[1]Principia Cybernetica Web

                      Is there a "hard problem" of consciousness?

   The "hard problem" of consciousness, according to which scientific models cannot
   explain the "qualia" or "first order experiences", is misguided if it is used to
   imply that we need more than structures and functions to explain conscious
   experience
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   First person experiences or qualia are the essentially subjective, personal
   feelings or experiences that each of us have (e.g. the feeling of "redness" or
   "cold"), and that cannot be described by words, formulas, programs or any other
   objective representation. According to some consciousness theorists, such as
   David Chalmers, an agent without such qualia would merely be a "zombie", a
   creature that may behave, sense and communicate just like a human being, but that
   would lack the most crucial aspect of consciousness. The "hard problem" of
   [2]consciousness research then consists in elucidating the nature of first-person
   experiences.

   We believe that this approach is essential misguided. If the hypothetical zombie
   behaves in all respects indistinguishably from a person with consciousness, then
   the [3]principle of the identity of the indistinguishables would force us to
   conclude that the "zombie" has consciousness. How else would we know that the
   people around us aren't zombies? We assume they have conscious experience similar
   to ourselves because they behave in all other respects similar to us. But if you
   would take this reasoning seriously, then you might start to get nightmarish
   fantasies in which you are the only real, conscious person in the world, and all
   the others are merely sophisticated automatons that pretend to be like you.

   What we do agree with is that "first-person experience" is essentially different
   from "third-person experience". Every cybernetic agent complex enough to be
   capable of [4]learning will develop an essentially unique experience. No language
   or formalism is powerful enough to capture this experience fully. Although we may
   have used certain formal languages to program our cybernetic agent-robot, once
   the robot has become capable of learning, its program will change in myriads of
   ways that are impossible to control or predict. If we could predict the robot's
   developments, this would merely mean that we have done a poor job of design,
   producing a creature that lacks the creativity and flexibility to adapt to really
   novel situations.

   Moreover, even for the most simple cybernetic agents, sensations, though perhaps
   not unique, are intrinsically subjective or affective. Agents do not sense the
   world as if they were impersonal, objective bystanders, that try to internally
   represent the world as it is, independently of themselves. For an agent a
   sensation is meaningful only to the degree that it relates to the agent's goals,
   which, in practice, means that it is relevant to the agent's individual survival.
   Thus, all sensation or awareness is from the beginning subjective or
   "first-person": it is directly connected to the "I", the "self", and only
   indirectly to the world outside.

   A [5]cybernetic system is defined by its relations, both the internal relations
   that determine its organization, and the external relations it has with its
   environment. Consciousness emerges from this network of relations, and not from
   the "objective", material components out of which the agent is built. What
   matters is not whether the robot is made from flesh and blood or from silicon
   chips, but how the robot's different sensations, goals, memories and actions are
   interrelated so as to produce an autonomous agent.

   Consciousness is not some mysterious substance, fluid, or property of matter, but
   a level of organization emerging from abstract processes and relations. People
   who search for consciousness in elementary particles (a form of panpsychism that
   has been suggested as a way to tackle the "hard problem"), because they cannot
   otherwise explain where the consciousness in our brain comes from, are misguided.
   Their intuition may be correct insofar that particles, just like any other
   system, should be seen as relations rather than just as clumps of matter. But to
   attribute consciousness to these extremely simple types of relations is merely a
   way to evade the really hard, but solvable, problem of reconstructing the complex
   cybernetic organization of the human mind in all its details and subtleties.
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   [6]Copyright© 2000 Principia Cybernetica - [7]Referencing this page

   Author
   F. [8]Heylighen,

   Date
   Apr 12, 2000

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                                    [15]Discussion
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     * [16]Discerning Consciousness via Scientific Method, Comment by Ben Swihart
     * [17]'identity of indescernables' insufficent for this argument, Comment by
       Bruce Edmonds
     * [18]General, Comment by Rangan

                                  [19]Add comment...

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References

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