The hard problem is very hard actually

No, you can't say experience is just brain-states

I came across this essay on twitter. ¹

The central thesis is this:

when a human brain sees the color red or puts its hand on a hot stove, there is “something it is to be like” that experience, that person, in that moment, above and beyond any detailed complete description of the location and motion of every atom in the human. why does that physical state “cause” or “give rise to” that experience, or qualia? is it not at least conceivable that this same physical state of the world might have no experience at all?

sorry. nope. the experience is the brainstate. it identifies, one to one.

Which is quite shocking as it would mean that this person has a fully developed theory of consciousness that the neuroscientists never heard of.

Then attempting to refute p-zombies with this:

if i say “you can imagine water which is physically identical to our water but is not H2O”, you can totally “imagine” this. but it’s a false shallow form of imagining born of your ignorance and inability to minutely model chemistry and physics. all you are actually doing is imagining a glass of a clear liquid and tagging it “not-H2O” mentally. the concepts of H2O and the properties of water, which are in fact just the same thing, seem different to you because you’re introduced to one before you can even remember and the other years later in chemistry class as a stick and ball diagram. the fact that you can imagine confused and false worldstates does not mean “water” and “H2O” are necessarily ontologically distinct, and only potentially correlated. it’s a fact about you, not the world. p-zombies are not actually “conceivable”.

Actually, the qualitative properties of water exist entirely in my head. I can’t actually go check that other people experience water in the same way that I do. I know there are people that don’t, that for example, don’t enjoy the taste of water, so it’s reasonable to infer they experience something different than me when they drink water.

This is especially relevant when considering non-human beings, like animals. You never know if their qualitative experience of water is equal to our own, but given that that qualitative experience varies even in humans, it’s reasonable to assume that it’s different. It’s probably especially different if you’re an aquatic animal. I would say that H2O is one thing with a thoroughly specced physical definition, but “water”, physically, it’s H20, but there are as many waters as there are beings capable of perceiving H20.

Knowing that a substance is H20 won’t tell you anything about the experience of water that a conscious being has.

we actually have a huge amount of evidence that these are just the same thing, far more than any normal standard demands. you shove electrodes in your brain and you see red and feel pain and joy and love and hate. we find the right area of neural matter and turn off your vision. or your ability to remember your mother. we see the patterns and can tell what you’re experiencing, in realtime, see the red and the pain and whatever emotions you feel when you look at the guy who put on the electrodes. we can see all the neural activity of your experience laid bare. not perfectly, not yet, but it gets better every year.

Yeah, I know of this stuff. Perhaps a computer analogy clarifies why this doesn’t solve the hard problem:

I see something on my computer screen. I don’t tell you what it is.

You study the physical state of the computer to reconstruct the image in my screen. You succeed!

You also then claim I’m not looking at any computer screen at all, and there is no computer screen anywhere. I wonder why you needed to study the computer in the first place to reconstruct the image, instead of glancing at my monitor, like I do. I need zero knowledge of the computer’s internals to see the image in the monitor.

To bring it back to brains, it’s reasonable to infer they generate the contents of the mind. ² But that is not the same as saying, the brain is the mind. It seems equally reasonable to infer they are not the mind or its contents. After all, I don’t need to know anything at all about brains to interact with the contents of my mind. There is something else to the mind that isn’t brain-states. It could be this something else is caused by brain-states, but that is a very different thing from it being the brain-state.

The hilarious thing is that they grant this point and knock out their entire central thesis all by themselves further down:

there is nothing it-is-like for you to be a whale. you are not a whale. the brain-states it experiences are quite different from your own. there is no plausible way to directly identify them

But if the experience is just the brain-state, the brain-state is a fully physically specified thing, why is it that you can’t directly identify what the experience of the whale is like? What’s the missing information? There are no unknown physics involved in the brain-state.

And finally this is precisely what the hard problem is about and what makes it so hard. You can’t title your essay the hard problem is easy and then within it admit that it is impossible to know what it is like to be a whale.

Then there’s a bunch of confusion about how because non-human beings almost certainly experience things different than we do, they do not have experiences:

the thing we are talking about when we talk about “seeing red” as humans is not some universally translatable platonic object out there in the universe. it’s a verbalization of our very specific brains. alien minds do not have red qualia. or pain qualia. or joy qualia.

that’s not to say alien minds can’t be conscious, and that’s not to say that they won’t see some wavelength and have some consistent correlated mindstates about it. but the question of “how do we identify those mindstates as being the same as ours when we see red?” sort of dissolves. they’re not the same, they’re obviously not the same. the raw experience is completely different. the whole thing we’re thinking of when we talk about experience is entirely about ourselves.

...

there is nothing meaningful it-is-like for me to be a whale. type error. our brains are structured in very different ways, our experiences are incomparable.

I had never seen someone go down this route before, but for myself, while it’s true I only know my own experience, I can definitely imagine that a non-human being is having some different experience. And I have a feeling it’s quite likely animals with color vision see the same thing I do when I say I see red, and that they experience joy and pain that is not especially different from my own.

But then, how would you validate or invalidate that hunch? That’s what the hard problem is about.

The question of what it’s like to be a bat was never “what would it be like for me to be a bat?”, it was always, “what is it like for the bat to be a bat?”.

And if you say that question is unanswerable, you are saying the hard problem is insoluble.

Then there’s a digression on LLMs (basically assuming they have experiences) that I don’t think matters.

What it would take to actually solve the hard problem

It cannot be solved with any argument. If you had to present an argument to solve the hard problem you refuted yourself, because arguments are not evidence, and evidence is what’s needed to solve the hard problem.

I think there’s no scientific rebuttal to solipsism, because so far, as an individual, you can’t validate that other brains are having experiences at all. It’s very reasonable to infer other brains have experiences, are conscious, since you’re in a human body, and you know you have a mind, and that your brain state impacts your mind state, but that inference is not scientific evidence.

The inference also leaves you completely at a loss to ascertain whether any non-brains are conscious or not.

So you would have to somehow observe as a third party someone else’s mind-stream, directly, without this being mediated by instruments that read brain state. Because if you use such an instrument, you’re granting that what you’re doing is hooking up a second monitor to the brain, while the monitor the person who owns the brain is using remains inaccessible and undetectable.

Basically, I would have to imagine an image in my head, say, a purple cube, and someone would have to situate the purple cube in time and space and show that it decomposes into the elementary particles of physics, just like my chair. I’m not holding my breath.

There is another alternative I can think of, that I will look at in a follow up essay on the possibility of a scientific study of consciousness.

1. Already, an auspicious beginning.

2. Though there are some issues with that, as the mind is not a passive screen having images projected on it.