This is a linkpost for https://philpapers.org/rec/SCHFUT
If you assume pure subjectivity (it's unmeasurable and incomparable), there's not much to study or say about it. That'd explain by a selection effect why most researchers choose to focus/redefine to problems they can make progress on. Camp #1 has something to publish.
Camp #2 may well be correct, but it's a very uncomfortable position for moderns. If you can't measure or define consciousness, what are you basing all this talk of human rights and respect-for-others on? If you say this in the wrong crowd, you'll be booed or assumed to be a eugenicist or something.
Indeed, camp#1 is much more fun if you want to do experiments, publish your findings, acquire funding (i e. be a scientist). Nobody wants to hear those nitpickers from camp#2 trying to spoil the party by pointing out that those experiments do not measure what they are supposed to measure. Btw I'm all for human rights and respect for others but I don't think that has much to do with consciousness.
I am Camp 2 and I fully believe we can measure a lot and do predictive science on all this.
I don’t think Camp 2 has consensus on this conjecture (and we have anecdotal reports on all kinds of suggestive weird phenomena in this sense; and the upcoming technological changes which are likely to provide us with opportunities to test all of this experimentally).
A good post!
However, I do suspect that the conjecture is wrong.
There are three lines of reasoning hinting at that, all associated with various “non-standard states of consciousness”:
various synchronization effects people report
various novel (for them) qualia people report
upcoming “merge” experiments
A bit more details are at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DCW7FjmP66Ahz3RLu/what-if-we-actually-want-to-solve-the-hard-problem-of and in the essay it references.
Interesting. I would say that synchronizing or merging could perhaps lead to an expanded consciousness, but not to an observation of an external consciousness.
I would expect creation of some kind of hybrid consciousness, which is different from both.
Of course, a true merge and a synchronization still differ (do we have one subjectivity here (at least temporarily) or do we have two different subjective realities deforming towards being more similar to each other).
If we have a situation when a merge is reversible (which would normally be a desirable property in this kind of experiments), then the main question (besides safety of all this) is how much "first-person recall" remains after reversal (it's a well known problem of various altered states of consciousness: how much recall does one have afterwards, and how long does this recall last).
So we have a couple of problems here.
Instead of observing external consciousness as is, we expect to observe some kind of hybrid (it's not clear how close it can be made to the original "non-mixed other" eventually, although one can try to gradually shift it towards "the other" having a higher weight in the resulting mix)
During this observation one is not quite "oneself", one becomes the observed, and if one breaks this state, one reverts to (somewhat modified) "oneself of the past", and then the question is how much remains of the recall of the experience (radical altered states of consciousness serve as our guide here, the situation is not so different)
So it's not that the "subjectivity of the other" is fully inaccessible, but it is accessible with limitations:
it's distorted (perhaps eventually one can progress towards making those distortions smaller)
one becomes the observed (perhaps eventually we can learn how to maintain "both screens" simultaneously, but right now we should expect just fully getting into that "altered state of consciousness")
the question is how much recall does one keep if one does not stay there, but goes back (again the dynamics observed after experiencing "radically altered states of consciousness" is our guide here)
Even if it were possible to observe someone else's conscious experience directly, it seems like you'd need a very specific set of conditions to hold. Specifically:
To use a silly analogy, there is nothing that theoretically prevents physically placing a car inside a larger car. But cars, by and large, and not designed to do that. And one car would need to be much larger than the other. (I said this was a silly analogy.)
So consciousness might be "strongly subjective" in practice for all the kinds of minds that currently exist, without necessarily being so in theory.
In Thou art rainbow: Consciousness as a Self-Referential Physical Process, I argue that the experience is special but mostly because such phenomena are actually rare. I'd also argue - along the lines of Parameters of Metacognition - The Anesthesia Patient - that it is not as clearcut an unobservable as it often seems.
Consciousness is a self-referential physical process whose special character comes from recursion
The point of the conjecture of strong subjectivity is precisely that consciousness is probably not something like that. For if the conjecture is true then consciousness would be fundamentally subjective and therefore have no other knowable properties. Not because they are hidden, but because it just doesn't have them.
You seem to say. 1) One can obtain information about an experience, 2) construct an arbitrarily accurate model of it, 3) reproduce a structurally equivalent experience, but you will still fail to undergo the same experiential event. Of course I agree with that. You can experience the same experience by construction only from the same structure. It is private in that sense.
Indeed, we can not experience someone else's experience because we would have to be them to do that. But my point is that, since that seems the only way to have access to consciousness, there appears to be no way to objectively know anything about it. One could argue that there may be other ways to know about consciousness besides directly experiencing it. But then the only thing we might go by are descriptions (or at least behavioral responses). Even from the most eloquent descriptions, as far as I know, nobody has ever been able to really learn anything about what it is to have a conscious experience. Hence the conjecture, that suggests: if this has not been possible despite all of our efforts, we should assume that consciousness is indeed fundamentally subjective and accept its implications. Not to stifle the debate of course, but to see where we can get from there.
In his memoir "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!" Feynman tells the tale of trying to watch himself fall asleep.
Eventually he gives up, deciding that he isn't actually watching himself fall asleep. He is living out a different conscious experience, of attempting to retain a vestigial conscious experience as he drifts off to sleep, with the intention of reporting what "it" feels like. But what is "it"? After reflection he concludes that "it" is this different experience, which he lives out. But he never gets to observe himself fall asleep naturally. We cannot "observe" our own conscious experience. We can only live it. Living it leaves memory traces; we can talk about our conscious experience afterwards. We can adjust the balance of attention between inside and outside experience, paying more attention to internal experience. This may give use more to talk about. But we then talk about a different experience, with a different balance of inside and outside experience.
I felt threatened by this. At the time that I read "Surely You're Joking" I was getting into Buddhist meditation and watching my thoughts come and go. I believed that I was watching my thoughts. Feynman told me I was wrong. I was meditating and experiencing a different ebb and flow of thoughts than if I wasn't meditating. I wanted to know what my mind was up to. That is to say I wanted to know what my mind was up to when I wasn't meditating. I fooled myself into thinking that meditating was like running a C program under GDB and I was observing the undisturbed operation of (my mind|the C program). In fact, all that I had done was to complicate my internal experience, giving myself more to talk about afterwards.
Chewing on this some more, I decided that, while Feynman was basically correct, he had missed a trick.
Suppose that Alfred's motive for watching his mind as he falls asleep is that he is having trouble falling asleep. Alfred notices recurring thoughts about unfinished job X that makes him anxious and stops him falling asleep. The following day Alfred finishes X, and that night, well, it is time to split the hypothetical into two cases.
Case One: That night Alfred falls asleep easily. That is evidence that worries about X were indeed keeping him awake. He never got to observe himself worrying about X when he tried to get off to sleep in his usual way. But Alfred obtained useful information when he departed from his usual practice. The departure was in itself unpromising. He paid more attention to the swirl of annoying thoughts. That might be expected to make falling asleep harder. And maybe it did, on the night that he tried it. The important point is that the topology of the space of mental experience is not discrete. Different mental experiences maybe close to each other or distant from each other. Paying more attention to the swirl of annoying thoughts generated a different mental experience, but one that was close enough to paying less attention that it captured useful information.
Case Two: That night Alfred tossed and turned and took ages to fall asleep. That is evidence against the hypothesis that worries about X were keeping him awake.
We notice that Alfred's attempt to diagnose his sleep problem was cheap. X probably needed doing eventually. Swapping around the order, XYZ, rather than YZX, is probably cost free. Case One is a good win. Case Two is neutral. Alfred doesn't much care that watching himself fall asleep is epistemologically invalid. It was a gamble with a positive expected value, and worth taking.
And what of my attempts to use meditation to observe my mind? Philosophically doomed, I accept Feynman's point. But is it useful? A cryptographer would notice that the secrets of my ordinary mental states are not secure. Meditation is a small disturbance. There are correlations between what my mind gets up to when I am meditating and what my mind gets up to when I am not meditating. Information leaks out. If I am willing to follow up on the "insights" that I gain from meditation with a bit of cryptanalysis, I can benefit.
Now I can comment on
I, for one, have never heard of anyone observing someone else's conscious experiences.
without being inscrutable. I don't think that one can observe ones own conscious experience.
what makes consciousness so perplexing is its fundamental subjectivity, which comes down to the impossibility of external observation under any circumstances
I want to add the impossibility of internal observation. Yes, one can remember little bits and pieces of ones recent experience, and that permits a side channel channel attack on conscious experience more generally, by exploiting correlations between the contents of similar mental experiences. But that's it. There is nothing like hooking up GDB to see what is really going on.
I think that conscious experience is as coherent and real as it needs to be for the brain to work. For example, I remember watching my cat leaping from my first floor kitchen window to the roof of next doors garden shed. Elegantly, yes, but after delay. I watched his gaze dart back and forth between his fore-paws and the shed several times before he leapt. Since there was a twenty foot drop to basement level, it is easy to understand. He saw the danger and thought to himself "That is quite a drop, I'd better get this right, estimate the distance three times, jump once, and all that. Actually it is not very far." But not in English, and not so elaborately; just enough to keep him safe (for cat values of safe).
Maybe that counts as an external observation of consciousness? No! Daan Schetselaar and I agree: no.
What about internal observations of consciousness? After a fall, a human may be more careful and have that kind of inner dialogue. They can even repeat it to you if you ask why they are hesitating. I believe that there is an internal rehearsal loop for speech. We can organize our thoughts and check them before we open our mouths. Bits of consciousness end up in that loop, available to prompting or the practice of mindfulness. If that is what we mean by "observing consciousness" then "observing consciousness" is not mysterious. And if by "observing consciousness" we mean something more substantial, then I don't think we can do it.
Indeed, I agree on the impossibility of internal observation. Observation requires an object and a subject, and in that sense is always 'external'. The conjecture is not about external vs. internal observation, but about observation in general which I'd say is necessarily external. I will add a clarification to the post, when I have a bit more time, thanks for pointing this out!
About the examples of 'pseudo' internal observation: one might say that we can observe some of our own brain processes such as inner speech, thoughts or dreams. But I'd say that what we observe then are neural processes, not the conscious experience of those processes.
Hard to nail down exactly what I mean here, but I see traces of an objective account of what it's subjectively like to be a person in correlations between oral traditions of tribes that share human ancestry but not any cultural connection. This could be done better with ideas expressed in languages that emerged recently (with the prototypical cases being schools for the deaf or hereditarily deaf populations inventing sign languages) but I haven't found any pre-translation oral traditions in these languages.
A community of 30 or 40 language models that don't have language yet can't invent a language to communicate. This is a built-in human capability (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language) so it will emerge sooner or later by the bitter lesson. Once LLMs and algorithms get to a point where they can do this we'll finally get answers about their subjective experience in their own words without reference to human experience, although there will be other issues at that point.
Concretely: there are lots of things that we are pretty sure won't happen in such an experiment (such as carefully and correctly isolating the group of cooperating generative transformers from human generated text, training from random initalization on RL in some environemnt, and then coming back and finding a recognizable congregation of fire and brimstone pentecostals) which means that would get a huge torrent of information about subjectivity if one of the impossible outcomes happened, which means we get tidbits of information on subjectivity when they don't.
I don't think there's such an insurmountable ontological difference between observing the consciousness of other people (and remembering the consciousness of one's past self) vs. observing the external reality in general. Both are something probabilistically inferred about something "out there" rather than something that's right now right here and directly perceived. Perhaps you can never become quite as certain about the latter category than the phenomenal experience of your current observer moment, but that is hardly surprising that you know "the right here right now" better than the rest of the universe.
Assumed it would be possible to observe other people's consciousness, I would agree there would not be an insurmountable difference vs. observing reality in general. But observing someone else's qualia would still only lead to a conscious experience of their qualia in the observer. I.e. the conscious experience that this observation yields is still the observer's.
Yes, and "observing external reality" only leads into observing more qualia in your head rather than perceiving external reality as such, from which you make more or less indirect inferences about external reality. Some of these observations feel relatively direct, like observation of macro-level objects like tables and whatever, but even then you always only observe the them in some limited way, from some specific angle and what you see is something like your brain's representation of the object rather than what it "objectively looks like" (there probably isn't such a thing), these observations also never equal to the objective existence of the object which could always conceivably be a hallucination etc.
And then something like atoms or quantum fields isn't perceived even this way at all, but rather postulated and inferred from complicated experiments to explain a wide range of comparatively more direct observations. Consciousness of other people is a bit like this - I would argue still more direct than the "observation" of atoms as pretty much all people can figure out other people probably have subjective experiences without doing any formal science. It's just basic extrapolation from one's own subjective experience, similarity to other humans and observing their behavior and postulating consciousness etc.
This is a linkpost to a short article that I published on PhilPapers. I hope to get some useful feedback here.
The article was borne out of the frustrating observation that many scientists working on the problem of consciousness seem to just deny that there is something fundamentally perplexing about the topic (I guess that places them in camp#1, according to Rafael Harth). As if by doing science as usual it will automatically all work out in the end.
I argue that what makes consciousness so perplexing is its fundamental subjectivity, which comes down to the impossibility of external observation under any circumstances (which I called strong subjectivity). This might seem like a bold statement, since hundreds of years of philosophy of mind and many convoluted thought experiments have not settled this matter beyond doubt.
Yet, the strong subjectivity of consciousness is a suspicion that appears true as far as our observations go. I, for one, have never heard of anyone observing someone else's conscious experiences. I can not even imagine what that could possibly mean (I guess one would have to be the person whose consciousness one is observing, which does not seem to make sense). However, I am also not aware of any definitive logical argument proving the absolute impossibility of such a feat.
We don't seem to get much further trying to come up with ever more convoluted thought experiments and even more convoluted ways to avoid their conclusions. Instead, I suggest to treat the suspicion of strong subjectivity like a conjecture in mathematics: something that seems true as far as everything that we have ever observed, but that has not yet been formally proven to be true.
The truth or falsehood of this conjecture is pivotal for any theory of consciousness. Most current theories that I know of do not take the conjecture as a core assumption, which I suspect goes a long way in explaining why none of them has managed to provide a satisfactory explanation.
As a recent initiate to LessWrong, I am now very aware that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. All the more reason that it seems unwise to discard the conjecture of strong subjectivity at this point. Instead, the most reasonable thing to do appears to assume strong subjectivity for any viable theory of consciousness.