Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosophy professor at UC Riverside, publishes papers and essays on consciousness, ethics, and moral psychology.
HN commenters recommend his paper arguing the United States is probably conscious as worth reading, though one finds a related paper unconvincing because of speculative premises.
I understand that you view qualia as structural properties, and can map trillions of physical brain-configurations to trillions of subjective brain-states. However there is still a massive discrepancy between our subjective experience of such states, and the physical configurations that are claimed to represent it - which is why it is not a satisfactory answer to the hard problem of consciousness for many people.
The 2 big discrepancies I see are this: 1. We have the subjective perception of free will: I can choose to write these sentences or not. Where does that intention originate? If our consciousness is just neuronal computation, then it is completely deterministic or probabilistic. That is entirely contradictory of most people's experience, because we can choose what we want to do, and do things that strongly contradict our "mood". Some people can even go further to consciously modify their brain states. If you claim that is also just a product of complex structural properties, you get into an infinitely regressing claim.
2. Despite being able to create incredibly complex connected structures, arguably even more complicated than a single person's brain, such as the Internet, we have no evidence of such an entity having a subjective feeling of consciousness. There is simply no parallel in our current knowledge for how subjective experience can arise from system configurations. You seem to be simply assuming that an experience is such a configuration, but we have no…
Huh okay thanks for commenting, I was very confused about what exactly I was reading until you prompted me to look him up. Interesting guy — he’s a full time professional academic in philosophy, and yet writes like a hacker, even going as far as to skip APA citations in favor of undescribed hyperlinks! The style is a fascinating mix of analytic (such as only giving the time of day to recent theories, and constricting his argument to an explicit outline) and a more casual blog style. He’s also been writing about exactly this — perhaps in slightly less unified (hehe) terms - since at least 2007: https://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/
If you find the time, could you share what the big takeaways were that had a profound effect? I’m guessing it was a practical exercise that trained you to more accurately introspect, but that’s just a guess. I’m way too deep into all this philosophy stuff already so I mostly got indignant disagreement out of this essay, and I’d like to see it in a more productive light!
> its value in teaching the various ethics (I don't know what replaces that).
There’s no need to replace that. Teaching people about ethics doesn’t make them more ethical[1], and people who enjoyed discussing it continued through the end of their worlds multiple times, whether the Greeks, Romans (Augustine), Persians or anyone else who saw the world they believed in died.
YC isn’t in a zero sum game. They’ll certify anyone they think is awesome as awesome. Harvard will only certify a maximum number in the matriculating class, and they certainly won’t deliberately create competitors in that space like YC did with Pioneer. YC does its very best to disrupt itself. It does pay those it’s educating and there are technically competitors to it as an accelerator.
[1] https://aeon.co/essays/how-often-do-ethics-professors-call-their-mothers
https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/EthicalEthicists-150715.pdf
A post I made a while back that seems relevant:
> The proteins in a cell form complex organelles, each with a specific role to play in the functioning of the cell. The cells in your body each specialize to constitute a complex, conscious organism. Likewise, you are part of a complicated social and technological network.[1] And just as the cell doesn’t ask the proteins what they think of their functions, our human ecosystem doesn’t care much what we think about it’s operation. As technology creates more and more refined models of the human body and mind we will find ourselves slotted more and more tightly into roles so the whole machine can operate more efficiently.
[1] https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/USAconscious.htm
Hideous things can be done by evil people, but also accidentally by well-meaning people when they don't realize what the stakes are. How many people stop being racist only because they leave the environment where racism was prevalent and they get exposed to a different heuristic on human worth?
There's a paper discussing heuristics for determining the moral worth (not intelligence) of being which advocates the precautionary principle: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/AIRights2-180604.htm
> avoid acting heinously by the standards of any reasonable ethical principle that draws a significant proportion of well-informed, thoughtful theorists
For some wider context of his views, check out his other articles, particularly http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/CrazyMind.htm.
I don't get the impression that Schwitzgebel takes analytic philosophy very seriously, which is something I find very refreshing about him (compared to other philosophers of consciousness such as Chalmers). His early interest was on ancient Chinese philosophy, and in http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/ZZ.htm, he promotes what he regards as an ancient Chinese outlook about not taking language too seriously, which contrasts with traditional Anglo-American philosophy.