Rob B's Shortform Feed

Rob Bensinger

This is a repository for miscellaneous short things I want to post. Other people are welcome to make top-level comments here if they want. (E.g., questions for me you'd rather discuss publicly than via PM; links you think will be interesting to people in this comment section but not to LW as a whole; etc.)

Copied from some conversations on Twitter:

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Eric Rogstad: I think "illusionism" is a really misleading term. As far as I can tell, illusionists believe that consciousness is real, but has some diff properties than others believe.

It's like if you called Einstein an "illusionist" w.r.t. space or time.

See my comments here:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/biKchmLrkatdBbiH8/book-review-rethinking-consciousness

Rob Bensinger: I mostly disagree. It's possible to define a theory-neutral notion of 'consciousness', but I think it's just true that 'there's no such thing as subjective awareness / qualia / etc.', and I think this cuts real dang deep into the heart of what most people mean by consciousness.

Before the name illusionism caught on, I had to use the term 'eliminativism', but I had to do a lot of work to clarify that I'm not like old-school eliminativists who think consciousness is obviously or analytically fake. Glad to have a clearer term now.

I think people get caught up in knots about the hard problem of consciousness because they try to gesture at 'the fact that they have subjective awareness', without realizing they're gesturing at something that contains massive introspective misrepresentations / illusions.

Seeing that we have to throw out a key part of Chalmers' explanandum is an important insight for avoiding philosophical knots, even though it doesn't much help us build a positive account. That account matters, but epistemic spring cleaning matters too.

Eric Rogstad:

'the fact that they have subjective awareness', without realizing they're gesturing at something that contains massive introspective misrepresentations / illusions

@robbensinger I don't see how this is so different from my relativity example.

The situation still seems to be that there is a real thing that we're pointing at with "subjective awareness", and also people have a lot of wrong beliefs about it.

I guess the question is whether consciousness is more like "space" or more like "phlogiston".

It's possible to define a theory-neutral notion of 'consciousness'

@robbensinger If we defined a theory-neutral notion of 'consciousness' (to refer to whatever the thing is that causes us to talk about our experiences), would you still want to describe yourself as an 'illusionist' w.r.t that theory?

Keith Frankish: Yes! In fact that's exactly what I do. (The claim isn't that consciousness itself is illusory, only that qualia are)

Rob Bensinger: Yeah, I'm happy to define 'consciousness' in theory-neutral terms and say it exists in some sense. 'Qualia are an illusion' or 'phenomenal consciousness is an illusion' is more precise anyway.

I don't care how we define 'consciousness'. The claims I care about are:

1. Illusionism is asserting something substantive and (even among physicalists) controversial.

2. Illusionism is genuinely denying the existence of something widely seen as real and crucial (and self-evident!).

3. On the object level: phenomenal consciousness is in fact an introspective illusion.

'Phenomenal consciousness isn't real', 'phenomenal consciousness is real and reducible', and 'phenomenal consciousness is real and fundamental' are three substantively different views.

1TAG6y

Edit: What it implies is violations of physicalism. You can accept that physics is a map that predicts observations, without accepting that it is the map, to which all other maps must be reduced. The epiphenomenalist worry is that, if qualia are not denied entirely, they have no causal role to play, since physical causation already accounts for everything that needs to be accounted for. But physics is a set of theories and descriptions...a map. Usually, the ability of a map to explain and is not exclusive of another map's ability to do so on. We can explain the death of Mr Smith as the result of bullet entering his heart, or as the result of a finger squeezing a trigger, or a a result of the insurance policy recently taken out on his life, and so on. So why can't we resolve the epiphenomenal worry by saying that that physical causation and mental causation are just different, non rivalrous, maps? I screamed because my pain fibres fired" alongside -- not versus "I screamed becaue I felt a sharp pain". It is not the case that there is physical stuff that is doing all the causation, and mental stuff that is doing none of it: rather there is a physical view of what is going on, and a mentalistic view. Physicalists are reluctant to go down this route, because physicalism is based on the idea that there is something special about the physical map, which means it is not just another map. This special quality means that a physical explanation excludes others, unlike a typical map. But what is it? It's rooted in reductionism, the idea that every other map (that is, every theory of the special sciences) can or should reduce to the physical map. But the reducibility of consciousness is the center of the Hard Problem. If consciousness really is irreducible, and not just unreduced, then that is evidence against the reduction of everything to the physical, and, in turn, evidence against the special, exclusive nature of the physical map. So, without the reducibility of cons

2Rob Bensinger6y

If the physics map doesn't imply the mind map (because of the zombie argument, the Mary's room argument, etc.), then how do you come to know about the mind map? The causal process by which you come to know the physics map is easy to understand: [...] What is the version of this story for the mind map, once we assume that the mind map has contents that have no causal effect on the physical world? (E.g., your mind map had absolutely no effect on the words you typed into the LW page.) At some point you didn't have a concept for "qualia"; how did you learn it, if your qualia have no causal effects? At some point you heard about the zombie argument and concluded "ah yes, my mental map must be logically independent of my physical map"; how did you do that without your mental map having any effects? I can imagine an interactionist video game, where my brain has more processing power than the game and therefore can't be fully represented in the game itself. It would then make sense that I can talk about properties that don't exist within the game's engine: I myself exist outside the game universe, and I can use that fact to causally change the game's outcomes in ways that a less computationally powerful agent could not. Equally, I can imagine an epiphenomenal video game, where I'm strapped into a headset but forbidden from using the controls. I passively watch the events occurring in the game; but no event in the game ever reflects or takes note of the fact that I exist or have any 'unphysical' properties, and if there is an AI steering my avatar or camera's behavior, the AI knows zilch about me. (You could imagine a programmer deliberately designing the game to have NPCs talk about entities outside the game world; but then the programmer's game-transcending cognitive capacities are not epiphenomenal relative to the game.) The thing that doesn't make sense is to import intuitions from the interactionist game to the epiphenomenal game, while insisting it's all sti

If the physics map doesn’t imply the mind map (because of the zombie argument, the Mary’s room argument, etc.), then how do you come to know about the mind map?

Direct evidence. That's the starting point of the whole thing. People think that they have qualia because it seems to them that they do.

Edit: In fact, it's the other way round: we are always using the mind map, but we remove the subjectivity, "warm fuzzies" from it to arrive at the physics map. Ho wdo we know that physics is the whole story, when we start with our experience, and make a subset o... (read more)

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