Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought

Philip Goff

Scientific American

Originally published 3 July 24

Here is an excerpt:

The hard problem comes after we’ve explained all of these functions of the brain, where we are still left with a puzzle: Why is the carrying out of these functions accompanied by experience? Why doesn’t all this mechanistic functioning go on “in the dark”? In my own work, I have argued that the hard problem is rooted in the way that the “father of modern science,” Galileo, designed physical science to exclude consciousness.

Chalmers made the quandary vivid by promoting the idea of a “philosophical zombie,” a complicated mechanism set up to behave exactly like a human being and with the same information processing in its brain, but with no consciousness. You stick a knife in such a zombie, and it screams and runs away. But it doesn’t actually feel pain. When a philosophical zombie crosses the street, it carefully checks that there is no traffic, but it doesn’t actually have any visual or auditory experience of the street.

Nobody thinks zombies are real, but they offer a vivid way of working out where you stand on the hard problem. Those on Team Chalmers believe that if all there was to a human being were the mechanistic processes of physical science, we’d all be zombies. Given that we’re not zombies, there must be something more going on in us to explain our consciousness. Solving the hard problem is then a matter of working out the extra ingredient, with one increasingly popular option being to posit very rudimentary forms of consciousness at the level of fundamental particles or fields.

For the opposing team, such as the late, great philosopher Daniel Dennett, this division between feeling and behavior makes no sense. The only task for a science of consciousness is explaining behavior, not just the external behavior of the organism but also that of its inner parts. This debate has rattled on for decades.

The article is here.

Here are some thoughts:

The author discusses the "hard problem of consciousness," a concept introduced by philosopher David Chalmers in the 1990s.  The hard problem refers to the difficulty of explaining why the brain's functions are accompanied by subjective experience, rather than occurring without any experience at all.    

The author uses the idea of "philosophical zombies" (beings that behave like humans but lack consciousness) and "pain-pleasure inverts" (beings that feel pleasure when we feel pain, and vice versa) to illustrate the complexity of this problem.    

This is important for psychologists because it highlights the deep mystery surrounding consciousness and suggests that explaining behavior is not enough; we also need to understand subjective experience.  It also challenges some basic assumptions about why we behave the way we do and points to the perplexing "mystery of psychophysical harmony" - why our behavior and consciousness align in a coherent way. 

The Seductive Diversion of ‘Solving’ Bias in Artificial Intelligence

Julia Powles
Medium.com
Originally posted December 7, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

There are three problems with this focus on A.I. bias. The first is that addressing bias as a computational problem obscures its root causes. Bias is a social problem, and seeking to solve it within the logic of automation is always going to be inadequate.

Second, even apparent success in tackling bias can have perverse consequences. Take the example of a facial recognition system that works poorly on women of color because of the group’s underrepresentation both in the training data and among system designers. Alleviating this problem by seeking to “equalize” representation merely co-opts designers in perfecting vast instruments of surveillance and classification.

When underlying systemic issues remain fundamentally untouched, the bias fighters simply render humans more machine readable, exposing minorities in particular to additional harms.

Third — and most dangerous and urgent of all — is the way in which the seductive controversy of A.I. bias, and the false allure of “solving” it, detracts from bigger, more pressing questions. Bias is real, but it’s also a captivating diversion.

The info is here.

‘The New Paradigm,’ Conscience and the Death of Catholic Morality

E. Christian Brugger
National Catholic Register
Originally published February 23, 2-18

Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, in a recent interview with Vatican News, contends the controversial reasoning expressed in the apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love) represents a “paradigm shift” in the Church’s reasoning, a “new approach,” arising from a “new spirit,” which the Church needs to carry out “the process of applying the directives of Amoris Laetitia.”

His reference to a “new paradigm” is murky. But its meaning is not. Among other things, he is referring to a new account of conscience that exalts the subjectivity of the process of decision-making to a degree that relativizes the objectivity of the moral law. To understand this account, we might first look at a favored maxim of Pope Francis: “Reality is greater than ideas.”

It admits no single-dimensional interpretation, which is no doubt why it’s attractive to the “Pope of Paradoxes.” But in one area, the arena of doctrine and praxis, a clear meaning has emerged. Dogma and doctrine constitute ideas, while praxis (i.e., the concrete lived experience of people) is reality: “Ideas — conceptual elaborations — are at the service of … praxis” (Evangelii Gaudium, 232).

In relation to the controversy stirred by Amoris Laetitia, “ideas” is interpreted to mean Church doctrine on thorny moral issues such as, but not only, Communion for the divorced and civilly remarried, and “reality” is interpreted to mean the concrete circumstances and decision-making of ordinary Catholics.

The article is here.

I feel therefore I am

How exactly did consciousness become a problem? And why, after years off the table, is it a hot research subject now?

Margaret Wertheim

Aeon

Originally published December 1, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Here again we meet the subject of pain, both physical and emotional. Can misery be ‘explained’ by synaptic firing? Can happiness? Some years ago, I discussed this issue with Father George Coyne, a Jesuit priest and astronomer who was then Director of the Vatican Observatory. I asked him what he thought of the notion that when the 12th‑century Hildegard of Bingen was having her visions of God, perhaps she was having epileptic fits. He had no problem with the fits. Indeed, he thought that when something so powerful was going on in a mind, there would necessarily be neurological correlates. Hildegard might well have been an epileptic, Father Coyne opined; that didn’t mean God wasn’t also talking to her.

Pain is surely like this too: it must have neurological correlates otherwise we wouldn’t be able to react to withdraw a hand from a flame and save our bodies from damage. (People who lose the ability to feel pain quickly succumb to injuries.) At the same time, pain transcends its physical dimensions, as do the many species of misery catalogued in Dante’s Hell, and represented to us in daily news accounts of the effects of war on millions of people today.

The article is here.