The Hard Problem - Who Counts?
Stripped of philosophical rhetoric, the Hard Problem of Consciousness is: Why does it feel this way to be me? It's about the inner experience of being. I won't digress into the history and controversy of the issue except to say that I do indeed regard the problem as "hard". It seems to me that no amount of understanding of the "mind" as an epiphenomenon of physics can explain the feeling of being in the world. In fact, it is hard to imagine what such an "explanation" would look like.
For me, the first step in tackling a hard problem is to recognize that it is, indeed, hard. The most critical step in my Master's thesis research was to recognized that the problem I was trying to solve was provably impossible. The key was to ask the right question and to know that the question you'd really like to ask is unanswerable.
For the purposes of this discussion, I will use the term "soul" to refer to a (possibly hypothetical) entity that is capable of experiencing the world in some way similar to the way I do. I know I have a soul (but I may still be wrong). I'm less sure about you.
I love to collect impertinent questions about consciousness. Let me give you one that had my head spinning for awhile.
Sam Harris poses a thought experiment:
Suppose we could build a robot that perfectly mimicked human behavior with the ability to totally fool anyone as to its mechanical nature (passing the Turing Test with flying colours and then some). In philosophy, this entity is called a "philosophical zombie" which is identical to a human in all respects except lacking a "soul". Typically, Sam sprinkles scientific fairy dust on an old problem by imagining the zombie to be a robot. This is just a modern spin on an old issue [2].
Harris claims (and I agree) that we would treat this robot as a "person" long before this high level of functionality was achieved. After all, people love their cars and pet spiders.
So Sam asks, What is the meaning of such a relationship? If you fall in love with a robot, are you not, in fact, alone in he universe and just fooling yourself about being "in love"? Good question.
Harris is famously capable of asking impertinent questions, but, like the rest of us, rather poor at coming up with pertinent answers [1]. What is it that is bothering Harris? One thing you will know about Harris if you listen 5 minutes into any of his podcasts is that he loves an audience. He would clearly not be doing what he's doing if he had only an audience of robots (I feel the same way about my blog, by the way). So it makes sense for him to be horrified by the notion that a person might have nothing but "relationships" with soulless machines [3].
Perhaps Sam needs to get over himself. Really, there is no way to know for sure if Sam himself is not a robot . At the core of his concern is his need to know that there is a soul-to-soul connection which, as a byproduct, validates that he himself has a soul. Possibly a robot would falsely validate Sam's soul by acting in a programmed way like a human being but, inside, being nothing but millions of lines of code instructing the machine to act like a living being. How does Sam know that he is not a zombie? Impertinent question: why does it matter? Is it not annoying to as the Universe the ultimate question and get back the response: Why do you ask?
Is it possible that one of the key attributes of this hypothetical "soul" is simply the desperate need to contact other souls? Perhaps one preoccupation of "souls" is to prove their own existence - another form of the "hard problem"!
We can understand Sam's problem without invoking the idea of soul at all (this happens a lot with "soul" questions). Humans are social animals. Our evolutionary survival strategy gives us hard-wired brain functions that recognize faces, voices and social status. We have "mirror neurons" that allow us to experience the behavior of other people as our own - an ability that allows the great apes (and some birds) to learn by watching. The great evolutionary achievement of man is language, which makes no sense unless it's an excellent way to share experience. Thus, we can suspect that this hunger for connection arises out of human nature. Not necessarily anything to do with "souls".
Along with this "deep hunger" are two more notable human characteristics: curiosity and self-awareness. We can easily understand why humans would be aware and curious about their own need to connect with others "like themselves" and for some of them at least to ask, What do I mean by "like myself"? Damn. The hard question again.
Returning to Sam's concern, I'd say that it "feels good" to make connections with entities that feel like souls. It's more than just feeling. It's good for you - a way of behaving in a human way. Not feeling this way is "swimming upstream", bound to create unnecessary tension and suffering. Cutting to the chase, our lives will feel just fine even if we are living in a society of zombies. By definition, zombie relationships will fulfill all the inner needs of a human unless that human persists in asking unanswerable questions.
So Sam, If you can't find someone to love you, buy a dog. Or start a blog ...
But wait! Suppose Sam is, indeed, a zombie. This is an even more chilling scenario: a world consisting of nothing but robots - just machines pretending to interact in a human way. A world of intelligent cuckoo clocks. Since there is nobody left to fool, we can imagine that the robots fall far short of accurate human simulation. If we think about it for a second, this is worse than Sam's empty love affair. We can see that we don't need Sam at all to reach this horrifying dystopia. What if only our machines are left and there are no souls at all in the Universe?
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[1] Sam is also good at burying his ideas in a deep layer of scientific "fairy dust", making it seem like he's got a new spin on very old problems. By sleight of hand, it can seem that his new way of asking the old problem actually answers the old problem.
[2] In fact, Sam's problem may not even deserve treatment as a philosophical question at all. Is it not painful to be in a relationship with someone who "has no idea who I am?" Is that not a common complaint? Is that not a relationship that lacks "soul to soul" connection - like living with a zombie? Possibly even feeling yourself to be a zombie?
[3] The vast majority of "hits" on this blog come from Russia. I assume that these are "bots" crawling the web for nefarious purposes not including an interest in philosophy.
For me, the first step in tackling a hard problem is to recognize that it is, indeed, hard. The most critical step in my Master's thesis research was to recognized that the problem I was trying to solve was provably impossible. The key was to ask the right question and to know that the question you'd really like to ask is unanswerable.
For the purposes of this discussion, I will use the term "soul" to refer to a (possibly hypothetical) entity that is capable of experiencing the world in some way similar to the way I do. I know I have a soul (but I may still be wrong). I'm less sure about you.
I love to collect impertinent questions about consciousness. Let me give you one that had my head spinning for awhile.
Sam Harris poses a thought experiment:
Suppose we could build a robot that perfectly mimicked human behavior with the ability to totally fool anyone as to its mechanical nature (passing the Turing Test with flying colours and then some). In philosophy, this entity is called a "philosophical zombie" which is identical to a human in all respects except lacking a "soul". Typically, Sam sprinkles scientific fairy dust on an old problem by imagining the zombie to be a robot. This is just a modern spin on an old issue [2].
Harris claims (and I agree) that we would treat this robot as a "person" long before this high level of functionality was achieved. After all, people love their cars and pet spiders.
So Sam asks, What is the meaning of such a relationship? If you fall in love with a robot, are you not, in fact, alone in he universe and just fooling yourself about being "in love"? Good question.
Harris is famously capable of asking impertinent questions, but, like the rest of us, rather poor at coming up with pertinent answers [1]. What is it that is bothering Harris? One thing you will know about Harris if you listen 5 minutes into any of his podcasts is that he loves an audience. He would clearly not be doing what he's doing if he had only an audience of robots (I feel the same way about my blog, by the way). So it makes sense for him to be horrified by the notion that a person might have nothing but "relationships" with soulless machines [3].
Perhaps Sam needs to get over himself. Really, there is no way to know for sure if Sam himself is not a robot . At the core of his concern is his need to know that there is a soul-to-soul connection which, as a byproduct, validates that he himself has a soul. Possibly a robot would falsely validate Sam's soul by acting in a programmed way like a human being but, inside, being nothing but millions of lines of code instructing the machine to act like a living being. How does Sam know that he is not a zombie? Impertinent question: why does it matter? Is it not annoying to as the Universe the ultimate question and get back the response: Why do you ask?
Is it possible that one of the key attributes of this hypothetical "soul" is simply the desperate need to contact other souls? Perhaps one preoccupation of "souls" is to prove their own existence - another form of the "hard problem"!
We can understand Sam's problem without invoking the idea of soul at all (this happens a lot with "soul" questions). Humans are social animals. Our evolutionary survival strategy gives us hard-wired brain functions that recognize faces, voices and social status. We have "mirror neurons" that allow us to experience the behavior of other people as our own - an ability that allows the great apes (and some birds) to learn by watching. The great evolutionary achievement of man is language, which makes no sense unless it's an excellent way to share experience. Thus, we can suspect that this hunger for connection arises out of human nature. Not necessarily anything to do with "souls".
Along with this "deep hunger" are two more notable human characteristics: curiosity and self-awareness. We can easily understand why humans would be aware and curious about their own need to connect with others "like themselves" and for some of them at least to ask, What do I mean by "like myself"? Damn. The hard question again.
Returning to Sam's concern, I'd say that it "feels good" to make connections with entities that feel like souls. It's more than just feeling. It's good for you - a way of behaving in a human way. Not feeling this way is "swimming upstream", bound to create unnecessary tension and suffering. Cutting to the chase, our lives will feel just fine even if we are living in a society of zombies. By definition, zombie relationships will fulfill all the inner needs of a human unless that human persists in asking unanswerable questions.
So Sam, If you can't find someone to love you, buy a dog. Or start a blog ...
But wait! Suppose Sam is, indeed, a zombie. This is an even more chilling scenario: a world consisting of nothing but robots - just machines pretending to interact in a human way. A world of intelligent cuckoo clocks. Since there is nobody left to fool, we can imagine that the robots fall far short of accurate human simulation. If we think about it for a second, this is worse than Sam's empty love affair. We can see that we don't need Sam at all to reach this horrifying dystopia. What if only our machines are left and there are no souls at all in the Universe?
----------------------------
[1] Sam is also good at burying his ideas in a deep layer of scientific "fairy dust", making it seem like he's got a new spin on very old problems. By sleight of hand, it can seem that his new way of asking the old problem actually answers the old problem.
[2] In fact, Sam's problem may not even deserve treatment as a philosophical question at all. Is it not painful to be in a relationship with someone who "has no idea who I am?" Is that not a common complaint? Is that not a relationship that lacks "soul to soul" connection - like living with a zombie? Possibly even feeling yourself to be a zombie?
[3] The vast majority of "hits" on this blog come from Russia. I assume that these are "bots" crawling the web for nefarious purposes not including an interest in philosophy.
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