My position is that I'd like an engineering-based, materialist theory of experienced affective consciousness (qualia) - but I doubt it is there to be found, even in principle.
The trouble is that, unlike intuitions in the past, the robotic/LLM emulation of an apparently conscious human being doesn't seem that conceptually difficult - and may even be achieved in decades.
But nowhere in that design would there be anything to identify as consciousness, I suspect. It seems only an extrapolation of current hardware and software design. Truly we are en route, it appears, to building something/someone whose status we can't settle on: it acts and converses as we do, the lights are on, but most likely no-one's at home.
It's even harder when you think that the experience of things (pain, pleasure, the look and feel of colours) surely has an evolutionary history. So there must be animals today, much less social and smart than humans, which experience sensations. A crab or a lizard? Are they more like robot vacuum cleaners or more like us?
The trouble is, I can imagine drone designers eventually producing drones isomorphic in behaviour to crabs and lizards while identifying neither a need to invoke, nor independent evidence of, consciousness in their creations.
But evolution is natural design, so doesn't this undermine our confidence in inferring animal consciousness from behaviour? In our own case, of course, experience is where we start, not something we infer by watching ourselves. So introspectively there can't be any doubts.
It's hard to reconcile these two intuitions.
Selection can explain why an animal detects injury and learns to avoid it. Does that also explain why that injury hurts?
Philosophers argue that experiential consciousness might simply be what certain engineering mechanisms constitute by virtue of their functional organisation.
And I retort: how? The same argument does for the crab and the crab-drone. Are we to say that by virtue of their designed functions the flame of conscious experience has turned on for both entities?
Perhaps experiential consciousness (pain, pleasure, the affective experience of the world; qualia) is not a logical consequence of certain kinds of designs. We have evidence connecting and correlating neural processes with felt-experiences, but no compelling explanation of why those processes should feel like anything.
Perhaps experiential consciousness is not explicable ultimately by the laws of physics plus boundary conditions, not another effective theory. Perhaps expecting such an explanation is itself a category error.
Perhaps consciousness is instead a further attribute of reality? Part of what exists beyond what our physical, data-driven descriptions capture - whether something additional to matter or something about matter we have not understood?
This may both be true and yet not constitute the basis of a research programme. Perhaps science - the dialectic of theory and practice - is something which requires the third-party materialist paradigm as its precondition?
We remain confronted by mystery - one towards which, if we're honest with ourselves, our intuitions push us, faute de mieux.
One question about this post as presented, is what the word "materialist" means in this context of the discussion of science?
ReplyDeleteIn classical physics we have a good enough intuition of what it means, as we move to classical fields we have a reasonable intuition - although now a little extended as these "fields" generally now permeate all of space-time. Initially the "gravitational field", now the "Higgs Field" permeate space-time. So this isnt quite as materialist as one takes an intuition from.
With Quantum Mechanics we lose more of the intuition of materialism - we appear to get results from Null experiments, etc. The non-locality from Bell's theorem also implies a non-materialism from a current physics (relativistic) perspective also.
Having said that, of course, we don't know whether any of this, or even anything that might immediately - (and in any physics theory to develop from this non-materialism) - be deduced from this physics non-materialism, has anything to do with any non-materialism in consciousness.
So the conclusion from some symbolic AI and now the LLM story is that it is possible to embody ie simulate the cognitive skills of analytical intelligence. However to pursue consciousness via science means digging ever deeper into neural brain models, any "quantum biology", and perhaps then deeper into what Quantum is and means. Maybe all this will still be superficial, but we have the mysteries there to explore.