Sure. I appreciate your input. I was just responding to the quote, as it was written. If Chalmer’s didn’t write/say that, then my critique was not of what Chalmers said. Although, I must say that if Chalmers characterizes physiological sensory perception in a manner that allows him to claim that computers perform the same ‘function’, I will surely say that his understanding of how physiological sensory perception works is lacking.
Oh, I understood. I’m saying that experience IS the biological machinery doing it’s job.
That was me, not Chalmers, just making the point that these “consciousness-adjacent” phenomena are, or will be, well within reach of machines, but we don’t (most of us) call them conscious. I don’t want to put words in Chalmers’ mouth . . . but the referenced quote was indeed Chalmers, and he does say “in the vicinity of experience,” not “experience.”
Understood! Thank you for that! 
I’m curious what we’re picking out of this world by using “consciousness-adjacent phenomena”?
I personally find that everyday common discussions had by educated and uneducated people alike which focus upon the capabilities of AI conflate the stark differences between how we think and learn and how machines operate.
To me, it seems that that is the direct consequence stemming from impoverished notions of mind, experience, thought, meaning, etc.
If a machine can satisfy a criterion/definition for some notion of thought, mind, intelligence, meaning, and/or experience then I was strongly suggest that those notions are sorely incomplete/lacking.
Chalmers formulated his Hard Problem before all that though, didn’t he?
The idea that consciousness is an inward reflective gazing is in the wrong direction. Consciousness is always about something, within a normative matrix. This is why it feels like something to be conscious. Not because consciousness is an ‘inner’ feeling referring only back to itself, but because all experience emerges out of expectations. Any feeling is recognizable to the extent that it is likened to previous experience on some basis.
It doesn’t feel like something to be a bat in general, this experience right now feels like something particular, something relatable to the past experience for the bat. Each experience at the same time is recognizable by relating to a past experience and by producing something new. So consciousness only functions by being about an outside. Consciousness is synthesis, construction, production, performance rather than reflection or passive knowing.
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Yes, good question. The list Chalmers gives seems about right to me:
“the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience - perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report”
(“Internal access” is rather opaque – not sure what he means – possibly a kind of self-reflective loop?)
I think you’re raising an interesting issue. Looking at such a list, we might go either of two ways. We might say that, since machines (I include AI) can arguably do all these things, therefore machines are not conscious. Or we might call into question our understanding of what consciousness is, and how we can tell when an entity has it or not.
That said, I think it requires an additional step to get here:
Would it be the notions themselves that are lacking, in this case, or would we simply be mistaken in believing that the machine satisfies the criteria?
Yes, though artificial intelligence was very much on the map. I agree that the Hard Problem only gets more exigent as we enter the AI Age; Chalmers was prophetic.
Just a footnote: According to Western thought, yes. Hinduistic and Buddhistic views of consciousness allow, even insist on, the possibility that consciousness requires no object, no “being about.”
I’m with you, but I still add a nod to the “presence” of the umvelt. This “organized quality” (dynamic relevant thing ) is “there.” It “is.”
Consciousness is “is itself.” I trust that at least you and few others understand that I do not mean “the velt is internal de-presentation.” Velt is velt-for. Hence the “um” in “um-velt.”
But I agree with you on how what is there is there.
Consciousness is traditionally conceived as a domain of self-presence, a sphere in which what is known is immediately given to itself. Heidegger, however, puts into question the concept of the ‘is’ as presence, in favor of the notion of ‘isness’ as movement. Dasein is never first “itself” and then related to a world. Dasein is already outside itself in its dealings with things. Its being is ek-static.
”Being itself” is never a state of self-coincidence. The self is always ahead of itself, thrown from a past it didnt choose, projecting possibilities it hasn’t yet become. The self exists only in this stretching-between.
The “is” should be heard more as a verb of transcendence than as a noun-like state of presence. The reason that Heidegger rejects the concept of consciousness is that he treats the ‘is’ as transit. The ‘is’ is not present to itself. It should be thought of more as a displacing than a presentness. One should think of ‘exist’ in terms of the ‘ex’ in ‘exit’, the not-being-at-home.
There ‘is’ no consciousness in itself. Consciousness is not itself; it is the clearing in which beings appear, and that clearing exists only as an ecstatic departure from itself.
Thus thrown in this throw, man is a transition, transition as the fundamental essence of occurrence. Man is history, or better, history is man. Man is enraptured in this transition and therefore essentially ‘absent’. Absent in a fundamental sense-never simply at hand, but absent in his essence, in his essentially being away, removed into essential having been and future-essentially absencing and never at hand, yet existent in his essential absence.
Transposed into the possible, he must constantly be mistaken concerning what is actual. And only because he is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. And only where there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment-being torn away in that wakeful manner that is the breath of all philosophizing, and which the greats among the philosophers called ev9ouma.cr!l6<;-as witnessed by the last of the greats, Friedrich Nietzsche, in that song of Zarathustra’s which he called the “intoxicated song” and in which we also experience what the world is.(The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics)
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Of course, my friend. I’m aware of the Heideggarian allergy to “presence.” We might say “presence-ing/absence-ing.” We might say “pragmo-dynamic de-concealment.”
I have “tried to replace the sub-ject with the e-ject.” This is basically Wittgenstein’s “pure realism.”
Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.
Reality-“for” is co-ordinated ( co-arranged ) with the sentient flesh that is itself an entity in the world. I suggest that we grip the sign “consciousness” as a pointing toward the "presence(ing) of “umvelt-from-point-of-you.”
“Being is presence,” writes Heidegger. This “decisive experience of my path of thinking cannot be remembered often enough” (GA 98: 278).
If we ever manage to think what is named in the word “presence” in its entire fullness and breadth, which flowered in the Greek experience of the world, then and only then may we, instead of “presence,” also say: being. Otherwise … the word “being” remains an empty sound. (GA 79: 148)
What is present outside the temporal present [ungegenwärtig] is the absent. As such, it remains essentially tied to what is presently present [das gegenwärtig Anwesende], insofar as it either comes forth into the region of unconcealment or departs from it. Even the absent is present, and presences into unconcealment as what is absent from it. … It is precisely what is presently present and the unconcealment that holds sway in it that pervade the essence of the absent as the non-presently present. (GA 5: 347)
I associate this “region of unconcealment” with a “digitized qualitative continuum.” The thing as “unity” is “discrete-ized.” We “enact” the temporal-interpersonal synthesis of its “moments.” This "enacted digital unity is the “idea” or “form not substance” of Plato/Saussure. But quality ( chora / dyad) is what is synthesized. This helps makes sense of “care.” Some events “feel good” via a “mute-elusive value-sensory basis” that tends to get converted into “internal qualia.” Note that these qualia are already “formed” (counting-as-ones). On the other side, the formal ideal element is projected into a “platonic sky” with its “quality” scraped off.
I perspectulate that post-Cartesian philosophers were unable to grok Plato’s doctrine this way. IMV, one has to understand the subject as eject to do so. The ur-hylomorphism is not the collision of two kinds of stuff. “Matter” tends to be grasped as a category for the “external.” If the inside/outside framework is taken axiomatically as absolute, access to something more “primordial” is blocked. Weirdly this connects to “all is vanity” where vanity translates הֶבֶל ( hebel). The root metaphor is “breath.” We co-enact categories, largely with breath. Breath too is vanity. Breath too is “breath.”
Now you are speaking my language. Do you recall my insistence that we need the ontological difference here ?
Yes, the “conscious” subject is an e-ject. Consciousness “does not exist” because being is not an entity. The sign “being” is of course an entity. But primates can come to want to try to point with this noun at the “it-is-ness” of the world. World is. My mom is “conscious” because the furniture is also there for her.
The noun-sign “presence” has the advantage of grounding in the primacy of perception. The temporal present might even be “defined” or “explicated” in terms of “sensory quality” as opposed to “memory-imagination quality.”
The lifeworld-physical object is “there” primarily as possibility. Even Mill had an inkling of this, though I don’t credit him with making the ontological difference explicit. Still, the circumvention of dualism leads the “e-ject.” The last step is from neutral monism to radical pluralism.
Beautiful passage ! I biblically-know what he means there. Yes. Risking misunderstanding, we might invoke the “wonder/terror” of the brute ur-“miracle” of the world. Sartre is great on this ( the nauseating part ) in Nausea.
Thanks for that! Sorry about the delayed response. It’s better to know what Chalmers said. I don’t see any issue here, for these cognitive and behavioral functions “in the vicinity of experience” aren’t enough for experience on my view.
Did you mean to say, “therefore, machines are conscious”?
Well, considering the potential for human error regarding both, establishing a criterion and later determining whether or not some candidate satisfies that criterion is certainly relevant.
In this case, it seems that Chalmers doesn’t count those consciousness adjacent phenomena as experience or consciousness. If he did, he wouldn’t have said that they were consciousness adjacent.
It is my understanding(possible misunderstanding) that the Hard Problem was directed towards functionalist physicalist accounts of the mind. Do you know if that’s an accurate take on his target?
This gets directly at the heart of the matter, I think: Our purported understanding of what consciousness is.
It will become quite apparent to nearly anyone perusing the SEP’s article on Consciousness that there is very little to no consensus regarding what counts as consciousness. Consciousness and conscious experience is directly ‘tied to’ theories of mind.
From my vantage point, which may be described accurately enough as a kind of ‘pluralist’ direct realism accompanied by a strong methodological naturalist bent that rejects dichotomous approaches, I find that the current lack of consensus may arise from centuries long misunderstandings of thought, belief, and meaning.
The overwhelming focus upon the so-called intrinsic features and characteristics of (conscious)experiences as a means to establish a criterion/definition for what counts as consciousness already presupposes what need to be rightly understood in much greater detail on a far more universal basis.
No – but I can see where the confusion arises. I meant to say pretty much the same thing you’re saying here:
If machines can do all the various things we’re labeling as “in the vicinity of consciousness,” that doesn’t mean they’re conscious, since we agree that being “in the vicinity of consciousness” doesn’t equal consciousness. What I should have added is that it doesn’t show they’re not conscious either. It merely shows that they needn’t be. “Therefore machines are not conscious” is wrong, except as an illustration of one of the two forks I think people often take, confronted with this issue. That was what I was trying to describe, but my brief post couldn’t handle it, sorry.
Yes, this is the premise we’re both accepting here.
I’m not sure how concerned he was with functionalism, though it was certainly in its heyday in the 90s, when the Hard Problem was coined. Perhaps others in TPF can answer this. I’ve usually read him as arguing against straightforward physicalism of the Dennett/Churchland variety. The Hard Problem claims that the (then and now) current version of physicalism doesn’t include an explanation of subjectivity, although it purports to be a complete account of what there is. It’s important to remind ourselves that Chalmers has never, to my knowledge, claimed that the Hard Problem can’t be solved – that subjectivity will forever remain out of reach of human understanding. We’re just not there yet.
Yes, and I agree with everything you go on to say. There is a delicate dance between philosophy, which can produce the concepts which science then takes on, and science itself, which can report back on how those concepts fare when applied in their work, which in turn influences the next iteration of concepts. This can be done with self-awareness or blindly, of course. It looks to me like the consciousness problem has barely begun this dance. The primary philosophical pairing which we begin with – subjective and objective – already seems far too poorly worked out by us philosophers to be of use in science, on this topic. And there is no scientific theory of consciousness that I’m aware of that can even answer the basic question of whether consciousness must be restricted to living things. As you say, “what needs to be rightly understood in much greater detail on a far more universal basis” is still quite a long ways away.
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No worries. Apology accepted, but unnecessary from my vantage point. I appreciate the aim at clarity here. I think I may now understand a bit more about what you were getting at earlier when you proposed the idea of not only an inadequate criterion/notion, but also of a mistaken assessment regarding the satisfaction or lack thereof.
If the criterion is inadequate to begin with, it really doesn’t matter whether or not a machine satisfies it. Hence, just because a machine doesn’t satisfy an inadequate criterion for what counts as conscious experience, it doesn’t follow that the machine is not conscious.
Am I understanding you here? I think I am, and it makes perfect sense to me, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve understood you. I mean, my criterion for what it takes to understand you could very well be satisfied and inadequate.
Yeah, I knew that Chalmers and Dennett were at odds. I, personally. was a bit disheartened upon Dennett’s death. I remain fairly impressed by his “Quining Qualia”. Pretty remarkable job of dissolving the ineffable private claims/parts of subjective experience(consciousness), by my lights anyway.
I think I remember Dennett claiming that Chalmers’ hard problem was created by its formulation, or something like that. I was left with the impression that Dennett didn’t give it much credence whatsoever, but I never really felt as though I understood Dennett’s position on that or his reasons for having that opinion.
On conscious experience in general…
I personally find that the objective/subjective and internal/external dichotomies are utterly inadequate for taking proper account of that which consists in/of both. Thought, belief, meaning, and experience are all such things. On my view, experience is existentially dependent upon thought and belief, and all thought and belief are meaningful to the creature forming, having, and/or holding them. Thus, until thought, belief, and meaning are rightly understood in much greater detail on a far more universal basis - one which lends itself to being parsed in terms of evolutionary progression - conscious experience will remain largely misunderstood.
Ooooo. Deja Vu. What…8-10 years? Still well-spoken.
And, extending the philosophical compatibility scope, perception is non-interpretive.
That, and knowing where, technically with whom, the compatibility ends. (Grin)
Carry on.
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Yes, this would have been a much clearer way to say it originally.
But no, as it happens. Perfectly adequate!
I’d be interested to hear more about the role of evolutionary explanation here. I tend to be wary of it but I’m open to different points of view.
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Hey M. Thank you. Betchoo say that ta all the gurls. Good to know you’re here too! Hopefully you’re doing well. 
I’m not entirely sure what is being referred to using the timeframe. 
I’m sitting here thinking about the logical possibilities. The time we’ve known one another? That sounds about right, I suppose. It also just so happens to be about the time that I began exploring elemental constituency and existential dependency in much greater detail.
Yup. Perception, on my view, does not include interpretation. That’s what thought, belief, and the attribution/recognition of meaning are for. Oooof. I better watch how I word that. Better to say that that’s how we interpret stuff. 
Did you remember that or didja see that I just let another member here know, like yesterday or the day before. If you remembered that, I’m impressed.<—thatsa playful little double entendre. 
Honestly M, I don’t remember exactly where and how my view diverges from a Kantian frame, but I do know that we’ve had a few very good in-depth discussions teasing that stuff out!
Rightly so.
I’m not sure that what I have in mind or what I’m attempting to do is along the same lines as what "the role of an evolutionary explanation" is referring to.
To me, it’s about a methodological approach that results in a universally applicable minimalist criterion for thought and belief that seems perfectly capable of growing in its complexity along with the biological machinery making up whatever thinking and/or believing creature we have under consideration. A notion of thought and belief that is capable of setting out the simplest form(s) of meaningful thought and belief as well as our own very complex forms of metacognition.
By…
…I’m not really looking for an evolutionary explanation, per se, so much as an understanding of thought and belief based upon a notion that is inherently capable of what I set out above.
It’s more of an basic outline or formula than an explanation.