality but with laws X» models are incoherent in the final analysis, only saved by our failure to be scrupulous; this applies to casual hypotheticals and to scientific theories alike. It's basically a tautology.
From my perspective, it's more like failure of suspension of disbelief.
Ah yes, Dust Theory.
I believe that this kind of universe cannot exist nor even be rigorously imagined, because there is no legitimate content to these notions of «governance» and «transition». What is transited, exactly? How is this set distinguishable from an unstructured heap of unrelated elements, self-contained sub-realities or just bit strings? It's not, but for the extraneous fact that there in some sense can exist a list or a table arbitrarily distinguishing them and referring to them as elements of a sequence (naturally, all such lists would be of equal status). But this does not governance make. You can think it's coherent metaphysics, but I claim you're wrong. The continuum of states exists as the rule of transformations over some contents. It's sophistry to say «well the rule is that there's no rule, only sequence».
In any case, the merit of dust theory or Ruliad is some Neutronium-man to the actual debate we're having. I don't need to concede remotely this much. A world of crayons or Newtonian physics or P-zombies is of course never argued to be an arbitrary sequence of bit strings, the (malformed) idea is that it is a continuous reality like ours, supporting conscious minds, with lawful state transitions.
It's all circular reasoning, always has been. But, more seriously, I think the circularity is on the non-physicalist side. Consider:
We know physical differences between kinds of information accessibility, expressed in medical terms like anosognosia and others. It is a fact about the world that need be included in any serious further theorizing. (In principle, you do not get to restrict the set of facts considered and then claim your model is «coherent» because it dodges contradictions).
We, therefore, can point (for some special cases, point very well) at the brain correlate of the delta between sensation «just happening» with no accessibility to the person and sensation «being felt» and say «lo, this is a qualia», citing the first definition. Its implied conditions are satisfied and this has nothing to do with circular insistence on physicalism, only with recognition that physical reality exists; this thing exists in it and is available to the zombie, even if it is not available to «non-spatiotemporal Cartesian soul».
If we circularly define quale as something that is not purely physical, then of course this delta can't be a qualia, but I think this would just be special pleading, not some fancy equally valid theory.
I don't think you can but whatever. What do you do with existing zombie-quale, then, do you just say they don't matter or are fake news? I've covered that already. This is a coherent theory… in a sense.
These are all questions that you can ask just as well about our actual universe.
Tell me the exact ontological status of our laws of physics and how they "govern" our universe, and I'll tell you the exact ontological status of the state table and how it "governs" a different hypothetical universe.
Well, that was a mistake on his part, and I wouldn't offer that as a "definition".
I think part of the disconnect here is that you're underestimating what a high bar it is to show that something is logically incoherent.
I am typing this message on a computer right now - or at least it sure seems that way. I am seeing the computer, I am touching it. I am seeing that my messages are being posted on the website, which couldn't be happening if I didn't have a computer. All the evidence is telling me that there is a computer in front of me here right now. And yet it is still logically coherent for me to claim that computers don't actually exist. It's coherent because I can make up any bullshit I want to make my beliefs cohere with each other and explain away contrary evidence. Maybe the only two entities that actually exist are me and Descartes' evil demon, and the demon is making me hallucinate the whole rest of the universe, including computers. I'm not logically obligated to include any purported facts about the world in my "serious further theorizing", assuming that I can just explain those facts away instead. Because we're not doing "serious further theorizing"; we're arguing about the internal logical coherence of a concept.
P-zombies are not a "model". It's a concept. The internal logical consistency of the concept is independent of whether it's actually a real thing in our reality or not.
If you want to look at how people have tried to argue for the incoherence of p-zombies in the literature, there are some references here:
The crucial thing here is that these arguments start with considerations that are internal to the concept of pain itself and use that to argue that p-zombies are lead into internal incoherence.
I haven't actually read any of the papers referenced so I can't evaluate the arguments right now. I take the main thrust to be something like, "it is a priori part of the concept of qualia that they play a causal role in our behavior", which would entail that p-zombies are incoherent. I disagree with the premise. Although I do acknowledge that it's not blatantly circular in the way that e.g. defining qualia as something physical would be.
I am unfamiliar with this term, and I wasn't able to determine what it meant just from reading your posts. Can you elaborate on this concept?
I don't think this statement has any content sans vacuous (the fact that you can reason in a similar manner about both).
On the contrary, I think that definition counts and yours are circular.
And I think you overestimate human aptitude at logical reasoning over sufficiently large sets of interdependent statements while watching out for incoherence. Also at recognizing which statements are relevant.
That's probably fair.
Let me put it like this. I reject that P-zombie is only a «concept» and not a «model». I think the whole school of thought that allows to claim the opposite is illegitimate and I won't engage with it further.
The definition of p-zombie as a de facto physical human entails the entire baggage of physical theory and all its concepts. It's not some neat string like «human modulo quale» but that string plus our entire physicalist model of a human. The physicalist model contains elements corresponding to a non-circular definition of quale, thus a zombie can't not have quale; and the «concept» of p-zombie as a human modulo quale, situated in the proper context of dependencies of the word "human", is either incoherent or circular due to people insisting on non-physicality and saying these quale don't count and some others, which have an arbitrary relationship with our reality (might be epiphenomena, might be monads or whatever) must exist for non-zombie humans.
No, I think this is just circular insistence on physicalism and not my argument. Physicalism taken seriously covers all of causality.
I just did, it's the delta between brain states corresponding to identical perceived and non-perceived sensations, that satisfies the sensible definition of qualia.
I'm sorry if the terminology was unclear. It was just a restatement of the questions you were already asking; nothing more. You were asking about the ontology of physical laws.
Here's the simplest way of putting it. Why is this coherent:
but this is incoherent:
Both are functions that map inputs to outputs; there's no principled distinction you can draw between them.
It seems that the crux of your argument regarding p-zombies is the following:
but I don't understand what "the physicalist model contains elements corresponding to a non-circular definition of quale" means. Is there anything we can do to get this clearer? I can state what I think your argument is here, and you can tell me if I'm right or not.
Based on your continued use of the example of "delta brain states", I think that you're thinking of something like the following. There are abnormal medical cases where we can observe that someone is having an experience, but they aren't aware of it. We can put them side by side with a healthy person who is having the exact same experience and is aware of it. We can measure the difference in brain activity between them. Ok.
You then go on to make a few inferences: you infer that qualia just is this brain activity that we've measured, that it's identical to it. You infer furthermore that this inference is logically necessary, and any denial of it would be logically incoherent. But, I claim, these inferences aren't logically necessary; that's the whole matter at issue here.
They're not logically necessary inferences because we can coherently imagine qualia and brain states coming apart. We can do this because I can't directly observe your qualia in the way that I can directly observe your brain states, your behavior, etc. That's why there's a Hard Problem in the first place. I don't even know what it would mean to observe someone else's qualia, even with a direct link between our brains. Pain just is your own first-person experience of pain; whatever else it is, it has to at least be that. How could I ever share in someone else's first-person experience? Whatever I experience simply becomes my experience rather than someone else's.
So no matter what physical observations you make, it's always an open question whether there's any qualia there as well. You can show me a million years of regular law-like correlations between certain brain states and people's reports of certain experiences; and I can still insist "well, yeah you're showing me brain states, and you're showing me behavioral correlates, but where's the qualia? I'm a hard-nosed empiricist, you have to show me the qualia itself."
I'm not imagining brain states without brain states; I'm imagining brain states without qualia. There's a gap there that always allows me to coherently imagine that, because brain states are observable and qualia isn't.
The distinction is that I do not think «maps inputs to outputs» is the most relevant way to understand the former. There is nothing outside the true generative function of our universe (let's assume it really is the universal wavefunction) that it addresses, no heap of states. It is not an arbitrary "mapping", it is a self-contained entity (see Tegmark I guess); no part of state it describes is not generated by it, so the ordering of its states is unique and necessary. I think this, or something very close to this, is what makes a "universe", and so preconditions for "Universe X" to be coherent. Universe is absolute necessity.
In contrast, a table-governed «universe» is entirely made of slices that are not generated by any algorithm that is related to the table or that could impose order on them; thus they cannot have any particular order; thus, this is not a universe but a set of descriptions of states and an unrelated string that claims they have an assigned sequence, and it is incoherent to call this a universe.
We can do in-universe approximations of physical laws that have different properties and are «coherent» for utilitarian purposes, but it must be kept in mind that this is what they are. For a crayons universe, the equivalent is not the state table but the creative intent of Dan Harmon or what's his name. A crayons universe is coherent not as an actual self-contained universe but as a self-contained TV series episode.
I admit I might be very confused about this. Also, there can be even a coherent crayons-universe in this definition, at least it is imaginable that there can be.
I think you are just denying physicalism at this point.
No. Anosognosia was just a handy example of a differing information availability condition. Blindsight might be a better one. But specifically, I simply mean the delta between having sensation and perception. (I am not sure if discussing awareness or attention helps clarify this but they are discussed in this regard). A thing like "seeing red" is perception by canonical definition. We know how perception is implemented physically. Ergo we know one way for quale to work: it would be just for perceptions, implemented the way we know they are, to be informationally available to the mind.
Yes, it is.
It is logically necessary due to definitions of all elements involved, perception, quale, brain and so on. Perceptions are definitionally identical with quale, and this is how perceptions are implemented in the brain mechanically, the whole causal chain. Once more, you can insist until you are blue in the face that they are not available to a non-material Cartesian soul and therefore some other, fancier quale are needed. But you absolutely do not get to say that a physical human can have none.
It is not logically necessary that Cartesian souls outside normal causality stream do not exist. It is not logically necessary that they would have access to perceptions in the brain. It is not incoherent to demand that they be afforded something else. It's just scholastics. The brain has access to perceptions in the brain; the zombie totally has its zombie-quale.
Unless you can object to the identity of perception and qualia with something more than A) "it's not logically necessary that they be identical, although I don't have a definition for qualia that makes them non-identical and isn't just insistence that there are non-physical quale" or B) "physicalism actually sucks though" , I maintain that it is in fact necessary.
This is obviously circular. You insist that you can "coherently imagine" A since you can't observe B. But denying that you observe B does not automatically make it so you actually don't (again, there is such a thing as blindsight).
You can observe them with fMRI. This is just a difference in observing them from the outside versus from the inside. This isn't a problem unique for quale: for a thing to exist, there must be difference between contents included in that thing and everything else. This is how all things work. Your perceptions are events of self-attention in your nervous system, not in mine.
Reasons «there is a Hard Problem» include: narcissism, mental sloppiness, obsession with gut feelings, excessive funding, insight porn industry, aftershocks of psychedelic revolution, and popularity of Coachella with some well-connected types suffering from all the above. But they have nothing to do with logic. The idea of Hard Problem is dumb, embarrassing on par with an illiterate stoner's fascination about whether he has a "hand" or "five fingers plus a palm".
To be honest I'm bored of this debate. It feels dirty to even think back to times I cared for it.
Ok. Then the state table function I was describing is also a "generative function", it's also a "self-contained entity", etc. It doesn't really matter how you want to describe it, just pick your favorite story and run with it. "State table" was just a way of describing it that I had hoped would make the nature of the function clearer; it doesn't entail that there's literally a table on God's hard drive in an ethereal realm or something. A function is a function is a function, again there's no principled distinction you can draw between any of them at the level of logical coherence (unless it e.g. wasn't total over its domain or something pathological like that, but that's not what we're dealing with here).
This is the crux of the disagreement.
You observe the brain activity in the p-zombie brain and you say "look, the qualia are right there, you can't say that you both see the qualia here and you don't see the qualia here, that's incoherent, they're obviously here because here they are, I'm showing them to you." But this is what I deny. You are not observing qualia when you observe the fMRI readings (in the sense that, when you look at an apple, you don't "observe" quarks, in the sense that this observation of the apple by itself is not evidence for the existence of quarks. You can't look at an apple and go "yep, there's the quarks, I'm just reading it right off this observation". You might learn on independent grounds that apples are made of quarks, and thus you come to realize post facto that when you look at an apple you are also looking at quarks, but this is not the type of "observation" that is at issue here. It's conceivable that you might learn on independent grounds that when you look at brain activity you are also looking at qualia (I'd have further objections to this but let's just grant it), but you can't look at fMRI activity and go "yep, there's the qualia, I'm looking right at it" in any direct way.)
First we have to make sure we both have the same thing in mind when we're talking about qualia. A quale just is your first-person experience of a sensation. It's the actual pain you feel when you feel, well, pain. It could be other things too, in addition to this; it's possible that we can say more about its nature or properties. But fundamentally, it's just what you actually feel. That is its identity.
The fact that qualia besides your own can't be directly observed seems so obvious to me that it's hard to give an argument for why you should think so as well. But I can try.
I'm not 100% sure about this first one, but I think it's getting at something important, so I'll throw it out there: if there was a sense in which you could directly observe qualia, then it would no longer be an open question whether you were the only conscious mind in existence or not. You would have direct knowledge, on the same level of certainty that you have of your own perceptual experience, that other consciousnesses exist. But you don't have this type of direct knowledge, and it is an open question whether you are the only consciousness in existence or not. You could be hallucinating the whole universe, for example, and no one is having any actual conscious experience except you. Saying that you can directly observe qualia strikes me as akin to saying that you can directly observe that e.g. the apple in front of you actually exists in reality and isn't just a hallucination or a simulation. But as we know from philosophy 101, you can't simply observe this. You can observe the fMRI readings, but you cannot "observe" that they are not hallucinatory; similarly, you cannot observe whether they are attended by qualia or not. It's just something that you don't have access to.
Alternatively, just consider how people are already starting to have debates over whether GPT-4 is conscious or not. Can it actually feel pain? Can it actually feel anything? Most people still don't think so, but already a few are starting to say that it might. And as systems start to get more complex, as you start to put LLMs in humanoid robots and they consistently say "ouch" when you poke them, then people will be even more divided over whether those robots are actually feeling pain or not. What sort of empirical observation could settle this debate? It doesn't seem like there could be any. You can't just "see" whether the robot is feeling pain or not, in the way that you can "see" its performance on a benchmark test.
Obviously this is a doomed enterprise. I agree with you that, by this standard of skepticism, it is impossible to establish that someone has a mind at all. In practice I really do not believe that your mind is much similar to my own, so there isn't really a reason to believe that you can conceive of qualia in a way that I'd endorse, not matter what you type, and vice versa.
You are going in circles. This is worse than circular, this is contentless. "A qualia just is a first-person experience". Okay? "It's the actual pain you feel". Sure, and? The question is whether "a brain" "feels" "pain", in some way that can be operationalized.
If I were you, I'd try mindwipe myself at this point, because it's clear that the procedure you're using for reasoning has run into its inherent ceiling.
Is there any independent information content to a qualia of red, something that actually distinguishes it from other quale, and something that is not insistence on it being an ineffable experience that is "first-person"? (Information: "what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things.") Well, whatever that content is, it is isomorphic to the working bits of the corresponding brain state. The brain state contains that information, we know very well that it does. Maybe you can't be sure that you observe its traces "directly" on fMRI, but in theory it exists necessarily, so long as physical universe works by physical rules.
So the question is: can information (of a brain state, or perhaps any information encoded on any physical substrate) "feel like anything" for the identity to be valid. I do not see a well-formed argument for why it cannot, sans some talk about conceivability.
But that is just a mindless token stream. I straight up do not recognize that you have the capacity to evaluate whether this is conceivable or coherent.
And that's that I guess.
Irrelevant. The p-zombie thought experiment assumes physicalism, which means it assumes the conventional model where brains contain information.
There really is strictly nothing to your position than the exasperated feeling that there must be some honorable, justifiable escape from physicalism, that it must have a flaw, that it must not explain the whole picture, that there must be a "conceivable" way for brain states to somehow "not feel like anything to themselves" as they exchange information on their own plane of existence. But I maintain that A) this idea is not coherent and B) you are vendor-locked from stress-testing it because tokens like "I", "you" and "feel" are privileged in your design and you won't be able to look at the problem without them no matter how much I ask you to.
I've learned not to argue with LLMs and I stop arguing with you.
Well, maybe. But obviously our minds are similar enough that we're able to have a productive conversation. We took our initial disagreement, about the conceivability of p-zombies, and reduced it to a more fundamental claim: whether observation of fMRI activity counts as direct observation of qualia or not. That's genuine progress! That shows that we're communicating with each other and we aren't just talking past each other.
There is nothing circular about pain (or seeing red or hearing sound or etc). It's just pain; that's it. Of course you know what pain is. Nothing could be more familiar or self-evident to you.
Plainly, it does not! Assuming that this is what you mean by physicalism.
The fact that first-person experience exists is privileged, yes. It is more privileged than anything else. Certainly more privileged than any proposition about the "external world", more privileged than any purported law of physics. I can doubt that quarks exist. I can't doubt that pain exists.
I am of course well aware of the arguments that claim to demonstrate that there is no "self", no "I". I do not think I am committed to the denial of such arguments, nor do I think that that question is particularly material to the current discussion. I stake my claim at "qualia exists" rather than "I exist".
Well, I think you're getting at something here that leads back into my question about the consciousness of GPT-4 (which you did not address). Is a rock conscious? Does a rock encode "information" too, of the type that's needed for qualia? We can speculate on that - we can come up with a theory like IIT that allows us to infer that some systems are conscious and some aren't. But the important question is, how can we settle that question via empirical observation? It doesn't seem like we can - no matter how reasonable we think our inference is, the question will always remain fundamentally open. And that is because qualia other than your own can never be directly observed.
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