Comment by HarHarVeryFunny
6 days ago
The major reason for the never-ending disagreements on the nature of consciousness is that pretty much 100% of the time no-one ever rigorously defines what (things) they are actually talking about, and the word is so overloaded and poorly defined that any discussion therefore devolves into people talking about different things, as well as the discussion being so vague as to be meaningless.
There are of course other reasons too, with things like religious beliefs and human ego meaning that people come to the discussion with a major bias and fixed views rather than even being open to any rational discussion.
Finally, everyone is conscious and has an opinion, but only a tiny fraction are actually knowledgeable about the brain and have spent any large amount of time thinking about things like evolution and brain development .. they have an opinion, but are just not qualified to discuss it!
If you break down all the different things that people are referring to when they talk about "consciousness", and define them individually with as little wiggle room as the english language and underlying taxonomy of concepts allows, then I really don't think there is much mystery about consciousness at all, but of course those with an agenda who want there to be a mystery will still argue about every part of it including the definitions that remove all the wiggle room.
The nature of consciousness has long been a contentious subject, and one of interest, but it seems that the rise of AI has intensified the discussion with the new question being whether AI is or could be conscious. I do think this can be answered in a principled way (=yes), but in the end you can only PROVE that something, or someone else, is conscious if you accept a functional/testable definition of it in the first place.
One can build scientific theories without rigorously defining terms: a stipulative definition is enough.
Best example is Darwin's "Origin of Species"; here, Darwin didn't rigorously define "species": 'No one definition has as yet satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species.'
Many in the social sciences fetishize definitions, operating under the false notion that formulating a precise definition is the primary goal of inquiry. In reality, a robust scientific theory is a structured set of hypotheses; when combined with auxiliary theories, it derives a specific set of testable consequences.
Even within this framework, one must remain vigilant against ad hoc explanations. An ad hoc explanation fails to provide genuine systemic insight because it is engineered solely to fit the target phenomenon; it eliminates the explanatory gap by simply re-stating or absorbing the explanandum without offering any independent predictive or falsifiable power.
But with "consciousness" we don't have even a stipulative definition, more like 40 different competing definitions (https://philpapers.org/rec/VIMMAT) which are in many cases only loosely related, and generally are talking about very different things. When the situation is this bad, I am skeptical you can make scientific progress.
Stipulative definition is all about fixing the reference. Or if we want to use the talk of meaning, it is abou the extension/denotation. If 100 people fix the reference of the word 'consciousness' to 100 different things, it just means that these people are engaging in philosophical discussions without having any object level theories (theories from neuroscience, etc).
If 10 different scientists who work at the object level, using the same word but with a different reference, then we have 10 different theories about different phenomena. This is what we need today: more research, not philosophical discussions.
I'd say that comes down to a matter of degree, and as a quibble it's certainly not a scientific theory if it's not worded sufficiently precisely to be testable and falsifiable. With Darwin it was really about where did all the variety of animals come from, and with speciation/variation being a process rather than an event, it really doesn't make much difference how one defines "species" (can't interbreed is a useful starting point). Of course Darwin was also just speculating about some mechanism of hereditability existing, so at the time this was more of a thought experiment than theory.
The trouble with discussion of "consciousness" is the sheer degree of ill-definedness - it is such a hand wavy and multi-facted concept, that it's not possible to even begin any meaningful discussion without defining a better vocabulary and breaking the concept down into pieces. Are you talking about subjective experience, mental awareness, free-will, altered state of consciousness, or what, or more likely simultaneously some mish-mash of all of the above and more!
> The major reason for the never-ending disagreements on the nature of consciousness is that pretty much 100% of the time no-one ever rigorously defines what (things) they are actually talking about, and the word is so overloaded and poorly defined that any discussion therefore devolves into people talking about different things, as well as the discussion being so vague as to be meaningless.
You're right, but that rigorous definition is a significant part of the problem. We have a very difficult time rigorously defining and then debating certain attributes about consciousness or related concepts precisely because the definition and exploration of the definition is what is being debated.
This makes it a very fascinating topic.
For my own pet theory I think consciousness as we like to understand it is an emergent and evolutionary social construct for cooperation amongst humans, and different people may have different levels of conscious thoughts, similar to how mammals are conscious in a different way amongst other species. It's a spectrum. There are, in fact, philosophical zombies.
> with things like religious beliefs and human ego meaning that people come to the discussion with a major bias and fixed views rather than even being open to any rational discussion.
You're forgetting that attempting to have a "rational" discussion is itself a bias inherited from the many centuries of intellectual development that occurred between the middle ages and now - the parts that the article conveniently skips over entirely.
The "debate" here doesn't function to generate an answer, but to narrow down the scope of the question into the very constrained domain. When ppl debate "consciousness" they are re-affirming their opinion that humans are inherently rational agents (hence "scire" -> "to know"), rather than agents that can live, feel, think and will, which would require a different term, like "soul".
> rather than agents that can live, feel, think and will, which would require a different term, like "soul"
You're just substituting one ill-defined, and overloaded, word ("consciousness") with a bunch of others ("live", "feel", etc), and asserting that to you they mean something different.
It's impossible to have a discussion on this basis, and I'm sure to many people "soul" is exactly what they mean by "consciousness", or at least part of it. It's no less reasonable that an AI has a soul as that it is conscious - it depends on exactly what you define those words to mean.
People have made due with conceptual fuzziness, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that discussion is impossible without absolute conceptual clarity. All you are saying is that using these terms does not allow you to have a specific kind of discussion - which, a lot of the time, is one that reduces humans to mathematical objects that perform computations.
Yet, if that is your goal and the definition of "soul" or "consciousness" are entirely arbitrary decisions that you don't care about - then it's worth remembering the adage "you may not care about politics, but politics cares about you".
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> they have an opinion, but are just not qualified to discuss it! … I really don't think there is much mystery about consciousness at all
Are you actually qualified to discuss this by your criteria?
I'm not a professional neuroscientist for sure, but I've certainly spent decades thinking about things like intelligence and evolution, perception, qualia, have read dozens of papers on subjects like cortical microarchitecure, etc, and would like to think I'm well enough informed to be able to discuss things like intelligence and consciousness.
I don’t really care about whether you are “qualified” by your criteria, because I don’t hold your view that there is some specific level of education that allows one to hold and express an opinion. My point was more to point out some potential hypocrisy.
No one is obligated to humor or debate amateurs because no one is obligated to humor or debate anyone[1]. But being an amateur does not mean that the person couldn’t hold a valid or meaningful viewpoint. Dismissing someone’s opinion specifically because they are an amateur is just a special case of appeal to authority. If their opinions are fundamentally flawed, then those can be addressed head on without resorting to insisting that they don’t have the right qualifications to participate in the discussion.
[1] The “faster than light” neutrinos come to mind, too. Scientists involved in the experiments explicitly said they didn’t have time to entertain amateur theories, a valid statement.
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