The hard problem of consciousness: David Chalmers at TED2014
http://blog.ted.com/2014/03/19/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-david-chalmers-at-ted2014/"But
why is it that all this behavior is accompanied by
subjective experience?"
Chalmers assures us he is a scientific materialist at heart, and that he wants a scientific theory of consciousness to work. ...
Chalmers has a few candidates.
One crazy idea is from
Daniel Dennett: There is
no hard problem. The whole idea of the
subjective movie is a kind of illusion. All we have to do is explain the objective behavior, and then we’re done. Chalmers respects the idea, but doesn’t like it: “I say more power to him, but for me that is too close to denying the datum of consciousness to be satisfying.”
So Chalmer’s own first crazy idea:
consciousness is fundamental. “Physicists sometimes take parts of the universe as fundamental building blocks — space or time, or mass.” These are taken as primitive and the rest is built up from there. Sometimes the list of fundamentals expands, such as when James Clerk Maxwell realized that electromagnetism couldn’t be explained from other known laws of physics, and so he postulated electric charge as a new fundamental idea. Chalmers thinks that’s where we are with consciousness.
Importantly, “This doesn’t mean you suddenly can’t do science with it. This opens up the way to do science with it.” He thinks we need to connect this fundamental with the other fundamentals.
Chalmer’s second crazy idea:
every system might be conscious at some level. Consciousness might be universal, an idea called panpsychism. The idea is not that photons are intelligent or thinking, or wracked with angst. Rather, it’s that “Photons have some element of raw subjective feeling, a precursor to consciousness.” Pause. ”This might seem crazy to us,” he says, “but not to people from other cultures.”
But also, he goes on, a simple way to link consciousness to fundamental laws is to link it to information processing. It’s possible that wherever information is being processed, there is some consciousness. Chalmers put that idea forward about twenty years ago, but at the time it wasn’t well developed. Now a neuroscientist, Giulio Tononi, has created a measure, phi, that counts the amount of information integration. In a human, there is a lot information integration. In a mouse, still quite a lot. As you go down to worms, microbes and photons it falls off rapidly, but never goes to zero. ”I don’t know if this is right, but right now it’s the leading theory.”
If true, this theory has many implications. “I used to think I shouldn’t eat anything that’s conscious. If you’re a panpsychist, you’ll be pretty hungry.” It’s also natural to ask about other systems, like computers. If consciousness is integrated information, and computers do integrate information, that raises ethical issues about developing intelligent computer systems, and turning them off.
Or you could think about bigger systems: “Does Canada have a consciousness? Or the TED audience? I don’t know the answer, but I think it’s one worth taking seriously.” ...
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