The Hard Assumption of Consciousness
This essay is a response to a YouTube video by exurb1a, a comedy channel about the philosophy of science and human life.
The hard problem of consciousness is about how things we consider “conscious,” like most humans, are able to experience the world vividly rather than though mere detection of chemical events and response according to physical laws. Although interesting, it was not after much thought that I’ve stopped considering it a “problem.”
When I was five years old, I convinced myself of many ridiculous things. I thought that airplanes simply flew up above the clouds, traveling no more than 100 miles, while the world beneath simply rearranged into Beijing. Being five years old, I had no way to prove this wasn’t true. Over time, science class dismantled most but one of these conspiracies: to this day I still believe in philosophical zombies. I distinctly remember thinking when I was five: “why shouldn’t I kick her? Even if she gets hurt it wouldn’t matter, since she is just pretending—after all, she don’t really feel pain. Nobody really feels anything, not in the way that I do.” (p.s. I did not kick people)
The assumption that consciousness is special in any way is arrogant. First, we label ourselves consciousness. Next we ask, what is consciousness? Many hot questions arise: are fish conscious? Plants? Can we make computers conscious? The order in which we approach the question is wrong. First, we need a definition. Then we try to measure it, and then we make conclusions and ask further questions.
I will try to address some of the questions which stem from the hard problem.
How can the color “orange” be described to someone who can’t see color? Well, you can see bright colors and dim colors. Every color lies between two nodes: when you close your eyes, you are experiencing an extreme known as “black,” and when you look at the sun, you are experiencing an extreme known as “white.” What if there were three nodes? That’s trippy, but think about how you can not only walk North or South, but also East and West. Additional dimensions adds infinite more variety. Things you can see are between black and white, but also between other nodes we call “red” and “blue.” Orange is very red and a bit blue.
My description neglects the qualia of colors, however I submit there is nothing spectacular about qualia. Individual experiences can’t be described due to the sheer amount of information in a frame of reality. It is hard to put words to an experience in the same way it is hard to count the grains of rice you ate this past week. Quantity of information is also what I blame for why artificial intelligence cannot yet do things that humans can. I have seen stop signs from more angles than there are pictures of them on the entire internet. Nonetheless, the volume of data on the internet is ever increasing, and with every extra bit of new data, computer intelligence comes closer and closer to match that of human ability.
On what is and isn’t conscious: like us, computers are processors of information. The simplest Turing machine has a sensor and it produces output. However, unlike us computers do not processes the information we do, experiencing life the way we do… or so it goes. My question is, why do we make this assumption? Moreover, can the inverse claim that computers do experience qualia be rejected, and if not, then why are qualia so distinguished as a concept? Occam’s razor rejects the discrepancy between the P-N junction of a semiconductor and the synaptic cleft between neurons. Whether you are ready to bite this bullet or not, ponder this question: how do you know that your current state of consciousness is a continuation of the same episode from before you last went to sleep, not a “reboot” with all your memories copied over? You don’t. Every night you die, and every morning you are different.
Consciousness is an illusion. More specifically, consciousness is a helpful word we use to describe strange behaviors resulting from highly advanced cognition from an animal (and why it has to be from an animal is arbitrary). The word “conscious” can be thought of as an adjective. For example, how bright is this lightbulb? Kind of bright. There are things that are brighter or dimmer. Similarly, we can ask: how conscious is a plant? Only a bit, if at all. What about a human? Very conscious. Fish? Somewhere between a plant and human.
“What is consciousness?” is not a scientific question. The real hard question is, how can we measure consciousness? Some adjectives are easy: brightness can be measured in lumens, heaviness can be measured in gram-meters per second squared. Adjectives which are more complicated need to be broken down. How fragrant are these mint leaves? Well, if one gram of the sample is pureed and placed in a box of pure nitrogen gas at STP where the air is moving at 0.1 meters per second towards a chemical detector, how many organic volatile compounds quantified as molecules per second can we detect?
The protocol to measure fragrance is needfully specific, because fragrance is a complex property. Similarly, to measure consciousness we would first need to agree on a highly specific definition. The very reason that we disagree on its definition is a reason people use to argue that consciousness is distinctly fascinating property. This bit is not interesting to me. Half of Americans couldn’t say whether the pound is a unit of mass or weight. Even on the other hand, the world’s greatest minds in particle physics could not tell you what energy is, yet we have many instruments to measure it in standardized units. Disagreement is a lack of understanding. To expand our understanding we need science—without a research question, the discussion devolves to banter. To understand consciousness, we need to rethink the hard problem. Big and lofty questions are good and casual, but unanswerable. The hard problem is unanswerable because there is no hard problem. The answer lies in easy problems, just ones which have not been asked yet.
