I think the real problem is pretending that the phrase “what it feels like to be something” is going to act like a key in my dict of feelings.
A: You know, the feeling of what it is like to be something.
B: sits quietly, looks at ceiling Right, yeah, that feeling.
From a different angle, if OP wants to define “consciousness” as some feeling it sounds like he’s basically done. He’s labeled one of his feelings with the word “consciousness”. I’m not sure what point of contention remains.
> Consciousness is the subjective experience of "being like something"
I absolutely detest that definition of consciousness. It just moves the fuzziness from the word "consciousness" to the phrase "being like something". It means absolutely nothing. Figuring out what the subjective experience of a model is like is about as unquantifiable as it gets.
This is a common attempt to rationalize away the hard problem of consciousness that I find to be an almost textbook example of "begging the question". What is a feeling? Well, it's a type of experience. Does a glass of water have experiences? Probably not, because experiences are phenomena that are relative to conscious entities. Saying that X has experiences or that X is conscious are, in my view, equivalent claims.
Saying that "consciousness is just a feeling" is equivalent to saying that "consciousness is just consciousness". It may sound like and explanation, but it is just a tautology.
> Saying that "consciousness is just a feeling" is equivalent to saying that "consciousness is just consciousness". It may sound like and explanation, but it is just a tautology.
I think you hit the nail in the head with that. Consciousness might very well just be a tautology, so the only definitions we are going to be able to produce are going to be circular or recursive.
However, this is a problem with written language in general. The definition of any word is only provided in the form of other words, which themselves are defined by words as well, so without an interpreter/reader that makes a connection from language to something else, language by itself can’t really have any meaning.
I feel like the greater problem is that we use the word 'consciousness' at all; the very term is undefined and acting like its a term we can build a science on is just as flimsy as saying its a feeling
That depends on the definition of consciousness I guess. Of course you could define it in a physical way but that would be something different than what many people mean by consciousness - i.e. that it's my feelings, perceptions, thoughts, etc.
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.
How do you know that what you say about consciousness isn’t just a language game you play where you define words in terms of other words that are hardly connected to anything?
“What it is like to be a bat”
“What it is like to experience something”
After having seen descriptions of all the physical components of experience:
“It is Qualia! What it is like to see red”
Having been described all the differences between sensing red and green, and people who can’t tell the difference, and the suggestion that maybe what you call consciousness is the collection of abilities to distinguish various things...
“No, it is something more”.
What is it? How is that different than saying there is a “true essence” of a thing, over and above its properties? This is what greek philosophers asked about.
“It is the sense of identity. Integrating into one experience.”
Ok so what about Theseus’ ship? If all the cells are being replaced? What about your gut brain? Coukd it have a separate consciousness living in the same body?
“These are interesting questions”.
Here is a statement I will make:
If you are careful to define your words unambgiously, in terms of RICH connections to other concepts, you will find that you won’t be able to ask a single question about the following subjects without having a straightforward and simple reductionist-sounding answer:
>Consciousness is marked by the presence of subjective experience: In the philosopher’s term of art, there is “something it is like” for us to be aware of the world (1).
This is exactly what I find the most baffling and amusing about almost every academic writing on consciousness today: this definition of consciousness which uses the weird phrasing "there is something it is like". It is so unusual, yet ubiquitous, yet almost nobody who uses it ever examines this phrase closely or expands on what precisely they mean by it. Maybe it's just a cargo-cultish stand-in for "you know what the fuck I mean".
Ah, I did find a paper about this which seems like a good entry point: 'What it is Like' Talk is not Technical Talk by Jonathan Farrell.
This particular group of some specific biologists and philosophers can declare whatever they want.
But when you see how they attempt to define consciousness, it falls apart, because we don't have any objective definition of it.
The article states:
> The declaration focuses on the most basic kind of consciousness, known as phenomenal consciousness... If a creature is phenomenally conscious, it has the capacity to experience feelings such as pain or pleasure or hunger, but not necessarily more complex mental states such as self-awareness.
Unfortunately, we have no method whatsoever (yet) of distinguishing between creatures who genuinely feel pain/pleasure, and creatures who act in ways to avoid bad outcomes and seek good outcomes while feeling nothing, of which we merely project our own feelings onto them.
We don't even have a scientific definition of the verb "feel" at all. We have utterly no idea what distinguishes neurons that contribute to conscious feeling, from neurons that are subconscious and produce no feeling at all.
By "consciousness" and "feelings" he doesn't mean "self-awareness" and "emotions", he means "sentience": the fact that you/we have any kind of internal experience. We have to look past the definitional debate to the real "hard problem of consciousness", which is: why is there any experience at all? Why aren't we all just philosophical-zombies?
> You can't say something exists if you don't have a definition for it
There are many definitions for it, but for a definition to work the definition has to make sense for the person receiving it. Hence why the descriptions vary and can appear vogue. The first step is an attempt at showing to the other person what the discussion is about. So here is my another attempt: the sensation that appears in your "minds eye" when you see or imagine a red color. The awareness of this color is what consciousness is about. Perhaps it's so intimate that people don't think often about it and so it's hard to point to it, hence the difficulty with definitions.
> Just because you feel in your guts you have consciousness doesn't mean you have it
I can be an extreme sceptic and doubt anything. I can see a cat, close my eyes, open them again and see the same cat standing there. Was the cat there when I closed my eyes? I can certainly doubt that. Maybe it was quickly abducted and returned a moment later in the same place. Maybe some objects disappear when they are not looked at? Maybe there is no cat in the first place but this is a mirage or a hallucination of mine. Maybe I am now dreaming. All this I can doubt. What I cannot doubt is the fact that I am seeing a cat now. And the fact that I have a memory of seeing a cat before closing my eyes. So to the contrary - whatever you think you know can be doubted. The fact that you are having a conscious experience of something cannot be doubted.
> It's not badly defined. Consciousness is our subjective experience of color, sound, taste, smell, touch, feelings in perception, imagination, hallucination, illusion, dreams and inner dialog. It's something we're all familiar with.
I don’t know this doesn’t seem like a great definition to me. It lists a dozen distinct properties, most very complicated in their own right, and then kind of collapses into “we all know what it is anyway”
As always, so much is written about consciousness without attempting to define it, or state clearly what its function might be. There's usually a pattern. After a lot of preamble, the non-definition of "what it feels like" is offered. This itself is an indication that our understanding of consciousness is so poor that we cannot articulate the question itself.
Why are some experiences conscious and some experiences not? Why is spotting a ball conscious, but the precise arm movements that take it there unconscious? (Can you tell what your elbow or your back muscles did as your arm maneuvered towards the ball?)
We finally understand consciousness.
Not just at a metaphorical level (Daniel Dennett has done a wonderful job of that), but at a mechanistic how-is-it-put together. Rather that focus on who has solved it, I'll talk about that it is (That info is at the end)
What is the function of consciousness? Among others, It is the "hierarchical, simultaneous, and rapid resolution of uncertainty." Our world, of large macro-scale beings, is fundamentally ambiguous.
The dominant "bayesian" and "information" metaphors for understanding brain functions do not take time and fundamental ambiguity inherent to the world into account. Meaning is not given to us on a plate. It must be manufactured by the brain. Information is constructed from sensory data. How? And what does it mean?
Here is an example: Listen to this audio. What do you hear?
Firstly, note that whatever you hear is a conscious percept. It is your brain orchestrating its daily unceasing miracle of resolving uncertainty and helping you consciously perceive.
Are you hearing "The scent of the two-cent stamp sent me back"? If not, you will now (and why is that?)
There are three homonyms (SCENT, CENT, and SENT -- which all sound the same) in this audio sequence that unfolds over time that are seemingly instantly resolved into three entirely different meanings. How?
That is one example of fundamental ambiguity. Computation is everything that the brain does to the sensory data it takes in. The auditory sequence in this case. Consciousness is what you consciously perceive. The three different meanings, somehow resolved all at once. And if you think about it, there's some time-travel involved here. SCENT and CENT can only be resolved in meaning towards the end of the sentence. Consciousness is what allows us to do this resolution into something stable and take action, and be entirely oblivious to all the many possibilities that this could have been. And we do this thousands of times everyday as go about perceiving and acting on what is filtered through this conscious perception.
This example also helps us focus on one crucial aspect of consciousness that every major theory or discussion out there ignores. There is a timeline to consciousness. What "it feels like" undulates over time.
Any theory but of consciousness must be able to explain the phenomenological timeline. But since our understanding is so poor, every major theory ignores this entirely. See https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00587-4 for a great review of all the major theories. The authors lament how all the major theories are imprecise, and that they should offer "computational models to bring mechanistic specificity" and be able to account for "temporality" among other things.
And that brings me to the final part.
We already have a wonderfully precise, mechanistic, and stunningly coherent "computational" framework for consciousness. Stephen Grossberg, often hailed as a pioneer in computational neuroscience and brain modeling, has explained consciousness by attempting to model every other facet of perception, which most take for granted as the "easy stuff". His work is of great importance for AI too which, for all the wonderful seemingly-magical stuff deeplearning has generated, is largely a one-trick pony riding error-backpropagation way too hard. His 65-year body of work, however, is largely unknown. The sentiment is captured by this tweet from an academic:
That is unfortunate. Grossberg’s work is important, and most importantly, offers the only coherent mechanistically precise, computational framework that also happens to explain consciousness.
I guess those are the same thing to me. If something exists in everything, what is the point in labeling it? It can't be used to discern anything from anything else. Taken to less of an extreme you might find that consciousness is a synonym for aliveness, and you may as well just call it aliveness.
Yes, it's fuzzy just because there doesn't seem to be a general widespread agreement on terminology, even among "experts", so that someone uses the word consciousness meaning something completely different than someone else. It seems that each time one wants to embark in a consciousness discussion, there should be a glossary preamble to specify definitions.
Regardless of the breadth of the spectrum of definitions, at the very bottom you find phenomenal consciousness. The given, undeniable fact that "it feels like something". We don't have a plausible avenue, not even in principle, to even start addressing this fact of existence, to the point that the most rational stance is to assume that it is fundamental in nature.
Philosophers have defined consciousness, why do people keep repeating that line? Your subjective sensations that make up perception, dreams, inner dialog, that sort of thing. Call it qualia, representations or correlations, but we all experience colors, sounds, tastes, pains, pleasures. We all probably dream, most of us visualize or have inner dialog. It's not that hard to define, it's only because of the ambiguity of the word where it's conflating whether other mental activity like being awake or being aware.
"How can it happen that a physical creature comes to have this mysterious, magical stuff called consciousness? You reduce it down to something much more biological, like basic feelings, and then you start building up the complexities. A first step in that direction is “I feel.” Then comes the question, What is the cause of this feeling? What is this feeling about? And then you have the beginnings of cognition. “I feel like this about that.” So feeling gets extended onto perception and other cognitive representations of the organism in the world."
Seems to me like:
consciousness = a feeling or narrative of 'feelings', which arises out of a function that takes in all perception.
A: You know, the feeling of what it is like to be something.
B: sits quietly, looks at ceiling Right, yeah, that feeling.
From a different angle, if OP wants to define “consciousness” as some feeling it sounds like he’s basically done. He’s labeled one of his feelings with the word “consciousness”. I’m not sure what point of contention remains.
reply