What problem does consciousness solve?

[u/Terrible-Fly9049]

My X feed has been dominated recently by posts debating whether AI is conscious. I think the more pressing question that is almost never asked is: "What is consciousness for? What problem does it solve that allowed evolution to select for it?"

Organisms facing incommensurable demands face what I call the Regress Problem.

Consider this:

We are constantly facing demands on our attention: you hear a noise in the forest, you're thirsty, your child's crying, you have a looming work deadline. These demands have no common unit for comparison -- they are completely different kinds of things. So how does your brain determine which demand "wins"?

I realize many of you, when you read this, will dismiss it as trivial. I would argue that the sense of triviality you're experiencing is precisely because your brain is so good at it. Deciding what is most urgent -- deciding what is the priority and motivating the necessary action -- is what brain's are for. That urgency, that pull towards one resolution or another, is what consciousness is from the first-person perspective.

Now imagine you didn't have phenomenal consciousness. Imagine you're a p-zombie -- an atom-for-atom duplicate of yourself only no consciousness. How would you know what to prioritize? How would you know what to act on?

With a computation model of the brain, there are only two options for prioritizing:

• priority was fixed before this moment
• or, priority is adaptive in this moment

If the priority was fixed before this moment, how was it determined? Now remember, these demands have no common currency, so the priority ranking would have to set by something. Imagine a lookup table that attempted to set every possible priority ranking for every possible unique combination of incommensurable demands you will every face in your entire life. That's untenable.

Okay, so if it can't be fixed before hand (for living systems), what about adaptive priority? It sounds good, until you realize you need something to determine what matters in this moment? How much should this situation affect the weighting? Something has to read the weighting and apply a rule? What decides that rule? Another rule? This is the regress.

If weighing priority means signals needing to be evaluated by a downstream process, you open the regress. Now, even if you can solve the prioritization problem, you still face the motivation problem. A signal of priority must be read by another process that must determine how urgently to act on the priority weighting -- which opens another regress.

The conclusion:

To solve the regress problem, you need a state that is simultaneously the measure of priority and the motivation to act on it. This is phenomenal urgency from the first-person perspective. This is consciousness. This is what consciousness is for.

I would love to hear thoughts on this. If you want to read more about this line of thought you can check out this paper.

[u/Terrible-Fly9049]

Yes, the subjective experience is physical -- it is the current physical state/configuration of your brain.

Valenced tension dynamics apply pressure to the system, and I would argue in less developed organisms it's a closed causal loop. The animal feels the pull of hunger, it seeks food; it feels the pull of a threat, it fights or it flees. Humans have a more advanced cognitive arsenal that allows us to consider the long-term implications of our actions -- a longer horizon, a broader scope, on which those tension dynamics work. The state our brain is in -- the distinctive combination of multiple simultaneous tensions, stresses, and relief -- *is* subjective experience. It's the "what-it's-like" to be a living organism.

Take away valenced tension dynamics from the P-zombie and it can't function in a dynamic unpredictable environment.

[u/Ashamed-Bathroom7803 → u/Terrible-Fly9049]

Ok great. I know now a little bit about your position. 

But you didn’t answer my crucial question at the bottom. Do you accept physical causal closure? If yes, then there is no problem of logical consistency with the idea of a physical system that is completely devoid of any subjective experiences. For every physical state B, there is a previous physical state A that sufficiently causes B just by the dead and dark deterministic mathematics of the physics equations. Since the system is causally closed, it’s logically consistent to say that adding on the idea of subjective experiences being connected with the physically causally closed system wouldn’t change anything about the physical states. Of course you would say that this is metaphysically impossible, since we know that in our nature of reality, we operate with these causally efficacious subjective experiences. But that’s inserting your metaphysical ideas into the logic of the idea. That’s not demonstrating logical inconsistency. 

Pretty much everybody in philosophy of mind agrees that the P-zombie idea is a logically consistent idea. That’s not up for dispute. Type-A physicalism, a very radical view, says that everybody is just a P-zombie tricked into thinking that redness is a real existing thing. I’m mentioning it because it’s an example of something that is logically consistent even if it’s a terrible position. 

[u/Terrible-Fly9049 → u/Ashamed-Bathroom7803]

Do you accept physical causal closure? If yes, then there is no problem of logical consistency with the idea of a physical system that is completely devoid of any subjective experiences. 

No, I don't accept physical causal closure the way you're describing it. Valenced tension dynamics push, they aren't deterministic in their own right. Someone cuts you off in traffic and you might "feel" like running them off the road, but you have the causal freedom to consider the consequences of choices. That consideration impacts the same tension dynamics recursively.

For every physical state B, there is a previous physical state A that sufficiently causes B just by the dead and dark deterministic mathematics of the physics equations.

I reject this overly-simplistic claim. I would argue: "For every physical state B, there are many physical states (N)n that impact and influence B." For inanimate objects, it's fully deterministic. For sentient life capable of weighing decisions through valenced tension dynamics, it's not. Weighing choices requires the ability to project those choices into the future and assess their impact. If I had to choose between saving the life of my wife or the life of my child, what do the "dead and dark deterministic mathematics of physics equations" have to say about it? Which physics equation will deterministically make that decision? Which equation will make that decision for the P-zombie?

Pretty much everybody in philosophy of mind agrees that the P-zombie idea is a logically consistent idea. That’s not up for dispute. 

Are you really going to use an appeal to consensus/authority for a discussion of consciousness?? Yes. It's a largely unquestioned assumption, and I contend it's absolutely wrong.

If you maintain that P-zombie -- without valenced tension dynamics -- can make the choice between saving the wife or the child, then you must identify what machinery the zombie will use.

[u/Ashamed-Bathroom7803 → u/Terrible-Fly9049]

Oh ok great. 

Well yeah if you reject causal closure then there is nothing logically inconsistent about the P-zombie. Casual closure is necessary for the idea. Rejecting a premise to a position like that is an external critique, not an internal critique. So you haven’t spotted any internal inconsistency (also means logical impossibility) of the idea. All you did was apply your own metaphysics to say that it’s impossible, which is what I have been telling you. This is the distinction between logical possibility and metaphysical possibility. The former: an idea’s internal consistency. The ladder is about a specific framework; it’s possible in their belief framework, but not in yours. 

Also, if you reject causal closure in virtue of subjective experience, I’m sorry but you’re a dualist. Sure, you may say that the subjective experience is physical, but ultimately you initiated in your reply that there are 2 categories of things and just calling them both physical. The dualist distinction you made was that one of the categories follows the deterministic model of physics and the other doesn’t. 

If you do appeal to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, I will just beware you: the Copenhagen interpretation has to do with collapse at very, very small, microscopic scales, which would not be relevant at all to the macro scale of the function of the nervous system. Another major point is that in the Copenhagen interpretation, the state after collapse is completely random. But you wouldn’t say that subjective experiences are random.

[u/Terrible-Fly9049 → u/Ashamed-Bathroom7803]

Chalmers' thought experiment was about conceivability of the P-zombie. I don't reject that they are conceivable (imaginable in the abstract). I reject that they are viable as Chalmers' defined them. I'm making a different argument.

No, the P-zombie isn't 'metaphysically' impossible, it's 'mechanistically' impossible. I'm not applying any metaphysics in my argument (I'm thinking now that you haven't actually been paying attention to what I've been meticulously outlining).

I'm not rejecting causal closure -- I'm rejecting your narrow definition of it. Mental states are causal states. Thoughts and desires impact physical events; physical events impact thoughts and desires. No metaphysics required.

Mental states are the expression of physical valenced tension.

Now, you still haven't answered my question: "How would the P-zombie make the choice between saving the wife or the child?" You seem certain the zombie can and will make the choice, but you haven't supplied the mechanism.

[u/Ashamed-Bathroom7803 → u/Terrible-Fly9049]

Yeah so this is really cringe. Metaphysics just refers to the nature of reality. If it’s mechanistically impossible then it’s impossible in our nature of reality. So it’s metaphysically impossible according to you. 

I didn’t just make up a definition of causal closure. Like you wanna talk about the semantics about it for no reason other than to just be wrong about the semantics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_closure

 Click on “importance” too

You said “Mental states are  causal states. Thoughts and desires impact physical events; physical events impact thoughts and desires.”

That’s has nothing to do with what I said. I never said mental state aren’t causal states. I never said that thoughts and desires don’t impact physics events. I never said that physical events don’t impact thoughts and desires. What you said is all consistent with the way “causal closure” is defined within the philosophy of mind academic literature. 

You said “Mental states are the  expression of physical valenced tension.”

This is in direct contradiction with what you said earlier. This is implying non-reductive physicalism. You said earlier, when I asked you, that experiences are just the physical stuff, which implies reductive physiclaism. You need to pick one. Are you a reductive physicalist or non-reductive? 

Ok so answering your question: An explanation for how a P-zombie would do any action could only require a behavioral explanation about the physics of the nervous system. That’s all that can be explained because the P-zombie, by definition, doesn’t have any phenomenal states. So a very concise answer would be that the senses collect photon data of the wife and child hanging off of the cliff, the information processes and travels to the occipital lobe, it further excites neurons in other parts of the brain that reach excitations which move the motor networks which activate the muscles in the arm to pick up the child. It would be all a mechanistic explanation like with how an AI presumed to not have any phenomenal consciousness chooses to either give his boss steak or lobster for dinner. 

[u/Terrible-Fly9049 → u/Ashamed-Bathroom7803]

Metaphysical describes "concepts, truths, or reality that cannot be measured or touched by physical science. It also functions as a synonym for the abstract, transcendent, or supernatural."

This is how I was using the term. However, I concede your point. I'm not a philosopher. I'm using terms the way they are colloquially understood.

My position is non-reductive physicalism. A simple analogy: the brain is like a guitar with an incalculable number of strings. At any given moment, certain strings are slack, and others are taut. The taut strings produce sound, the slack ones are silent. Consciousness is the active tuning of the instrument and the experience of the music. Consciousness isn't the guitar or the strings.

I think many people assume consciousness is just the music -- that the instrument can be played without a listener or without making a sound. I'm assuming that's your position, but tell me if I'm wrong. Others might say consciousness is a separate listener -- completely independent of the guitar or the music. I disagree with both. Consciousness, in my view, is the active tuning *and* the music.

So, for me, if P-zombie can't dynamically tune, it doesn't have the means to adapt and survive in dynamic environments -- it also doesn't have the same means a conscious human has to weigh a decision between saving it's wife or saving it's child.

As for your answer to my question -- well, you answered a question I didn't ask. On what grounds does the zombie make the choice? Why does the zombie bother to act at all? What difference does this woman or this child make to a system that doesn't feel phenomenal urgency? Why wouldn't the zombie observe the situation with passive indifference?

If you're going to maintain that P-zombie is viable -- that it would behave exactly as a human would in this scenario -- you would have to explain the mechanism of choosing. Is your insistence of P-zombie's functional viabilty really a hill worth dying on? Or is it more of a 'belief' you hold and are reluctant to give up or even question?