You only need intrinsic property of existence for the whole universe to solve zombies. But you also need it for a chair to be real.
Of course, I don't think many physicalists actually believe in structural relations all the way down.
I agree that the dialogue could be strawmanning the typical C1 position by having them commit to a strong structural realism, but I’m genuinely unsure how to remove this in a way that’s consistent for their position and pushes back sufficiently on C2.
If you grant this “intrinsic property of existence” you open the door for C2 to press everything they want. C1 wants to say that worlds which are structurally isomorphic are literally the same world. If you start to say that some “intrinsic property” is needed to realise the structure then C2 has an opening to claim this is the categorical protophenomenal property required to fix phenomenal character.
Do you see any other options to improve C1’s position? Flagging that this is a genuine pressure point in wrestling with in my own view.
Microexperiences are unphysical - there are no electrons, only global wavefunction.
Agree that C2 needs to refine the view here so it’s consistent with modern physics. I think it’s possible for them to do this in principle, but agree it’s a point C1 could press.
I think it circles here? You started by justifying incompleteness by inverted spectrum, received the objection about chairs being analogous, and then answer that the difference is in incompleteness. The problem is that the chair analogy is correct - the difference between blue and red is completely describable by physics
Agree that C1 could press circularity but I don’t think C2 would concede it. They’re arguing that conscious experience of blue and red gives evidence of something that doesn’t purely fit the causal/functional role in the way a chair does. So it’s a test case the chair doesn’t pass. C1 would disagree and say the causal/functional role fully exhausts everything that needs explaining. I think this is just a restatement of the crux.
Let me explain my view in a little more detail - it’s worth noting that I hold it pretty tentatively (around ~p(60%)) but I think you’ll find it appealing and hopefully see where it parts way with your view.
If you hold a blue image in your mind there’ll be something it’s like for you to experience blue. Call that Q. Now if you hold a red experience in your mind there’ll be a corresponding red experience that’s different to the blue one. Call it Q’. Hopefully you know what I’m talking about here! Some people with very strong camp 1 intuitions aren’t even willing to grant this, but I feel like if we’ve gotten this far in the thread we have some common ground here.
On my view, there is a fact of the matter about what blue and red look like for you and this is underdetermined by the physical/dispositional properties. The physical/dispositional properties could be held constant and these blue/red experiences could vary in principle. Granted, there’s a lot of structural constraints e.g. light cones in your retina, reflectance of surfaces, wiring of your brain etc.. But I claim that even if physics were fully fixed some aspect of your experience could vary in principle.
More precisely, a complete description of physics would tell you everything about the dispositional/relational properties of physical particles. Specifically, given a state P it will tell you how it evolves to P’. An example is an electron with charge q and mass m moving in an electric and gravitational field. The physics fully specifies the dispositional properties of the particles e.g. the electron will move in such-and-such a way. But this doesn’t tell you about any of their essential properties. If you switched the mass with something that played the same role but was intrinsically different (call is schmass) would that change anything? On standard physics, it wouldn’t matter what was playing the mass-role itself only that the structural form of the equations are intact.
On my view however, it does matter. The particles have an additional categorical/essential property that fixes something about the world. Importantly, these properties are physical in some sense (they’re all part of the same “stuff” that physicists talk about) but they’re not captured by the normal relational/dispositional properties of physics. This view is called Russellian Monism.
So with this formalism in place it actually connects up quite nicely with the other components of your view. The 0P/1P framework gives a nice overview of the difference between describing the disposition of the state (0P) and tokening the categorical essence of the state (1P). The hard problem intuitions just fall straight out of the difference between 0P/1P. Also on this view there are no zombies, since duplicating the physical particles necessarily duplicates their categorical properties — so there’s no gap between what I’ve been calling functional 1P and phenomenal 1P. As soon as experiences enter 1P they’re phenomenal.
Where this differs from your view is I think you need a categorical property to fix the phenomenal character of certain states. Whereas on your view it seems like you’re using the bridging law + structure to fix phenomenal character. In my previous comments I’m mostly pressing you about how much work structure is doing in your framework. If you’re happy for bridging laws to provide the jump then our views actually become really close.
Your point about Löb’s theorem is interesting and it seems like it could be a nice formalisation of the 0P/1P idea. I’d just emphasise that it’s still a structural argument for why 1P/phenomenal talk is really tricky - it doesn’t give you a metaphysical explanation for why 1P has a “what it’s likeness” in the first place. For this you need the bridging laws or the categorical properties.
This is a cool position. Thanks for taking the time to explain it in so much detail.
I think I can see where we’re diverging. You want to place the metaphysical bridge between the 0P -> 1P perspective and because there’s something metaphysically substantial happening in this bridge it’s a camp-2 position. But within the 1P side you’re treating 1P phenomenal states as a subset of the full 1P space and what links the phenomenal states to the other 1P states is some kind of structural relation. This idea is very camp 1-ish to me, the extra work done is being done by structural/relational links between phenomenal and non-phenomenal states in 1P.
By contrast, I want to place the metaphysical bridge between the physical and phenomenal states P -> Q. This means I’m rejecting the claim that Q is related to P by purely structural relations or dispositional properties. This is also why I said the most parsimonious bridge was a null one unless you had access to Q. I agree the null bridge is incoherent if what you’re talking about is the 0P -> 1P link that an instantiated agent needs to access is sensors. But that’s not the bridge the unconscious superintelligence needs. It needs a bridge to Q and since it doesn’t possess Q it could coherently postulate a null bridge between P and Q. From its perspective the null bridge would also be most parsimonious if it truly didn’t possess Q.
I’ve kind’ve sketched my reasons for thinking structural and dispositional properties don’t yield Q in the rest of the thread but I’ll throw in one more: from my perspective the structural/dispositional properties are inherently 0P there’s no 1P categorical/intrinsic properties which describe “what it’s like”
So when you say:
the phenomenal structure is perhaps foreign, but understandable within the 1P side the same way a cell is understandable to it on the 0P side
I reject the analogy. On my view, your link between the non-phenomenal 1P and phenomenal 1P is still structural/relational and these properties are always 0P in nature.
This might be a natural point to end the conversation as I think we’re at a point where our intuitions lie on opposite sides of a pretty large crux. But I’m happy to continue if you think there’s another angle I’m missing.
I claim it could in-principle simulate us deeply enough to pull out the 1P phenomenal concepts
I don’t think this is right. A simulation (even an extremely detailed one) is ultimately only telling you about relational/dispositional facts i.e. given a physical state P it will evolve to state P’. It doesn’t say anything about the associated phenomenal state Q.
I additionally claim that simple bridge priors will be adequate for finding 1P phenomenalism, and that you would have to have a pretty unnatural one in order to avoid seeing this.
Ok I think this is the heart of the matter. I read the OP’s original point (“an unconscious super-intelligence would not guess that alien minds are conscious”) as essentially saying the most natural bridge prior for an unconscious system to posit is a null one i.e. that no real bridge exists.
Why think an unconscious system would be motivated to posit a bridge prior in which phenomenal properties actually exist? A prior that connects functional states to real phenomenal states is more complex than a prior in which phenomenal states are not real properties. The only reason to introduce the more complex prior is if the system had access to data points which require it as an explanation I.e. if it had access to phenomenal states Q.
Sahil’s argument about room temperature reference is interesting but I don’t think it quite works.
When your body is duplicated sim-you keeps thinking and referring to sim-temperature rather than temperature, so they’ll continue adjusting their sim-blankets and sim-AC to regulate their sim body temperature.
The point is, if this is a perfect atom-level simulation then the sim-cells in sim-you would act in the exact same way as real cells act in your real body and sim-temp would therefore play the same causal/functional role as real-temp for real you. In other words, sim-you would die (within the simulation) if their sim-temp fell outside a certain range and they would feel sim-cold or sim-warm causing them to adjust their sim-blankets and sim-AC. In this sense, sim-you would have a survival drive to maintain and adjust their sim-temperature! The fact that sim-temp doesn’t refer to real temp outside the simulation to maintain the computer chip temperature is irrelevant to how warm/cold sim-you is feeling and their subsequent survival drives.
I think the crux is that the simulation needs to be at the correct functional grain (whether fine-grained or coarse-grained) for sim-temperature to play the same functional role as real temperature and preserve the survival drives.
If you’re permitting a difference between 1P functional concepts and 1P phenomenal concepts then I’m happy to grant that an unconscious superintelligence would possess all the functional 1P resources and notice a kind of “functional analogue” of the hard problem intuitions due to the conceptual isolation of 0P/1P.
I’d push back if you’re making the stronger claim that the unconscious superintelligence would be able to fully grasp the actual hard problem of consciousness in anything like the sense that we do when we appeal to our 1P phenomenal concepts. By stipulation, it doesn’t possess 1P phenomenal concepts so it could never really “grok” the hard problem in the same way that we do. If it doesn’t possess the concepts I don’t see why it would be motivated to think evolved alien minds have genuinely additional metaphysical properties rather than just a certain kind of sophisticated self-model that lets them talk the way they do.
I don't claim to know what exactly makes an experience phenomenal, but I'm pretty sure it will be something with non-trivial structure, and that this structure will sync-up in a predictable way with the 0P explanation of consciousness.
I’m not 100% sure if I’m interpreting this correctly. If the claim is that an ideal 0P observer would, in principle, be able to tell which concepts were 1P phenomenal for a given entity purely from 0P information and absent any of its own 1P phenomenal data points then I disagree and this is a crux for me.
If you believe that an exhaustive explanation based on the laws of physics would still leave the mystery of consciousness unexplained then I'd urge you not to drop the word metaphysical from the description of camp #2.
Metaphysical doesn't necessarily need to mean "spooky" or "non-naturalist". There are plenty of coherent naturalist camp #2 formulations of phenomenal consciousness e.g. Russellian monism and property dualism. These both require additional metaphysical commitments to try to explain consciousness but they fit coherently within a naturalist viewpoint.
I think of myself as in camp 2
Thanks for the clarification. I'm surprised by this, and I think it presents a problem for your view in the 0P/1P logic post you linked.
If I understand your view correctly, you want to say:
As far as I can tell, this is the Phenomenal Concept Strategy i.e. from purely 3rd person facts about a cognitive architecture, we're supposed to see that the system will form these primitive "experience" concepts, treat them as metaphysically independent and form hard-problem intuitions. My worry is that once you pair this with Camp #2 style phenomenal realism it's vulnerable to Chalmers' dilemma. Roughly, you have two horns to choose from
Horn 1: If phenomenal concepts are defined too strongly then a zombie won't have those concepts, in which case, these concepts are part of the hard problem and require an explanation.
Horn 2: If phenomenal concepts are defined too weakly then zombies can have them. In this case, they don't explain the Hard Problem of consciousness (since zombies don't have phenomenal experience).
To put this in the language of your 0P/1P post, if "possessing phenomenal concepts" just boils down to being the kind of system that needs 1P logic to reason effectively about its internal states then zombies would possess them and zombies would be conscious which is a contradiction.
You could get around this by saying zombies are not conceivable (because any entity capable of deploying 1P logic is conscious) but this would kind've defeat the purpose of our thought-experiment as the superintelligence wouldn't be unconscious if it can accurately reason about 1P logic.
Using the framework in this post, I suspect you’re in Camp #1 about consciousness i.e. you believe consciousness can be reduced to a functional/physical description of a system in a deflationary way.
Those in Camp #2 believe there’s some additional metaphysical property that constitutes “what it’s like” to be an entity. In this case, I don’t think there’s any obvious reason an unconscious superintelligence would postulate this property in alien minds. The superintelligence itself wouldn’t possess the property (as it’s unconscious by stipulation) so even if it discovered the functional/physical markers which give rise to “conscious utterances” it wouldn’t discover the phenomenal property that constitutes “what it’s like.” This is especially true if it never actually observes or interacts with conscious creatures.
I think the OP is pretty clearly in camp #2 which might be why you’re so surprised at the claim if you’re in camp #1.
It’s called ontic structural realism and it’s a well-known and respected view in philosophy, but I agree it’s not the standard physicalist view (or at least physicalists don’t usually explicitly commit to it in the way C1 does.) One of the things I was motivated to explore with the dialogue is if C1 needs to be committed to it or if they can get away from it.
In particular, I think C1 concedes too much to C2 if they take your suggested line. If the “intrinsic property of existence” you’re positing is categorical rather than relational then it doesn’t actually show up in the laws of physics. There’s no “charge” or “mass” intrinsically because in the equations these quantities could be switched with something that plays the same structural role — there’s no “essence” over and above the physical laws which makes it ‘charge’ rather than ‘scharge’.
If C1 grants all this then they grant everything that C2 wants to say — there are nonphenomenal intrinsic properties that underlie physical reality. The crux just becomes whether these properties have anything to do with phenomenology or not. If the categorical properties are there anyway C1 can’t really claim their theory is more parsimonious. At least C2 is using them for some work (to fix phenomenal character) on C1’s story they’d need to be completely idle.
I think this is a good suggestion and a pressure point that C1 could press harder. C2 wants to say there’s a counterfactual difference between world A and world B which is relational and that they differ only in the categorical base properties. But if the worlds were ever brought into contact it would result in physical or behavioural differences e.g. “Oh, I see blue now!” so how exactly is the categorical base effecting a physical change if physics is causally closed? C2 has some responses but none feel completely satisfying.