You are just delusional, literally hallucinating things I never wrote. Nowhere in anything I wrote did I claim that I am rejecting it as meaningless “because its individual words don’t yield the intended meaning under their preferred literal interpretation.”. I never said that, I never implied that, I never gave the impression of implying that, and I never had the air of the impression of implying that.
You are literally just hallucinating things never written.
You insist that words derive their meaning from social usage, then declare “what it’s like” meaningless by dissecting its individual words into “similar being.” That’s not a serious linguistic argument. You’re contradicting your own account of how language works.
That is literally not what I said at all.
Likewise, a rock “experiencing erosion” and a person experiencing pain involve two different meanings of “experience.”
Maybe for you it is, but then you’d need to explain why it is different, other than the subjects and objects being different.
One means undergoing a physical change; the other involves feeling something. You’re equivocating between them. And a camera has a vantage point, too. That doesn’t mean it has subjective experience. Nothing I’ve argued requires consciousness to be nonphysical or inexplicable.
So… this “consciousness” is not monphysical… but feelings aren’t physical changes… right.
A physical explanation of pain doesn’t negate the existence of felt pain.
Why would a physical explanation negate the existence of a physical event?
The question is what produces that experience and how we can reliably identify it in other systems.
Reality is not something “produced.” It just is what it is.
But here’s the fundamental issue: Do you actually deny there’s a distinction between a nervous system detecting harmful stimuli and someone consciously feeling pain?
If the nervous system in question is a person, and the harmful stimuli is pain, it is one and the same.
Experience is not subjective. It is contextual, but contextuality is a property of physical reality, not of subjectivity.
I’m referring specifically to subjective experience: what it’s like to feel pain, perceive color, experience emotions, dream, etc.
Yes, Chalmerites like to prepend “what it is like” to things, as if it somehow proves anything. You can tell when a phrase means literally nothing when everyone just repeats it verbatim without ever rewording it in different ways, because the phrase carries no meaning, and only has the appearance of meaning by being repeated a lot.
Pain, color, emotions, and dreams are all real occurrences in the real world that really happen and all have real physical explanations for them. Prepending “what it is like” to them doesn’t mean anything. “Like” means “akin to” or “similar to,” and “what it is” regards being. And so the phrase, if taken literally, is about “similar being,” which I don’t see how that even makes linguistic sense in this context.
Of course, as Chalermites always do, you will probably get frustrated with me for taking the words literally, because I’m supposed to interpret them abstractly or something, but then there is zero clarity on what this abstract interpretation is supposed to be.
But notice what you’ve actually demonstrated: we can recognize instances of a phenomenon without fully understanding what constitutes it… You can describe the observable characteristics of a banana and use them to identify other bananas. But what happens when you encounter something that shares those characteristics without being a banana, or a banana that doesn’t exhibit the characteristics you’ve chosen? You need to investigate further, potentially refining your classification criteria.
It’s literally physically impossible for something to share all observable characteristics of a banana without being a banana.
Of course, if we have a very loose definition of a “banana” that is so broad it would even include an apple, then either the word itself “banana” really does just refer to banana+apple, or we would add on to the definition to separate the two. Words are ultimately a social construct, what is real is what they refer to when used in practice, and not the specific definition in the dictionary. I’m sure you know what a “dog” is, but few people have ever intentionally looked up the word “dog” in a dictionary. You can just know what it means by its social use.
Now consider consciousness. Unlike a banana, subjective experience isn’t directly observable by third parties. I can recognize my own experiences, but determining whether another entity has comparable experiences is a different problem entirely. That’s why establishing reliable criteria matters.
You are being so absurdly vague that I have no choice but to just try and guess at what you even mean by this, so I may get my guessing wrong, but that’s on you for being so extremely abstract. It seems that there are two halves to what you are trying to say, so I am going to attempt to parse them.
First, again, there is nothing “subjective” about experience. Experience is just when X happens to Y, i.e. a rock experiences erosion in the rain. It seems to me that one half of how you are you are using “subjective” here to refer to “my own experiences,” i.e. “X happens to myself,” which is a strange way to use the word “subjective,” because it would be like saying, if I eat a sandwich, I’m engaging in “subjective eating,” or that my house is a “subjective house” because it’s owned by a subject. But, whatever, words are words, but I would refer to it more meaningfully as “experience of a subject.” Second, you say that it “isn’t directly observable by third parties.” Of course, the experiences of a subject are obviously observable by third-parties, so you must be introducing some second criterion here, likely you are trying to say, it is the experience of a subject, as it is realized from the subject’s own vantage point. That is what I presume you mean by “isn’t directly observable by third parties.”
Actually, the first half seems irrelevant, because any experience, whether it happens to a subject or not, as it is realized from a subject’s vantage point specifically, is not realized by the vantage points of other subjects. If I see a rock experience erosion in the rain, no one else on earth can perceive it exactly the way I did. (The term “accessible” does not really make much sense, because what is realized is not something to be “accessed.”)
But, there is no mystery about this at all. Obviously, if they were to perceive what I perceived exactly as how I perceived it, they would have to be standing in the same place as I am, they would have to be of the same height as me, they would have to have the same nose in front of their face as I do, they would have to have the same memories such that they contemplate upon it the same way, so on and so forth.
That is to say, they would have to be me.
Indeed, talking about accessing another person’s vantage point does not even make linguistic sense. You could imagine getting closer and closer to my vantage point, by gradually taking atoms from my body and replacing them with your own, until you become identical to I, but the moment that identity occurs, then you would just be me, and you would cease to exist, so you would have failed to achieve my vantage point, you would have just stopped existing. Indeed, this is because how we define objects in the first place inherently entails that object’s vantage point, and so they are basically two ways of describing the same thing.
If you think the “mystery” is that we cannot access each other vantage points… that is not mysterious at all. So what is the mystery? Even after this whole aside, I am not sure what you think is so mysterious.
Your Florgleblorp analogy would apply if I were referring to something for which we had no identifiable phenomenon whatsoever. But that’s not what I’m doing. I’m referring to subjective experience, and asking what constitutes it and how we can determine whether it exists in other systems.
You have not identified any phenomenon at all. You are acting as if X experiencing Y suddenly evolves into some new phenomenon if X is a subject, but there is no explanation as to why this is the case. It would be like saying that houses are banal, but houses owned by people, those are “subjective houses,” and require a special explanation… why? You kind of skipped that step.
Here’s my own example for you: we could define consciousness as the ability to verbally report internal states. That’s a perfectly testable definition.
Notice how your definition, then, suddenly entails nothing about so-called “subjective experience.”
The moment you start to talk about anything real, you suddenly have to move away from the meaningless, Chalermite language.
But whether it actually identifies subjective experience, rather than merely the ability to produce convincing reports, remains a question. There’s nothing there to differentiate between correlation and causation.
Yeah, you can see the essence of Chalmers in here as well. On one hand, you want to make it look like you are being reasonable by giving a definition that has some concrete meaning, but then you immediately backpedal to Chalmerland and start talking about how we could never actually connect that concrete definition to the abstract thing you were supposed to be defining in the first place… and so you would’ve just wasted our time.
If you want to prove consciousness, I stand my ground on the argument that you first need to qualify consciousness as a thing. What is it?
Why would I want to prove something that isn’t even defined in the first place?
You may find that consciousness is actually something which was deeply misunderstood and unexpected.
Well, I can’t misunderstand anything because I have no understanding of what this “consciousness” supposedly is to begin with, so if someone did discover something unexpected and labeled it as “consciousness,” it would just be a new understanding.
Such a discovery would allow you to draw genuinely meaningful conclusions about whether or not LLMs can ever truly be conscious. That’s how you form a theory.
That’s more akin to taxonomy than theory building, just looking for ways to categorize things into this or that group.
You suggested, earlier, that someone may be able to detect consciousness by measuring whether the agent’s observation can collapse a waveform…By the same logic, an LLM could pass your hypothesized test.
the fuck
I literally said the opposite
I wrote a giant rant about how that is insanely batshit idiotic and that quantum mechanics has nothing to do with consciousness at all.
No, there is no “hypothesized test,” what on earth are you talking about
Simply deciding that LLMs shouldn’t count as conscious, without even truly understanding what qualifies consciousness, is just moving the goalpost. Or bikeshedding, perhaps.
I don’t decide that LLMs shouldn’t count as “conscious,” because I don’t have a reason to even take the concept of “consciousness” seriously to begin with!
I started with the disclosure that we all believe consciousness exists in some form.
Do we?
That alone separates my argument from your example: consciousness exists, Florgleblorp doesn’t.
How can we even assign properties to something which has no meaning?
That’s how scientific investigation frequently works. We recognize phenomena before we fully understand their mechanisms or develop reliable criteria for identifying them.
No, that’s not how scientific investigation works. Even if we do not fully understand something, we can still fully define what it is we’re talking about. We can concretely define what a banana is, such that you and I can both agree upon what is and isn’t a banana, long before we have any detailed physical analysis of the underlying chemical properties of a banana. Not understanding something in perfect detail doesn’t prevent you from giving a high-level definition which defines it in terms of its surface-level qualities.
I don’t even see how we can investigate something to begin with if we cannot even identify what it is that we’re talking about. That’s why I think you missed the point of my Florgleblorp example… if I told you to go investigate Florgleblorp, how would you even do that, if you have no idea what I’m even talking about, because I’ve not even given you a definition loose enough to identify it?
I don’t blame you because half of PhD physicists are obsessed with quantum woo themselves and believe silly things like this, so there’s no shame in a Laymen making such a mistake.
But there is no scientific reason to believe that there is any physical wave that exists when you’re not looking and suddenly “collapses” when you look to begin with.
The reality is much simpler. Bell’s theorem proves that quantum mechanics is non-local, but the no-communication theorem proves that this non-locality never bubbles up to the level of something directly measurable, so you cannot communicate with it. You can only notice the non-locality by bringing measurements together and then making inferences about things that you did not directly measure.
This is significant because special relativity is both logically and mathematically incompatible with anything non-local. However, if what you directly measure never exhibits anything non-local, then you can construct a theory which only talks about what happens at measurement and nothing else, and then that theory would remain mathematically consistent with special relativity.
That is how textbook quantum mechanics is formulated: it is purely a theory of measurements. It is simply not a theory of physical reality. It makes no claim as to there being, in physical reality, some infinite-dimensional waveform that floats around in Hilbert space with no address in physical that “collapses” down when you look at it. It makes no claims at all to what physical reality is doing when you are not looking.
The wavefunction is just taken to be a book keeping tool to make a prediction as to what will happen if you make a measurement, and you have to update it in response to the measurement, and so “measurements” are taken to be fundamental in the theory, as a fundamental axiom. There is no derivation of what the measuring device is actually even measuring at all, because it is not a theory of reality. There is no claim that “consciousness” is involved, or anything at all, because it is not a theory of reality.
It is a theory of measurement outcomes and nothing more is said. Injecting things about the wavefunction collapsing because a cat looking at it is going beyond the textbook axioms. The textbook axioms of quantum mechanics really are entirely operational: they just provide a book keeping method for the physicist to make predictions as to what they will measure. The dependence upon the measuring device as fundamental is not a claim that measurements are actually fundamental to reality, but it is just a consequence of the operational nature of the theory. Treating it as a theory of physical reality will always lead to nonsense.
To me, that is backwards. No one applies the same logic anywhere else. Can you think of any other situation whereby we insist some word, let’s call it Florgleblorp, has true meaning, even though none of us can define Florgleblorp, and that we need to do further scientific research and discovery in order to learn how to properly define Florgleblorp?
It’s just strange to me. We invent terms to describe things that we already know exist, we don’t start with terms that contain no meaning and then go out in search for meaning. That is bizarre.
You can rant all you want about how I’m arguing from authority (I’m not) or how you’re disagreeing rather than not understanding, but you keep literally saying you do not understand.
I am challenging you to actually justify your position, which you have not done so.
Your perception of the squares in the image is “subjective” because you are seeing the same light from both grey squares but perceiving it differently based on context. You are literally percieving the same objective physical phenomenon in two different subjective ways.
Why does something differing based upon context make it subjective? That would make it contextual. It’s not the same physical phenomenon: one is a gray square in the context of a shadow, and the other is not. Those are not the same things.
Still, Chalmerite bug person cannot admit that someone who disagrees with them might disagree for reasons other than misunderstanding. Not a single bone in your body will ever allow you to admit that other people may disagree for reasons other than being ignorant of the holy scriptures, because then you’d actually have to have neurons fire in your brain to justify why you believe what you do. Every post you make must be layered with long rants about how I do not understand anything because it is necessary to avoid actually having to justify why you believe what you do, which requires independent thought.
Color is a subjective experience
Why is color a subjective experience? I mean, the image you sent me is something you sent to me because you knew I would look at it and see the same colors you are seeing… that seems pretty objective to me.
(which, for the third time, does NOT mean a physical experience happening to a subject (like you), it means your perception of that physical experience).
I’m not sure I see the distinction. My perception is just a physical experience happening to me.
Do you understand what I’m trying to communicate about the difference between a physical phenomena, and your perception of said physical phenomena?
No, you keep just describing the same thing twice but saying one is different by fiat without ever actually giving any explanation as to why.
What are you talking about, “done being cordial,” “nothing but patient,” “spent the entire thread”? You literally replied to me like 2 times before this. You hallucinating some long-running conversation or something? LOL
You say, “I have never asked you to agree with me, or asserted that the things I am discussing are unquestionably true,” but then you insist I must be an entirely ignorant moron who simply disagrees with you because I don’t know anything about the topic… if you believe people can understand the topic and disagree with you… then why do you not act that way in practice?
Not a single neuron in your brain ever fired when I asked you to explain why you believe what you do; you immediately just jumped to “this person questioned the sacred scriptures! They must not understand anything!” And just posted a rant explaining how I must not know anything at all for daring to disagree and not automatically buy into your claims.
FYI I have made an explicit effort to avoid learning about what Philosophers™ think (legitimately who the fuck is David Chalmers?),
Yeah, and so you mindlessly absorb popular ideas without even knowing who they are from. The idea of “subjective experience” was popularized by Chalmers, who used it as his basis for his framework of “subjective experience” being “consciousness.” The term itself he didn’t invent, he borrowed it from Nagel, and so the term never existed in the literature until 1974.
Apparently, according to you, philosophy did not exist until 1974, and so me, disagreeing with a stupid paper, is equivalent to me denying all of philosophy!
You also say, “You haven’t had a cogent reaction to a single thought I’ve had,” but what cogent point have you even attempted to make, other than claiming that I must fail to understand your genius for not automatically agreeing with you?
What do you mean “proof”? Proof that the field of philosophy considers there to be a distinction?
lot of people believe something therefore it’s true
i am very intelligent
I pointed you to a great resource to learn about this, the proof that philosophers think there is a distinction and the details of how and why they believe that (and common arguments against it if that’s your jam!) are RIGHT THERE in the link I provided.
This is why Chalmerites like yourself are subhumans bugs. You have no brains. You are entirely incapable of conscious thought.
It is literally physically impossible for you to ever think about anything anyone ever says. Your brain just absorbs something that someone told you as a fact. When asked to justify it, every Chalermite bug is shocked at the very idea someone does dares question the eternal wisdom! To rationalize it, they conclude: the only possible way someone disagrees is that they just don’t understand the great wisdom of our lord and savior David Chalmers! They must just be an uneducated heathen who has not seen the light of the scriptures!
Like, this is literally related to “I think, therefore I am”.
Yeah, an idiotic and completely circular statement, because “I” is both in the premise and the conclusion, and so using it to prove that “I” (the self) is a priori is the highest level of sophistry.
If you disagree with philosophy in general
If “philosophy” = Chalmerite brainrot, then sure, I oppose philosophy.
Edit: Oh, I see you actually edited an argument into your response, rather than just making appeals to authority and accusing me of being a know-nothing who just doesn’t understand your genius.
Sadly, however, this argument is incoherent.
Your eyes measure the photons and cause your brain to produce the subjective experience of “red”. Nothing about this relies on you knowing how photons work. Monitors vary and rgb doesn’t correlate directly to light wavelength, but it therefore also does not correlate directly with your subjective experience. Your subjective experience also does not always line up with wavelengths of light-
All you have done is literally copy/paste what I said myself, that color does not directly correspond to the wavelengths of light, but then append to that “subjective experience” with no explanation at all! Where did that even come from in the argument? You just suddenly decided to substitute “color” in with “subjective experience” in the sentence as if that is an argument, with no explanation at all for what justifies doing so! You haven’t even established that “subjective experience” even exists, let alone given any reason as to why you can substitute the word “color” with it.
It is not possible to percieve the world objectively.
Again, I don’t know what that even means. Perception is perception. It is not meaningfully “subjective” or “objective.”
In the phrase “subjective way that you percieve the world”, I am again just using “subjective” the same way I used “internal”, ie. to emphasize that I am talking about your experience of the world
Again, if “subjective” just means “your X” then me eating a sandwich would be subjectively eating a sandwich, and my house would a subjective house… it is not a natural way to use the term.
and not the actual world itself (think of how you percieve the grey squares in the above illusion rather than how they are physically the same color).
How are they “physically the same color” if you just said they are different? And didn’t you just substitute in “color” for “subjective experience”? So what the hell is “physical color”? You are contradicting yourself!
there is a philosophical distinction between the physical world and your perception
Proof?
RGB is measuring/defining proportions of different wavelengths of light
We knew about colors long before anyone knew what a “wavelength of light” is. I can tell something is red without needing to measure its photons. There are correlations between red, green, and blue, but they are not exact. Monitors do a lot of weird things with colors and so it is just false to state that there is a direct equivalence to color values and wavelengths of light that the monitor will actually emit.
I am using “internal experience” to mean the subjective way that you percieve the world.
How do I perceive the world “subjectively”? What does that even mean? Is it possible to perceive the world “objectively”?
But if you are using the word “experience” to mean “C is happening to you” then yes, the external experience is the thing that is physically happening and the internal experience is your perception of it happening to you.
So all you mean by “subjective experience” is that the things are happening to me specifically? So, if thing happens to another thing, and one of those things is a subject, then it is subjective? That is a strange way to use the word “subjective.” If I eat a sandwich, is that subjective eating?
How is red a subjective experience? We can all experience red things, at least, all of us with functioning eyes. What about that is subjective? How is color not directly measurable? Color is very easy to measure, we can even assign it values, like (r,g,b). If you see something red, you have already measured it to have the values (>0,0,0). I don’t know what the term “internal experience” even means. Experience is just something that happens to something else. A rock experiences erosion in the rain. I am experiencing tiredness right now. To say something experiences something is to just say X is happening to Y. I don’t see how it is meaningful to assign adjectives like “internal” or “external” to it. I mean, if the adjective was meaningful, then would it not imply that you are implicitly contrasting “internal experience” with “external experience”? What on earth would external experience be? If you cannot tell me what external experience is, then the adjective “internal” is contrasting it with nothing at all, so it is a useless adjective.
More Chalmerite slop. Chalmerites never prove that experience is “subjective,” it is just a religious maxim they all repeat over and over again, and you’re supposed to believe it without question, and all act baffled if you don’t mindlessly believe it with them like a drone, entirely incapable of even justifying why they believe it in the first place.
This belief in so-called “subjective experience” then leads them to conclude that there must be something magical the brain is doing to produce it, or maybe the brain doesn’t produce it at all and just taps into something pre-existing like a radio taps into radio waves. Since nothing in the constructions of artificially intelligent machines includes an ingredient that looks like that, they conclude that “AI is not consciousness”
… I mean, sure I guess so, I agree it doesn’t include this magical Chalmerite essence he calls “consciousness.” But there is no reason to believe humans possess it either.
Superposition really is just a mathematical notation to predict how the qubits will behave. It’s arguably nomological not ontological. No one has ever in history measured or detected or observed a qubit to be in this “third state.” It’s always found to just have a bit value of 0 or 1. The mathematical book keeping is just a way to predict that 0 or 1 and doesn’t describe a third state.
It is only a 0 or 1. A qubit has never been observed to be anything else.
No they are binary. Qubits only contain 1 bit of information.
Genuine question: why should I even believe consciousness exists? This whole endeavor seems pointless without that justification.
Since the 1980s everyone called him crazy because obviously quantum entanglement can’t exist in a brain… We recently found out that’s not difficult, and even superposition is possible.
You speak of entanglement and superposition like two separate things. Every entangled state is a superposition of states.
And “possible” is all that has been put on the table. There’s nothing that shows “actual.”
We know that anesthesia breaks up those microtubules and breaks superposition…
Microtubules are structures that hold cells together, and exist throughout the body, not just the brain. If you broke them up then your brain would fall apart and you’d die.
And we know that anesthesia stops consciousness…
Correlation doesn’t mean causation. Even if you are right that anesthesia “breaks up those microtubules,” it wouldn’t demonstrate any causal role.
But we don’t “know” the actual method of action of anesthesia because it’s not proven.
Yes, it’s not known, but it seems more likely that it is just due to injecting noise into the brain, which would imply that you don’t actually stop experiencing things under anesthesia. The brain doesn’t shut down, in fact, it has heightened activity. There is just so much noise that you cannot think about anything you’re experiencing or form coherent memories of any of it.
But you’re right, no proof, but that definitely seems at least more likely as an explanation to me than some strange connection to microtubules.
People constantly say anesthesia “turns off consciousness” and then focus on it for “consciousness” studies. But there is no evidence of that. If you watch a film, hit your head, and then forget what you watched, does that prove that the film never entered your conscious awareness? No, that’s silly, because that would mean any time you forget something, you retroactively rewrite the past.
All we can say for certain is that people who come out of anesthesia don’t report remembering anything. It is a complete guess to claim that they therefore didn’t actually experience anything at all, and it seems a bit dubious given that brain activity is not only still there but often even increased under anesthesia.
Like, I understand what kind of rigors you’re trying to apply here, but if everyone did what you’re doing wed have to pretend gravity isn’t real too.
You can observe gravity. You cannot observe “consciousness.”
What even is your alternative?
For the reason I said before, I have no good reason to even believe “consciousness” exists.
Interrupting superposition interrupts consciousness
“Interrupting superposition” doesn’t even make sense as a phrase. You’re just stringing words together.
Yes, so I analyzed both its social use, and its literal word meaning, and found no meaning in either… so I concluded it has no meaning.
That doesn’t establish your claim that I conclude it has no meaning only because the literal definitions of the words have no meaning. You just hallucinated something that never happened and was never said.
Again, a complete hallucination of something I objectively did not say. You are just inventing idiotic straw men argument and doubling and tripling-down on them.
You laughably say I claim X, then quote me literally saying ¬X, and then claim I’m “contradicting” myself, when your delusional ass invented that I said X to begin with!
Because you’re a subhuman bug who cannot have a meaningful conversation and just wants to deflect to idiotic hallucinations.
Now, you want to say I need to prove I didn’t say X! What a laughable shift of the burden of proof! How on earth do I prove I never wrote something? Just copy/paste everything I have ever typed in my entire life into one giant document? How does that even work?
If you want to claim I said something, you need to show evidence that I said it.
Ah yes, you cannot quote me saying X, but you can “critically examine” my words to derive that I must’ve been secretly thinking X despite never having written it… right.
You have never provided a shred of evidence.
Your claim is X: that I claimed that the phrase has no meaning only because its literal definition has no meaning.
You quote me saying two things:
You then, after quoting me saying Y and ¬X, claim I’m “contradicting” myself because your “critical examination” allows you to read my mind and conclude I intended to write X!
You’re just a fucking idiot, and I cannot believe I have allowed such a monkey to waste this much of time to begin with.