Illusionism accepts the obvious fact that experiences are real
This is the opposite of my understanding of illusionism.
This appears to be common in many popular conceptions of illusionism, but it is not found in actual writing by illusionist philosophers.
Dennett, "Quining Qualia":
> Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. I grant moreover that each person's states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do. … Qualia are supposed to be special properties, in some hard-to-define way. My claim--which can only come into focus as we proceed--is that conscious experience has no properties that are special in any of the ways qualia have been supposed to be special.
Frankish, "The Ethical Implications of Illusionism":
> Illusionists do not claim that conscious experiences are illusory — that we cannot really see, hear, feel pain, and so on. What is illusory, according to the illusionist, are the phenomenal properties of conscious experience — the irreducibly subjective aspect, the private show in the Cartesian Theatre. They are not denying conscious experience but claiming that we have a mistaken conception of what conscious experience is — a conception we find compelling because of the way our introspective systems work.
The attribution of "phenomenal" properties to conscious experience is actually a form of intellectual progress. It is a measure of the degree of insight into the nature of consciousness that the human race has attained. One aspect of this progress is the awareness that there is some tension between physicalism and the existence of phenomenal properties, or that the nature of that relationship is not understood.
Dennett and Frankish want to believe that physicalism is true, without any need for peculiar modifications like property dualism, panpsychism, and so forth. When it comes to the properties of conscious experience, they seem to resort either to eliminativism (the properties don't exist) or functionalism (the properties are just causal and structural properties of the brain). Of these two, functionalism might be psychologically healthier, in that you aren't denying that you have experiences, you are just telling yourself that they are really brain states or computational states.
I don't endorse every idea about consciousness that the illusionists oppose. For example, I see no reason to suppose that conscious experience is ineffable. We describe our mind states to each other all the time, using words, and greatly refined versions of these descriptions are no doubt possible. On the other hand, that mind states are private seems obvious: I have access to my own mental state but not to yours.
Regarding your own agenda, you want consciousness to be understood well enough that "hedonium" could be designed. OK, but it's a little strange to write as if only illusionists are trying to understand consciousness in the relevant way. As I implied, functionalism seems a better name for your research program than illusionism.
Not so clearcut. Clearly there are e.g. known illusionist philosophers providing wishiwsshy reasons as to why illusionists ought to still be altruistic. Their arguments there tens to not be that intrinsic value there is but actually seriously esoteric stuff. I'll provide link if the name of they French guy interviewed on it pops up again - and he's just an example. Illusionists portray very clearly the situation often as one of absence of intrinsically morally loaden feelings.
I am guessing the French guy you are thinking of is François Kammerer. To my knowledge, he is the only illusionist advancing that line right now, and Frankish is directly replying to him. Now, part of the project does need to involve what it is about experiences which grounds their normative value. But that's exactly what I mean to address here:
> Instead, illusionists have to work out what features about pleasure & pain that is responsible for our evaluative stance towards them: what is it about pleasure, in purely material terms, which causes us to judge that it is good? What is a ‘judgment’ here, and what does it require? How do these judgments give us reason to act? This will require a careful act of integrating empirical facts into a system of normative value. I have expressed some doubts about whether this is possible, but it seems that outside of a few papers by François Kammerer, it has not been given a serious try.
Thanks for the education, I've read quite some Frankish et al. but somehow I had missed that part. Yes, Kammerer interviews it was! Looking fwd to reading your two posts! Background: I always found Illusionists, but if you thus want Kammerer, 'stupid' in claiming, say, 'actual reason to genuinely care' may not fall apart if (thus, say, Kammerer's strong) illusionism held, and Kammerer's talk about the reasons I found really low-grade philo confabulation. Since a few years I, let's say 'intellectually', put quite some credence to that type of illusionism, in a way (emotionally rather not at all so far), and find it super dangeorous. (fwiw I actually think rather than 'machine is conscious', the AI development may in my expectation also nudge, say, careful enquirers more towards such strong illusionism and it may be terrible - and be terrible even if potentially true, to the degree that 'terrible' then still deserves a place in language). May my other comment be downvoted appropriately :)
Epistemic status: I feel reasonably confident (~75%) that some form of this is a worthwhile project. Looking for feedback to reduce that uncertainty.
“Hedonium” is a theoretical, minimally conscious substance optimized for experiencing happiness. Imagine a mind pared down to the bare essentials required for having happy experiences, instantiated as cheaply as possible.
Nobody has built hedonium yet. Nobody has tried to build hedonium yet. Nobody has even laid out the blueprint for how you would try to build hedonium yet.
It doesn’t seem impossible. 55% of philosophers of mind are physicalists: they believe that mental states just are physical states. Even non-physicalist philosophers of mind often believe that the mental and physical are tightly bound up—creating new brains, at the very least, creates new subjects of experience.
But maybe it’s just intractable. Lots of people seem to believe that conscious is unknowable and mysterious from the perspective of third-person science. Even if you know exactly what’s happening in someone’s brain, you can never really know what they’re experiencing. We can, at most, try to build cargo cult hedonium: bang together a bunch of the “correlates of consciousness” and hope that it creates a happy conscious subject.
But there is a philosophical approach which do not believe that consciousness is specially intractable: illusionism. Illusionism accepts the obvious fact that experiences are real: when I burn my finger, it hurts! However, illusionism denies that experiences have these special metaphysical properties like privacy, ineffability, certainty, and an essentially intrinsic nature which many philosophers saddle them with. My experience of pain is not “generated by” or “correlated with” some brain state, it is that state. When I burn my finger, I am not mistaken that it hurts—but I am mistaken if I think “hurting” is something fundamentally immaterial which eludes functional description. (I describe this view more fully in §1.)
If illusionism is true, then there is no known barrier of unknowability which prevents us from making hedonium, just detailed empirical work to do on understanding the functional, representational, biological, computational, etc. workings of pleasure and pain. Instantiating a subject of pleasure just is instantiating that material system, no phenomenal ectoplasm required.
Now, I’m not one of those hedonistic utilitarians who believes we should fill the universe with hedonium, eliminating all other potential sources of value. But I will make the modest claim that, ceteris paribus, happiness is good. If we have the capacity to make lots of it cheaply, without major sacrifices to other value-sources, then we should do it! Certain forms of hedonium, given the limited range of experiences we wish to instantiate, could be very simple, and there’s no reason to assume complexity is necessary for basic value.
So I think building hedonium should be an ongoing project for illusionist philosophers and empirical researchers. In §1, I offer a basic formulation of illusionism and explain why I think it’s a justifiable framework for the project. In §2, I describe the implications of illusionism for consciousness research. In §3, I discuss ideas for what the hedonium project would concretely look like.
1. What does illusionism mean?
I think illusionism is ~60% likely to be true, mostly due to being unsatisfied with alternative theories of consciousness. I’ve written quite a bit about this, but others have written even better:
I won’t attempt to argue for illusionism further here. However, I will argue that even if you are not an illusionist, you should still be quite interested in an illusionist-inspired hedonium project:
2. How an illusionist studies consciousness
This section draws heavy inspiration from Keith Frankish, especially here and here. Most of what I am saying here is an attempt to elaborate and precisify those ideas.
The old ideas about consciousness research—that we can “never know” if a physical system is “really” conscious, that nobody has any idea what consciousness is, that consciousness is a binary—all of those make no sense under the illusionist paradigm. Pain & pleasure aren’t correlated with, or even “caused by” physical processes—they are physical processes. So, when you encounter a system, ask not: is it conscious? Or: how are its physical brain and its consciousness linked? Instead ask, purely in functional terms:
…and so on. If your thought is, “okay, great, now we need to figure out which of these things generate consciousness,” then you haven’t taken the illusionist lesson to heart. Imagine you came across a 19th-century biologist who believes in élan vital, asking what is this mysterious essence which makes some things really alive and others, merely dead & mechanical matter. You explain that life is actually just a family of capacities for self-organization, reproduction, homeostasis, and so on. “Ah,” says the biologist, “now which of these things generate life, and how do they do it?” You tell the biologist that these things don’t “generate” life, they are what it means to be alive. “What!” says the biologist, outraged. “You deny the existence of life?!” It’s not just that the 19th-century biologist is incorrect, it’s that they aren’t even working with the right concepts. They think they are looking for life, but they are really looking for élan vital, which they will never find—not least because it doesn’t exist! Meanwhile life is all around them, but they don’t recognize it as such.[1]
So, in trying to build pleasure, an illusionist wants to know: what is typically going on in the brain when we introspectively judge that we are in pleasure? What kind of representations are in play? What kind of dispositions and sensitivities are involved? Whenever we describe some aspect of what pleasure is like—what underlying structure leads us to think pleasure is like that and not like this? These are all difficult empirical questions, but not unknowable in any sense.
Then, there are further philosophical questions: what aspects of the states we call pleasure and pain are the morally relevant ones? For instance, I have a disposition to curse loudly when I experience pain, and laugh when I experience pleasure. But many animals neither speak nor laugh. Does that mean that their pleasure and pain are morally irrelevant? The illusionist cannot simply pass the buck to psychophysical laws: “whatever physical processes generate the private, intrinsic, ineffable qualia of pleasure and pain is what’s relevant.” Instead, illusionists have to work out what features about pleasure & pain that is responsible for our evaluative stance towards them: what is it about pleasure, in purely material terms, which causes us to judge that it is good? What is a ‘judgment’ here, and what does it require? How do these judgments give us reason to act? This will require a careful act of integrating empirical facts into a system of normative value. I have expressed some doubts about whether this is possible, but it seems that outside of a few papers by François Kammerer, it has not been given a serious try.
3. What the hedonium project would look like
Perhaps the strongest argument against starting a hedonium project right now is that it sounds like it would take a lot of detailed neuroscience to pull off, and it seems like neuroscience is way behind where it would need to be to explain much psychology. Mechanistic interpretability is really hard. Neuroscientists have to do interpretability on massively more complicated AGI architectures without white-box access. If this is an empirically tractable project at all, wouldn’t it be better to wait until after the intelligence explosion, when our scientific tools will be much better?
Unfortunately, I think we do need to get cracking on detailed mechanisms for valenced experience before then, even if we can only provide probabilistic guesses based on current science:
Of course, you could argue that in this case we should just work on alignment, stopping entrenchment, and metaphysically agnostic ethical systems. I agree that we should be working on all those approaches, as well as working on the mechanistic, illusionist approach. It seems like there’s a dearth of concrete, shovel-ready projects in digital welfare, and that nobody has given this angle a serious try.
So, keeping in mind the target of helpfully informing near-term alignment and model welfare issues, what is it that such a project should be doing?
I don’t think this would be a substantially expensive project; I could see a small team of dedicated researchers making significant progress. If it’s true that EA is about to see a lot of new funding for ambitious projects, I would feel pretty excited about looking for funding, mentorship, & org support and trying to get this off the ground.
Phenomenal realists are well-aware of this analogy and have offered arguments about why they think consciousness isn’t like élan vital. I am not trying to strawman anyone here; I am trying to articulate how phenomenal realist research proposals look to the illusionist—why they would seem fundamentally mistaken.