I don't understand how someone can not understand the problem.
You and I have conscious experience, we have a meaningful sensation of qualia. A billet of 4140 steel does not, or so we assume. Both are governed by physical laws of the universe, so there must be some distinction beyond these physical laws that differentiate them.
In this framing, there are typically four camps, three of them line up with your camps:
1) I am not like a block of steel, but I don't know why.
2) I am not like a block of steel, but I know why ("religion")
3) I am like a block of steel, neither are conscious (no incongruity/consciousness is an illusion)
4) I am like a block of steel, both are conscious ("it from bit"/Chalmers's universal conciousness)
Of course this implies the existence of a 5th and 6th camp that believes the block of steel is conscious, but we are not. I find these camps throw the best parties.
That's the problem and exactly why I say I don't think it can't be explained via a vague feeling. I've never seen someone who says there is a hard problem of consciousness adequately explain to someone why there isn't. The poster is now making what seem more like appeals to emotion throughout the thread now: "are you saying that sufficiently complicated blocks of matter are conscious?" and the like. This is what always happens.
While I personally believe there is a problem, I cannot explain why, and for a long time I didn't think there was a problem
Can we deduce from your comment that you are in fact, not conscious?
We all know what it's like to be conscious (I presume - my theory of mind is intact but may be flawed). It's obviously the quality of being, i.e. experiencing qualia.
And since we as human beings are conscious, it stands to reason that there are probably other living beings (or matter in general) who are not. (Living) matter that doesn't experience the world, basically. No frame of reference. Unless you believe in panpsychism; then everything is conscious and we can ask ourselves what it's like to be a rock.
It's just that the hard problem of consciousness states that we haven't been able to define this "state" in its exact physical, neural correlates, but just because we haven't been able to do that yet, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It quite literally is the only thing we can know for sure exists, because otherwise no one would be there to ask or hear the question to begin with.
And sure, you can try to break it down into behavior and other properties of a living being, but that is simply side-stepping the hard problem and just ignoring the question of qualia.
Then again, there's something like "aphantasia": some people do not have the capacity to mentally visualize anything, and often aren't even aware of that themselves. I can imagine there's something analogous with the quality of consciousness, i.e. literal "NPCs" who do not experience the world from a frame of reference, but are basically non-sentient, human, autonomous agents. That's just a very dangerous line of thought, so don't take that too seriously :)
I'm afraid we are talking past each other. I do not know that quarks (or physical reality itself) exist; I merely infer it. Consciousness, on the other hand, is that very property by which I experience inference (among myriad other things). I do not have to (indeed, cannot) infer it.
Does it seem to you that anything at all is happening (e.g., that there seems to be a world around you, or that you seem to be having a thought)? Perhaps you're mistaken and it doesn't "really" seem, but only seems to seem. Nonetheless, it is that very seeming that I'm calling consciousness.
If I may ask: do you have significant experience with meditation? I suspect this conversation becomes easier when both parties have spent considerable time in the space between thoughts.
Well, I'm not totally convinced it's not like anything to be a rock. But this is the generally widely-used object of "an object without qualia".
You are apparently a believer in some degree of panpyschism. That's fine. Conscious is like gravity - it's just a part of the universe and there's no explanation for it other than that it is experienced by anything with (mass, for gravity ; ??? for consciousness).
I'm not opposed to this explanation, I'm just not (yet) convinced that it's the right one.
So far the only answer I've seen people give to the question is "what problem? There's no problem". Basically, there are many people who don't (or also have convinced themselves that they don't) perceive an incongruity between their personal subjective experience and the idea that consciousness is just an emergent phenomena of a physical system. I haven't found a good way to explain it, I just know that there's something wrong or missing.
So basically it seems there's three camps:
Those that feel the incongruity and don't know a solution.
Those that feel the incongruity and have found their own solution (which is usually what people will call "religion").
Those that do not feel the incongruity.
I don't personally see a way to justify it if someone doesn't feel the problem in their bones.
You seem to be using "the hard problem of consciousness" to mean something different than I've always taken it to mean.
I fully believe I am just a machine; the question is why there are qualia happening. Wipe my memory, change my identity, alter my consciousness – regardless, why, when I'm awake, does my mind seem to be the seat where a subjective experience is occurring?
It's a hard problem because the only appeal I can make for its existence is that it's happening for me. I can't prove it to you; it's conceivable there are p-zombies, who also vigorously assert they have qualia. This makes it seem dubious, a religious matter taken on faith, and yet paradoxically for me it is perhaps the only thing I can be truly certain of.
Perhaps qualia (subjective experience) is merely a feature of our universe: wherever structure arises, the universe experiences itself (in some commensurate way).
A large part of the problem is that people don't all agree on the definition of consciousness. It ranges anywhere from the property of having an internal experience (which I subscribe to) all the way to self awareness, and even to the ability for rational thought.
This - and arguments over the definition of "is" - were the reason I stopped reading philosophy of mind papers.
(3) My first problem is that most definitions for qualia I come across are back doors for dualism. The second problem is that I'm not sure there's any point to discussing purely subjective phenomena, since a discussion by its nature requires objective description.
(4) I don't have an inner theater, or if I do, I don't call it that. I have no idea what you are talking about. I don't know how this relates to a supposed indivisibility of consciousness (I mean... how are we supposed to know it's indivisible, since we lack the technology to cut a brain up and split it between bodies, not to mention the ethical issues? Am I supposed to trust you that it's indivisible? And what about the evidence from split-brain patients?)
If anything, I perceive a very disjointed self. For example, I feel like I have a distinctly single-threaded audio processor which can run independently of other functions. I can play the piano and talk, but not at the same time, and when I'm doing other things quietly I get free background music in my head without using an iPod. (I wouldn't call it inner theater.)
One reason we can't understand brains the way we understand cars is because the human brain is more complex by many orders of magnitude. So saying our "consciousness itself does not seem to be divisible in that way" is not very convincing. Microprocessors also don't seem to be divisible that way, but I've been assured that they are. And another important difference is the processes that designed cars, microprocessors, and brains. Part of the design criteria for cars and microprocessors is that they be easy to understand from understanding their parts. The car is designed to be understood.
A better comparison might be circuits designed using powerful optimization algorithms. A number of researchers have designed circuits using general purpose algorithms (such as genetic algorithms or swarm algorithms). For all but the most basic end goals, the circuits are practically incomprehensible. One researcher designed an analogue circuit to compute the cube of an input voltage, the resulting circuit defies understanding even though its components are clearly simple transistors. Another researcher made a signal analysis circuit using an FPGA, the resulting mess was a technological marvel but not something you could understand by sitting down and looking at the schematic. Given that the human brain is probably at least ten orders of magnitude more complicated, and created using an equally powerful optimization algorithm, there's no need to bring in quantum mechanics to explain why we don't understand the brain.
I think the major problem here is that too many people I meet have a narrow view of what it means to "understand" something. We're used to understanding (a) simple things, like thrown rocks and (b) complicated things for which there exists significant neural machinery to analyze, such as used car salesmen. As the things we try to understand become more and more complicated, the way we understand them becomes more and more like the Chinese room.
(5) Never said there was one electron. I said that the two electrons were interchangeable. I'm saying if you actually could clone someone to the extent necessary for Star Trek teleportation but forgot to dematerialize the original, then the label of "clone" and "original" is arbitrary. To me, it seems a cop out to assume that everyone agrees that one is the clone and one is the original.
Could you clarify what you mean by "confirmed by experiment" and "key part of the universe's workings"? The problem here is that the subject of the sentence is "it", so I'd like to know exactly what is confirmed by which experiment, please.
I'd also like to hear how consciousness just "falls out" of quantum mechanics, since my current understanding of Newtonian mechanics is sufficient to me. My theory is that I am a machine whose output is composed of deterministic parts and thermal noise, and I have yet to encounter experiences not explained by this theory.
As for string theory, its acceptance is hardly universal.
I am not talking about consciousness though, I couldn't care less about it! I am talking about the subjective feeling of existence, which is what you and I feel in every one of those disjoint moments. And the only reason I know that you feel it, is because I feel it and you're like me. If you sere made of silicon, I wouldn't know, and should not assume that you could
The problem in your stating (and many others) is that the notion of consciousness has self-awareness is baked into it. It's odd to think that the ability to experience qualia magically occurs for sufficiently complex systems, but it's not odd to think that self-awareness just arises once a system that can experience qualia reaches a sufficient complexity level. Unfortunately, people latch on to the reasonableness of the latter, and ignore the ridiculousness of the former.
Discussing consciousness can be really difficult because the word is used in different ways in everyday language.
Consciousness defined as the intrinsically subjective quality of experience (Qualia [0]) is what is considered impossibly difficult to explain (maybe even necessarily outside of the scopy of natural science) by some. It's also what makes some people consider the crazy out-there ideas seriously...
Anyway, my point is, explaining self-symbols that an agent uses to model its own role in the world is a completely different problem. Some people use the term "hard problem of consciousness" [1] to distinguish the former from the latter.
You've made a huge leap from there-is-no-hard-problem-of-consciousness to there-is-no-consciousness. Consciousness is the experience of being something. I know it exists, because I'm experiencing it right now. The experience is consciousness, despite being illusory in many ways. Even a completely illusory experience is a conscious experience. In no way does it preclude my just being stuff, or other forms of stuff experiencing things too (and thus also being conscious). The mystery is how I can feel anything at all despite being just stuff.
I don't get it. Who are you attributing this view to? I already said that I believe everything about consciousness/qualia/subjectivity are physical and measurable. There is nothing special about the human mind preventing us from replicating it in a machine.
Note: you brought up the term qualia, not me. I have never actually liked that term. I prefer the terms "consciousness" and "conscious experience".
My argument is that you can't argue meaningfully about it until you can define it meaningfully.
Agree. The problem is that I think consciousness is inherently subjective. We experience qualia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia) and you just can't objectively describe those. For example, could you describe the colour blue to a blind person? Every time you look at a blue object, you know it is blue, you experience that it is blue, but you can't describe it, and you can't compare it with for example my experience of blue objects. I have no idea if blue objects "look" the same in your mind as it does in mine. We can both agree that a certain object is blue, we both associate the effect blue light has on our eyes to blue objects, but that's it.
So imagine now that we make an AI with sensory inputs, perhaps we make a robot, perhaps we simulate a human brain, and we teach it that blue objects are blue. If we then show it objects, it should be able to correctly tell us if they are blue or not. But does that AI experience blue? We don't know. We can't ever know.
Imagine then that we "upload" your mind into a machine and put it in a humanoid robot. That thing would then walk like you, talk like you, remember like you, laugh like you, joke like you, cry like you, etc.
But would it be you? Would it be alive? Would it have consciousness? In my opinion - no. It's moving, but it's dead, so it's a zombie, a philosophical zombie:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
You and I have conscious experience, we have a meaningful sensation of qualia. A billet of 4140 steel does not, or so we assume. Both are governed by physical laws of the universe, so there must be some distinction beyond these physical laws that differentiate them.
In this framing, there are typically four camps, three of them line up with your camps:
1) I am not like a block of steel, but I don't know why.
2) I am not like a block of steel, but I know why ("religion")
3) I am like a block of steel, neither are conscious (no incongruity/consciousness is an illusion)
4) I am like a block of steel, both are conscious ("it from bit"/Chalmers's universal conciousness)
Of course this implies the existence of a 5th and 6th camp that believes the block of steel is conscious, but we are not. I find these camps throw the best parties.
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