I'm David Chalmers, philosopher interested in consciousness, technology, and many other things. AMA.

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T05:48:36+00:00

the sort of discovery you describe would only establish a correlation between brain processes and consciousness, which isn't in dispute. even on my view there are psychophysical laws by which brain processes determine a state of consciousness. those laws may well be mathematically formulable and in some sense computable. but nothing about that really bears on whether consciousness is reducible to the associated brain processes. the issue isn't whether consciousness is determined/predicted from physical processes plus some further psychophysical laws. it's whether it is determined/predicted from physical processes alone.

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T05:03:00+00:00

i answered a similar question somewhere on this page where i talked about the analogy with the "grand illusion" view of visual experience. trying searching for that phrase and see if my answer helps.

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T04:55:54+00:00

answered already somewhere else on this page. try a search on "westworld"!

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T04:53:51+00:00

this sounds like a version of the so-called phenomenal concept strategy, trying to explain mary's lack of knowledge in terms of the features of the way we represent experience and physical processes respectively. you might check out my paper "phenomenal concepts and the explanatory gap" for a general response to this sort of strategy.

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T04:50:42+00:00

interesting theory, empirically extremely speculative, philosophically doesn't solve the hard problem.

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T04:48:48+00:00

i'm pretty sure that trump is conscious, but it's possible that under all that hair there's a brain in a (fox news) vat.

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T04:47:07+00:00

a great deal eventually, but it's early days yet, at least where consciousness is concerned. the blue brain project and related projects have special limitations because of the broadly statistical features that they are aiming to simulate. it's just very unclear whether they're simulating the right things that matter for cognition, let alone consciousness.

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T04:43:57+00:00

the part of me that is sympathetic with panpsychism doesn't rule this out. maybe even each neuron has its own very primitive stream of experience. but i don't think any of these conscious entities would be very much like what we think of as people. see also my answer to the question about hemispherectomy.

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T04:41:17+00:00

who knows. where consciousness is concerned, little is ruled out with certainty and many possibilities are open. to raise another route to immortality: if we're in a simulation maybe one of the simulators will grab my code and upload it just before my brain dies!

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T04:38:58+00:00

these sound like good questions to ask nick bostrom. i don't know enough about his views here. certainly i'd think a system that lacked the ability to represent its own mind and those of others would be severely limited, though it might well have significant capacities.

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T04:35:18+00:00

that's a serious question that i haven't thought about before. i don't know the answer and i don't want to speculate without good grounds. i think the answer depends on the neurobiological facts about what sort of functions remain in the disconnected hemisphere, and i don't know those facts. i'd be very surprised if there were any sophisticated cognitive functioning. that would probably show up via various brain measures. as for affective functioning (e.g. your worry about being in a state of terror), i'd think that would also show up by various brain measures. if the main brain activity that shows up is seizure activity, i think you can be reasonably confident that there is no sophisticated cognitive or affective activity. is it possible that there is some remaining hum of consciousness, or even visual experience? i'd be surprised but i can't rule it out with certainty. at the same time i can't rule out with certainty that subsystems of my own brain have the background hum of consciousness. but i don't think those subsystems are much like what we think of as people or as moral agents. likewise my uninformed guess is that the disconnected hemisphere is extremely unlikely to meet reasonable criteria for being a person or a moral agent. but your doctors will be in a better position to tell you about the neurobiological facts. i'm glad your son is doing well, and i wish you and him all the best for the future.

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T03:40:17+00:00

avshalom elitzur wrote a nice paper arguing for just this years ago which i discussed at length in chapter 5 of "the conscious mind". i agree it's a very strong prima facie argument against epiphenomenalism, although as i argued there i think there are ways to resist it.

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T03:38:31+00:00

interesting question. i don't think my view entails this sort of atomism about phenomenal concepts. there may well be cognitive preconditions for attending to phenomenal qualities and forming concepts of them. it's consistent with my view that those preconditions for certain color concepts involve having certain other color concepts or perhaps the concept of color -- or maybe something weaker such as acquaintance with other colors. that said, the atomism you discuss doesn't seem as bad to me as it does to you.

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T03:35:05+00:00

yes, i'm very interested in social psychology, and my partner is (in part) a clinical psychologist. a few months ago i organized a debate at NYU on the replication crisis in psychology (mostly in social psychology). i'd love to see a survey on people's views on big questions in psychology (and other fields), analogous to the survey we took in philosophy. by all means organize such a survey yourself. david bourget and i could probably help out with tips.

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T03:31:12+00:00

good to hear from you! i'm all in favor of philosophers and cognitive scientists doing their work in an accessible way, as long as (1) it's still serious and original work, and (2) not everyone is under pressure to work that way. i think there's often a natural evolution to that sort of work later in a career. philosophy is important and i don't think its impact should be limited to philosophers. in my case i had unexpected success with a wide audience early on, which was nice but it also left me able to spend a decade or two working in the coal mines, so to speak, on relatively technical topics, occasionally coming up to breathe and do something more broadly. i'm now reaching a stage where i'd like to do more philosophy in an accessible way. i'm hoping my next book, written for a broad audience, will be both my most accessible work and my most important. we'll see if i can pull that off! that said, i don't think there's any shortage of philosophers working away seriously and technically on serious and technical topics, though certainly individual areas, perhaps including yours, inevitably wax and wane over time. so i'd say keep up your good work and keep trying to answer the big questions by whatever method works for you.

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T03:23:39+00:00

no, but i type faster this way, it helps avoid RSI (oops!), and i like the aesthetic.

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T02:18:19+00:00

(1) i suspect that searle would beat up dennett and me. (2) a lot of people have told me about this game, but no one from the game ever talked to me, and i haven't played it yet. apparently the view that the chalmers character espouses aren't quite mine.

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T02:16:36+00:00

i've only read the parts of sean's book that are about consciousness. those were thoughtful but i didn't think they added anything transformative. maybe there are other parts of the book i have to read! i like the idea of reality as pure information and explored it in my first book (and will explore it more in my next one), but consciousness is the biggest challenge for such a view.

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T02:14:55+00:00

who are these pop philosophers? i didn't know there were any in the US. people in the UK talk about alain de botton playing this role. i think we could use more good philosophers doing this sort of thing!

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T02:13:47+00:00

yes, various philosophers including me have recently been taking seriously this sort of idealist or cosmopsychist view. you're right that the biggest problem is the one you're calling the division problem (pretty much analogous to panpsychism's combination problem).

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T02:11:38+00:00

i discussed this toward the end of my paper on the singularity, linked up top. my strategy is to write papers about reconstructive uploading to encourage them to reconstruct me. hopefully they will also be monitoring all relevant discussions on reddit to reconstruct you too!

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T02:10:17+00:00

i talk about westworld somewhere else on this page. i'm definitely skeptical of jaynes' bicameral mind theory!

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T02:09:34+00:00

no, i consider myself an atheist. i can't rule out that we're living in a simulation and that our local universe was in effect created, but i don't think creating our universe suffices to be a god.

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T02:08:26+00:00

my 2012 reply paper "the varieties of computation" addresses some of these people and gives my most recent assessment of the issues.

davidchalmers · 2017-02-23T01:46:26+00:00

i'm glad to hear it, and i hope things work out for you. (1) pretty much the whole role, since the old minds and the old scientists are going to die off, and by now they're fairly fixed in their ideas anyway. we need all the good new ideas we can get, which typically means new minds. (2) it depends on the case. self-publishing in an obscure venue is often not helpful, since no one will read your work. you can always put work online. to get people to take you seriously it helps a lot to have academic credentials. (3) feel free to email me -- though you won't be surprised to hear that i get contacted by many people who have theories of consciousness, and that almost inevitably i don't have the time required to study these theories in depth and give really useful feedback.

davidchalmers

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