Richard,
Thank you for your reply. It implies your article was not as clearly worded as I would have liked it to have been, given the interpretation you say it is limited to. When you said "subjective phenomena associated with consciousness ... have the special status of being unanalyzable." (last paragraph in the first column of page 4 of your paper.) you apparently meant something much more narrow, such as "subjective phenomena associated with consciousness [of the type that cannot be communicated between people --- and/or --- of the type that are unanalyzable] ... have the special status of being unanalyzable." If you always intended that all your statements about the limited ability to analyze conscious phenomena be so limited --- then you were right --- I misunderstood your article, at least partially. We could argue about whether a reader should have understood this narrow interpretation. But it should be noted Wikipedia, that unquestionable font of human knowledge, states "qualia" has multiple definitions, only some of which matche the meaning you claim "everyone agrees upon.", i.e., subjective experiences that "do not involve anything that can be compared across individuals." And in Wikipedia's description of Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness, it lists questions that arguably would be covered by my interpretation. It is your paper, and it is up to you to decide how you define things, and how clearly you make your definitions known. But even given your narrow interpretation of conscious phenomena in your paper, I think there are important additional statements that can be made concerning it. First given some of the definitions of Chalmers hard problem it is not clear how much your definition adds. Second, and more importantly, I do not think there is a totally clear distinction between Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness" and what he classifies as the easy problems of consciousness. For example, the first two paragraphs on the second page of your paper seem to be discusses the unanalyzable nature of the hard problem. This includes the following statement: ".for every "objective" definition that has ever been proposed [for the hard problem], it seems, someone has countered that the real mystery has been side-stepped by the definition." If you define the hard problem of consciousness as being those aspects of consciousness that cannot be physically explained, it is like the hard problems concerning physical reality. It would seem that many key aspects of physical reality are equally "intrinsically beyond the reach of objective definition, while at the same time being as deserving of explanation as anything else in the universe" (Second paragraph on page 2 of your paper). Over time we have explained more and more about concepts at the heart of physical reality such as time, space, existence, but always some mystery remains. I think the same will be true about consciousness. In the coming decades we will be able to explain more and more about consciousness, and what is covered by the "hard problem" (i.e., that which is unexplainable) will shrink, but there will always remain some mystery. I believe that within decades two to six decades we will --be able to examine the physical manifestations of aspects of qualia that now cannot now be communicated between people (and thus now fit within your definition of qualia); --have an explanation for most of the major types of subjectively perceived properties and behaviors of consciousness; and --be able to posit reasonable theories about why we experience consciousness as a sense of awareness and how the various properties of that sense of awareness are created. But I believe there will always remain some mysteries, such as why there is any existence of anything, why there is any separation of anything, why there is any time, etc. In fifty to one hundred years the hard problem of consciousness may well just be viewed as one of the other hard problems of understanding reality. My belief is that consciousness is inherently no more mysterious than any of reality, given the technological advance that will occur in this century. I believe human consciousness is an extremely complex, dynamic, self-interacting, dynamically self-focus-selecting computation having trillions of channels connected in a small world network. And each human consciousness is in, and thus aware of, its own computation, just as a physical object located in a certain point of space is affected by a set of physical forces determined as a function of its location. The only difference is that different human consciousness seem to be largely separated from each other, whereas we believe the computation of the observable universe, other than what is in black holes, is continuously connected down to a granularity approaching the quantum level. (Totally digression, but how does gravity escape from black holes, if none of the other forces can?) Since there is no aspect of physical reality that is anything other than computation (if you include representation as part of computation), then there is no total distinction between physical reality and conscious reality, they are both computations, they both probably have degrees of consciousness, both involve complex parallel processing of interactions between extremely large numbers of entities. The major distinction is that human consciousness have the capability to learn and compute complex models of senses and emotionally felt experience and action. Maybe when humans die, our consciousness will return to the extremely complex computations of quantum reality. But answering that would be another "hard problem." Ed Porter P.S. Note that Daniel Dennet makes some arguments somewhat similar to mine above, although somewhat different, concerning Chalmers' hard problem at http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/chalmers.htm -----Original Message----- From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2008 4:05 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness Ed Porter wrote: > Richard, > > You have provided no basis for your argument that I have misunderstood > your paper and the literature upon which it is based. > > [snip] > > My position is that we can actually describe a fairly large number of > characteristics of our subjective experience consciousness that most > other intelligent people agree with. Although we cannot know that > others experience the color red exactly the same way we do, we can > determine that there are multiple shared describable characteristics > that most people claim to have with regard to their subjective > experiences of the color red. This is what I meant when I said that you had completely misunderstood both my paper and the background literature: the statement in the above paragraph could only be written by a person who does not understand the distinction between the "Hard Problem" of consciousness (this being David Chalmers' term for it) and the "Easy" problems. The precise definition of "qualia", which everyone agrees on, and which you are flatly contradicting here, is that these things do not involve anything that can be compared across individuals. Since this an utterly fundamental concept, if you do not get this then it is almost impossible to discuss the topic. Matt just tried to explain it to you. You did not get it even then. 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