[Philosopy] What is "Consciousness"?

[Devils_Advocate]

I recall once seeing an observation that about 90% of philosophical debates are really debates about the meanings of words, with the participants acknowledging this in maybe 10% of cases. I suspect that those numbers are overly optimistic. While words in general are vague, some words are much vaguer than others, and to the extent that philosophy deals exclusively with the vague*, one should expect it to be positively packed with particularly vague words. I've intended for a while to get around to a discussion of just what it means for something to mean something, which seems like it could shed light on a lot of issues. This is not me finally starting that discussion, but I do hope that this preamble will encourage respondents to bear the aforementioned considerations in mind.

*I cannot recall ever having seen "philosophy" defined as "the study of the vague", but this strikes me as a succinct definition of, at least, one sense of the word.

One vague word that comes up in a lot of discussions is "consciousness". Sometimes "sentience" or perhaps "awareness" might be used instead. Let us begin by noting that defining one of these words in terms of another does little to clarify meaning. Often a group of interrelated words have well-established relationships to each other, but far less clear relationships to anything else. The problems with this should be obvious. In this case, we cannot say whether e.g. an organism is sentient if we only know how the concepts of sentience and consciousness and awareness relate to each other, and not to the concept of an organism. For that matter, speaking of three concepts here seems overly generous; these words are almost if not entirely synonymous, with different senses of any one of them differing from each other more than do the words themselves.

I would like for this thread to serve as a place for us to explain some of the things that we understand these vague terms to mean. To clarify, I am looking for more than definitions like "awareness is the property of being aware". We can talk about how these words relate to each other, and about what different connotations we see them as having, but the goal here is to explain how these words relate to other things. It is not my intent for us to establish a single consensus definition of any term. When a word has multiple different commonly used senses, it creates confusion to try to clarify "its meaning" as if it only has one meaning. If one's goal is to understand how language is used in practice, one should acknowledge and attempt to explain such a word's various different meanings.

But I would also like for us to explore and to evaluate the merits of the various philosophical stances that these words are used to describe. In fact, this thread started out as a criticism of a particular concept of "consciousness". I thought that it would be nice to get some feedback, and also to have a reasonably well-constructed argument to link back to whenever I see a certain variety of nonsense (in my view) crop up. However, I'm unclear on how often the particular idea I'll argue against is the one that someone else is trying to express. So in cases in which it isn't, perhaps others can try to clarify here what they really mean, and then I can argue against, or perhaps even agree with, that. And having a repository of various ideas on the subject seems like it could be useful for anyone who wants to understand those ideas better.

So, with all of that out of the way, let me try to kick things off with some of my own musings.


On the Subject of Qualia and the Quining Thereof

People sometimes talk about "what it's like" to have some manner of subjective experience. There's an idea that there's a core, essential, ineffable component to a perception that makes that perception what it is. That while, for example, perceiving the color red may be associated with memories of various red objects, emotional responses, and so on -- may have various other mental correlates -- there is a core subjective experience of redness which is independent of all of the other things related to it.

And my perceptions certainly seem to have that manner of core essential element to them. Indeed, my perceptions seeming to have such core components is very much a part of how I experience them. My considered opinion on the matter, however, is that not only is there no incommunicable essential quality to subjective experience, but that such a thing is not possible; that there quite simply is "no room left over" for such a thing to exist in addition to everything else when everything has been accounted for. I realize that this is a counterintuitive stance. I hope that my readers can grant that our intuitions, even strong intuitions, can run counter to the truth.

The assumption that fundamental units of personal experience can't be shared with others leads to the conclusion that none of us can ever know whether someone else's personal experience is the same as our own. One might imagine that one could get around that through direct telepathic transmission of subjective experience; but the problem is, how can one ever know whether what is received is the same as what is transmitted?

Suppose that a purported channel of direct experience-sharing were opened between you and another person, only for you to find that that individual's perception of every image was the negative of your own, with white replaced with black, red with cyan, and so on; and the other person reported the same. You could conclude "Wow, this person has exactly the opposite perceptions that I have in response to the same external stimuli!" But you could also conclude "Woah, this person's perceptions of color are stored in the opposite way from how mine are, and whatever is transferring stuff between our minds isn't accounting for the difference."

But that's not just an issue with comparing the internal experiences of two different minds. Imagine that your own subjective impressions of color were somehow inverted, but that all of their associations were inverted as well. I'm positing a scenario in which your current perception of white is replaced with your current perception of black, but all of your memories of white are also instead of black, your feelings towards white become feelings towards black, and so on and so forth, with the same happening with each color and its complement. So you'd remember bright black light hurting your eyes, but of course you'd use the word "white" for it, because you remember the word "white" being the word for that color.

If the essential subjective nature of an experience really is separate from everything else about it, it's hard to see how the above-described scenario isn't internally consistent, whether or not it's possible in practice. In which case, you could hypothetically have your essential subjective impressions swapped around without being aware of it. Even if a complete scan of your brain showed no change, how could you know that the opposite perceptions weren't being stored in the opposite way? One might respond that the form in which it is stored is not a separate thing from the perception's essential nature. But even then, it would be impossible to tell the difference through mere introspection.

But that in turn undermines the definitive nature of our personal subjective experiences as something of which we have direct knowledge. If we can't tell whether perceptions were been swapped around, then there doesn't seem to be any particular sense in which we're aware that one of them is one thing and not something else. But even more than that, if the essential component of an experience doesn't interact with anything else, then it's not part of the same system of cause and effect. The metaphorical box that supposedly contains subjective redness could have anything or nothing in it, and that would play no role whatsoever in the construction of the abstract concept of subjective redness. So not only do we not know what's in that box in the sense of having justified beliefs about it, but its contents can't be subjective redness, because they don't play the relevant role, nor any role at all. A gear which turns no others is not part of the mechanism.

[Aedilred]

I recall once seeing an observation that about 90% of philosophical debates are really debates about the meanings of words, with the participants acknowledging this in maybe 10% of cases. I suspect that those numbers are overly optimistic. While words in general are vague, some words are much vaguer than others, and to the extent that philosophy deals exclusively with the vague*, one should expect it to be positively packed with particularly vague words. I've intended for a while to get around to a discussion of just what it means for something to mean something, which seems like it could shed light on a lot of issues. This is not me finally starting that discussion, but I do hope that this preamble will encourage respondents to bear the aforementioned considerations in mind.

*I cannot recall ever having seen "philosophy" defined as "the study of the vague", but this strikes me as a succinct definition of, at least, one sense of the word.

I must admit I haven't actually read the Investigations (life's too short) but isn't this essentially what Wittgenstein is all about?

[veti]

I think you are conflating two or more distinct questions here. Whether our internal perceptions are the same as each other's - is, I think, both unanswerable and irrelevant.

To the thread question, I recommend a book by Douglas Hofstadter called I am a strange loop. The title is itself an answer to the question, but of course you have to read the book to understand what it means. I can't convey more than a sliver of it here, partly because I don't have the time, but also largely because there's a fair bit that I frankly don't understand myself.

The Wikipedia article on "strange loops" gives a taste of the thesis, but inevitably sells it short. The book stands out more in my mind because it describes a completely materialistic interpretation of such abstractions as "the soul" and "love", as well as "self" and consciousness.

I'm sorry to give such a terse and possibly dismissive response to such a lengthy and thoughtful question, but it really doesn't feel like this is an appropriate forum for rigorous philosophy. We are too distracted, too pressed for time, too - frankly - frivolous to stay on topic for long.

[Unavenger]

I subscribe to the point of view that if philosophy is to be worthwhile, it needs to have an actual purpose - a point of view so close to tautological and so damned obvious that I consider it pretty much self-evident.

On the basis of this same philosophical pragmatism, I'm happy to allow "Consciousness" to be defined in a very linguistic descriptivist kind of way. When we are hit on the head and lose consciousness for a while, or enter a dreamless sleep and become unconscious for a while, we know what consciousness is because we know what it's like to be conscious, and we know what it's like to be unconscious, which is to say that we know that it isn't anything at all. We know well enough how to determine unconsciousness in others as well (although we generally prefer the term unresponsive because we cannot technically tell that the person in question isn't actually fully conscious but just unable to take any actions to respond to stimulus).

Even lawmakers and law enforcers are willing to use this kind of descriptivism. While this sentence, uttered in a court of law...

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that"

...was actually about trying to put a definition on hardcore pornography, the same kind of sentiment could easily apply to consciousness. We may not be able to come up with a coherent reason why an AI is not a consciousness, I could perhaps never succeed in intelligibly doing so, but I know it when I see it, and the AI involved in this hypothetical is not that.

---

As for qualia, the point that my experience of red could be different than yours is a kind of philosophical minutia I don't really want to wrap myself up in, but the question of what it's like to be angry, or what it's like to suffer an injustice, and what such an anger-inducing injustice might tempt a reasonable person to do, and what a reasonable person might believe in a certain situation, and whether a reasonable person would become afraid of a fight in progress, are all questions which have actual merit in the law and, I think, in our understanding of our fellow humans and our ability to have shared experiences.

I assume my experience of red is not the same as that of someone who is red-green colourblind*, and if it is, then I can be certain that my experience of green isn't. Whether my experience of what red looks like is the same as yours or not is basically immaterial and I really don't care. Is that a satisfying answer no, is it pragmatic philosophy yes. But is my experience of anger the same as yours? The answer is something like "Probably."

We generally understand that what we think and feel influences our decisions, and I'm willing to call epiphenomenalism enough of a "WeLl TeChNiCaLlY yOu CaN't PrOvE iT iSn'T tRuE" move, along with philosophical zombies and literally anything remotely referencing the Matrix, that these views can safely be ignored. At the very least, either what we think and feel influences our decisions, or something else is the case that happens by sheer coincidence to be functionally identical. Not only is the idea - that thinking "Oh, I need to go and do X" has no bearing on you doing X - positively absurd, but it doesn't even matter if it's not true, for the same reason that it doesn't matter whether hurricane warning systems work because meteorologists understand hurricanes or because hurricanes happen, by some crazy coincidence, to work in a completely different way that happens to be trackable by the exact same methods the exact same amount of the time. The hurricane is still tracked and we can still predict people's actions based on their emotions.

How might we know if someone else's perceptions are the same as ours? Well, we can check certain points of similarity. Turquoise looks like the sad child of blue and green (partly because it is), and major anxiety attacks feel as though you lost a fight with a Van Der Graff machine (although I would note that this is a fairly rare occurrence). If we can get people to agree that yes, turquoise looks a bit like blue and a bit like green, and that yes, when they have really bad anxiety attacks, they get the same kind of static feeling in their face too, then we can at least say that my experience of turqouise is analagous to yours in terms of blue and green, and that my experience of anxiety is analogous to yours in terms of headbutting a static orb. We can also see where things are different, particularly in cases where you might be colourblind or not experience the same kinds of anxiety attacks I do.

What this means is that even if my experience of the world isn't the same as yours, it has some kind of mostly 1:1 mapping with a few exceptions. The relation in my mind between what pink looks like, what white looks like and what red looks like, or what blue and green and turquoise look like, or magenta and blue and red, can produce a colour spectrum that just happens (by no coincidence whatsoever) to map to yours, and indeed also to an actual RGB or CMYK spectrum. Essentially, if I draw out my colour spectrum, even if the colours may look different for you than for me, but they'll all be in the right place.

We can do the same thing with emotions. We can probably agree that happy is about the opposite of sad and that annoyed is a little bit like angry only less so, and offended is a bit like angry too but also a bit like upset (or you can at least see where I'm coming from if I say that). You can't do the same kind of mapping out as easily as with a colour spectrum because you can't make a hex value and define emotions that way, so people will disagree more often, but I feel justified in presuming that to be largely semantic.

So we know that everyone's turquoise is a little bit like that person's green and a little bit like that person's blue, and that everyone's happy is the opposite of everyone's sad, unless otherwise specified, but all we've done is shown that the same internal comparisons are being made. If we want to make sure everything matches up perfectly, we need at least one anchor point per field (colour, emotion, sound, or whatever) and then we need to be able to work out what all our directions in that field actually mean. For example, if we use black as an anchor point, and we know what "Redder" "Greener" and "Bluer" actually mean, we can confirm whether or not our experience is actually shared. The bad news is that doing it that way is completely impossible.

The other way to do this is to look at what the actual effects of the colours or emotions are. We may not have the same experience of red, but does red affect us in the same way? The answer is probably "Yes". In almost every culture, red is violence, green and brown are nature, blue is calm, black is death or secrets, white is purity. Orange is familiarity and dark blue is fear or the unknown. Does anger affect us in the same way, and for that matter, is it caused the same way? Of course. Angry people raise their voices or act violently (not to mention that their heart rate tends to increase, although of course the real poster-kid for physiological reactions to emotions is arousal), and anger is brought on by insult, injury or injustice, whether real or percieved. Of course, with emotions, there's a lot more variance in how it's caused (I leave it up in the air as to how much colours affect us, because I can only really believe it's quite a lot).

Of course, because I'm doing my best to effect philosophical pragmatism, my go-to is that of course you're experiencing the same emotion as me when we're both insulted, both yell at our interlocutor, and both later describe that emotion we felt as "Anger". I do think it's certainly relevant that we can create a mostly 1:1 mapping of how my brain associates emotions and how someone else's does, and also quite interesting that we can probably do that even though I am autistic and they might not be.

Naturally, of course, synaesthesia messes with this. While most people have gustatory-olfactory synaesthesia (which is to say that it makes sense to refer to something as tasting the same way that it smells, or indeed tasting different to how it smells) and I would argue they have some kind of chromatic-emotional synaesthesia as well (the only reason it makes sense to say that red is anger, blue is calm and black is fear beyond simply deciding that you're going to associate those things), a lot of people with less common synaesthesias (like chromatic-gustatory, whereby things taste certain colours, which a good friend has, and numerical-spacial, whereby numbers seem to take up space in a room, which the lead singer of Icon for Hire has) have different mappings from each other - so while my friend thinks that the sweet, refreshing taste of [product placement here] is bright green, another person might think it tastes dark blue. This is probably okay for most purposes, though - people will still have the same mappings within a field (such as colours or tastes), even if they don't always have the same mappings across fields.

There's one more neurodivergence that I'd like to talk about before I head out and that's dissociative identity disorder - also known as "Multiple personality disorder", albeit strictly speaking incorrectly. The different alters ("personalities") can have radically different worldviews, gender identities, sexual orientations, desires, thoughts, preferences and indeed personailities, not to mention different levels of intellectual capability. I think it's relatively safe to call them different people in light of this. At least in some cases of DID, though, those alters can actually access each other's memories or experiences directly. This is almost exactly like the thought experiment you've suggested where you can wire yourself into someone else's experiences, except it's not a thought experiment and they can actually do it. To reiterate, these could be a fiercely competitive, implulsive pansexual man with a desire to change the world rather than sit and wait for it to change, and an ace, nonbinary borderline noninterventionist with a calm, collected affect and a sharp wit (and what the hey, I'm talking about real people here, that's not a hypothetical, these are real alters of someone I know) and yet they still feel the same emotions the same way and experiene the same colours the same way.

So I'm willing to bet that the same experiences are the same, fundamentally, for everyone unless otherwise stated - it's only whether or not we actually like them that differs. And even if our experiences aren't actually the same, they map to each other in the same way and they essentially function the same, and we can talk about them as though they were the same ("You know that feeling where...?"), and we generally acknowledge that they work the same way when we judge other people, in a court of law or the court of public opinion, on whether their reaction was a reasonable or understandable response to their emotional state. We already work on the assumption that other people's experiences of red or of anger are fundamentally like our own, unless we have a good reason to think otherwise. If I want to apply obnoxious levels of scientific burden of proof to this, I could argue that the onus is on anyone else to prove that there's any difference (after all, the null hypothesis is generally speaking that everything's the same and nothing does anything). If I don't, I can just show that it's relatively trivially the case that we already consider it to be the same for everyone, and we haven't broken anything that we can tell by making that assumption.

This babble brought to you by a philosopher who intensely dislikes most of philosophy, at an hour at which they should totally be in bed. I hope it makes some kind of sense anyway.



*Except that the cause of colourblindness is ocular, not neurological, so maybe their experience is the same but they'll just never have that experience. While we're at it, I'm also ignoring the fact that XX people can possibly see more shades of red than XY people, and also ignoring tetrachromacy for good measure, on the same basis.

[Tvtyrant]

Personally I think consciousness originates in communications. Communicating is a group activity, you are conveying information or intent to another organism (waggy tails, sneezing, whatever.) The more complex the information the larger the ability to either provide incorrect information or intentionally lie. To be able to guess when information is wrong or someone is lying about their intent you need to be able to compare your experience to their experience. Once you can do that you are able to see yourself as a separate entity from yourself, viewing the self as one would an outsider and you have consciousness.

The more an organism benefits from lying the more consciousness they need to be able to decipher if a lie would be plausible, and the more consciousness the viewer needs to be able to decipher your motivations for possibly lying. Koko the Gorilla would blame acts on its kitten as children do on clowns, not having enough development to see when the lie is clearly a fabrication.

[Anti-Eagle]

Consciousness is a self perpetuating idea invented by chemical processes, that I hope lives on after death as a psychic or spiritual entity.
The idea of being shut off like a light switch terrifies me. Do you just experience your death for what is eternity by your perception if that's the case?

OH GOD! OH ****! SOMEONE SAVE US!

*Ahem.* Philosophically I believe consciousness is more common than we'd like to think, but awareness and complexity differs based on where it develops in our world. As we stand? We're a self perpetuating machine that invents memes to increase the complexity of our view of reality. That is our conscious behaviour. We invented language just to accomplish this. Does it make us more successful, yes. But I don't believe that is necessarily the goal. I think memes are a parasitic force in our behaviours that helps drive conscious thought.

[Rydiro]

Consciousness seems to be unscientific (i.e. not generally testable) yet obviously existing (everyone reading this has a conscious experience).

Any statement beyond that is speculation and probably always will be.

[Vahnavoi]

All philosophical discussion is technically about meaning of words, but if it feels like a discussion's only that, in practice it means one, several or all parties are crap at communicating.

As far as consciousness goes, I consider everything to consist of energy and information; specifically, information limits energy into some shape. In everyday terms, consciousness is electromagnetism. It is technically true to say that a rock is conscious, or a beam of light, or a tree. It is counter-intuitive to our everyday experience, but it's the fundamental reason why you can rearrange the energy in a rock, or a beam of light, or a tree, into a being that adheres to our everyday ideas of consciousness, such as a human or a dog.

What follows from this is that qualia are fundamentally transferable and non-unique. If you can copy information of an organism with sufficient fidelity and have suitable energy to act as a medium, you can replicate internal experiences exactly. At a sufficiently deep level, there is no hard line between "subjective" and "objective", they're not antonyms, they're not 100% mutually exclusive sets of phenomena, and if scientific progress can continue for long enough, every "subjective" experience will pass from realm of metaphysics to physics and be explainable in "objective" terms.

[Unavenger]

I consider everything to consist of energy and information; specifically, information limits energy into some shape.

Isn't that just saying "Energy, but in specific patterns" or specific types of energy?

In everyday terms, consciousness is electromagnetism.

What? No it isn't.

It is technically true to say that a rock is conscious, or a beam of light, or a tree.

Again, "What? No it isn't."

It is counter-intuitive to our everyday experience, but it's the fundamental reason why you can rearrange the energy in a rock, or a beam of light, or a tree, into a being that adheres to our everyday ideas of consciousness, such as a human or a dog.

Oh, I think I see? You're taking the really, really reductionist take that everything is stuff, and stuff is energy, and energy is electromagnetism, therefore consciousness is electromagnetism. But if you want to do that, you have to remember that consciousness is a particular type of stuff, and stuff is a particualr type of energy, so it doesn't really follow that consciousness is electromagnetism. You could use the same line of logic to say that trees are matter and dogs are matter therefore dogs are trees. You also seem to be using words in a way that doesn't key to actual descriptivist meanings of how they're used. I'd also disagree that consciousness is even stuff any more than a play is stuff or a game of D&D is stuff: it comes about because of stuff and all of the components that make it work are stuff (or energy, and stuff is energy, yadda yadda) but it's a thing that happens, not stuff that exists

What follows from this is that qualia are fundamentally transferable and non-unique. If you can copy information of an organism with sufficient fidelity and have suitable energy to act as a medium, you can replicate internal experiences exactly. At a sufficiently deep level, there is no hard line between "subjective" and "objective", they're not antonyms, they're not 100% mutually exclusive sets of phenomena, and if scientific progress can continue for long enough, every "subjective" experience will pass from realm of metaphysics to physics and be explainable in "objective" terms.

Naturally, this doesn't follow, and the fact that it doesn't follow is kinda not really to do with the argument that you just made.

Obviously, we generally agree that DVD players are just as much "Stuff" as brains are, but sometimes they're broken and they show bad picture quality, or they're just not very good and they show bad picture quality, or whatever. Same is functionally true of brains. Sure, they're both made of stuff, but that stuff will interpret the same things differently, and this has literally nothing to do with the fact that brains are sorta electromagnetism if you try hard enough.

[Asmotherion]

The ability to diferenciate your self from your environment and act on your best interest for your survival based on the information accessible to you. That would be in my oppinion the best way to describe consciousness.

[Rydiro]

The ability to diferenciate your self from your environment...

That ability seems to be actually pretty uncommon in animals.