What is it like to be a bat?

Do you believe that each run of a ChatGPT prompt has a conscious experience of its existence, much like you (presumably) do?

If you don't believe that, then you face the challenge of describing what the difference is. It's difficult to do in ordinary language.

That's what Nagel is attempting to do. Unless you're an eliminativist who believes that conscious experience is an "illusion" (experienced by what?), then you're just quibbling about wording, and I suspect you'll have a difficult time coming up with better wording yourself.

Wait a minute - it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious.

I also don't think it's fair to say I'm just quibbling about wording. Yes, I am quibbling about wording, but the quibble is quite essential because the argument depends to such a large extent on wording. There are many other arguments for or against different views of consciousness but they are not the argument Nagel makes.

(Though fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears" and a far cry from "consciousness doesn't exist at all")

> it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious.

Certainly. I just didn't know where you stood on the question.

In Nagel's terms, there is not something it is like to be a game of Tetris. A game of Tetris doesn't have experiences. "Something it is like" is an attempt to characterize the aspect of consciousness that's proved most difficult to explain - what Chalmers dubbed the hard problem.

How would you describe the distinction?

> fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears"

Oh sure, I think that's widely accepted.

A running game of Tetris has memory, responds to stimuli, and communicates. There has been evolution and reproduction of games of Tetris (perhaps in the way that viruses do). It isn't able to have feelings, what needs to be added for it to start having feelings and experiences?

There is no distinction: the idea that there is a distinction rests on a linguistic confusion. The sentence "something it is like to be a bat" tries, as it were, to split the concept of "being a bat" in two, then makes us wonder about the difference between the two halves. I reject that we have to answer for any such difference, when we can show that the two halves are actually the same thing. It's a grammatical trick caused by collapsing a word that usually relates two distinct things ("A is like B") onto a singular "something".

Describing something as illusionary adds nothing because it implies someone to experience the illusion.

That’s the hard problem.

I would say a lot would need to be added. Given the same input, the tetris game will respond exactly the same each time. There is no awareness, learning, no decisions made, but purely a 100% predictible process.

The Oxford Living Dictionary defines consciousness as "[t]he state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings", "[a] person's awareness or perception of something", and "[t]he fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world".

There’s no trick to it, you’re overanalyzing. It’s just saing if I were a stone -> no experience, a bat -> some kind of experience. It is not claiming to define the ”something” as you seem to think.

I agree with the other reply that you're overthinking this.

If you claim there's no distinction, then in terms of the meaning Nagel is trying to convey, you're claiming there's no distinction that sets you apart from a game of Tetris in terms of consciousness.

That's where my first reply to you was coming from: if you believe the distinction Nagel is trying to convey doesn't exist, that's tantamount to saying that consciousness as a real phenomenon doesn't exist - the eliminativist position - or something along those lines.

If you do believe consciousness exists, then you're simply arguing with the way Nagel is choosing to characterize it. I asked how you would describe it, but you haven't tried to address that.

That Oxford definition highlights why work such as Nagel's is needed. It can plausibly be argued that LLMs or other AI systems can qualify on all those counts, but many (most?) people wouldn't consider them to have conscious experience.

Characterizing that distinction is surprisingly tricky. "What is it like to be..." is one way to do that. David Chalmers' article about "the hard problem of consciousness" is another: https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf

>It is not claiming to define the ”something” as you seem to think.

Certainly it's not claiming to define it, but it is making a claim about the existence of the "something", and also about the physical irreducibility of this "something".

But there are many things that set me apart from a game of Tetris! For example, I'm not made up of falling puzzle pieces, I enjoy drinking a cup of coffee every now and then, I was not invented by Alexey Pajitnov in 1985... The difference between an unconscious and a conscious thing could be a difference of this order, which does not at all amount to saying that consciousness does not exist.

We're not discussing whether you're identical to a game of Tetris.

We're discussing a way of characterizing the nature of the conscious experience that you presumably have, that a game of Tetris doesn't.

The way Nagel would put this is that "there is something it is like to be bondarchuk" - i.e., you have an experience of your existence that you can describe, because you're consciously aware of it.

We can ask the question of you, "What is it like to be bondarchuk?" and you can answer based on your actual experience. You wouldn't just be generating text in response to a prompt the way an LLM would, you'd be describing your conscious experience of your existence. For example, you say you enjoy drinking a cup of coffee occasionally. That's a conscious experience that shows that there is something it is like to be you.

There is, presumably, nothing it is like to be a Tetris game, because a Tetris game has no consciousness.

This is a standard, widely accepted characterization in consciousness studies. Even if you object to it, you should at least understand what it's saying. And if you do object to it, the onus is on you to provide a better description, which I note you've declined to do on multiple occasions now.

>We're discussing a way of characterizing the nature of the conscious experience that you presumably have, that a game of Tetris doesn't.

By talking of a different "nature" you already place the discussion on dualist grounds.

>you have an experience of your existence that you can describe, because you're consciously aware of it.

Certainly. But the way Nagel phrases it, "the experience" becomes akin to a "thing", and the absence of this "thing" in physical nature becomes an argument for the hypothesis that it's highly unlikely (maybe even impossible) to give a physicalist account of consciousness. That is what I disagree with.

>There is, presumably, nothing it is like to be a Tetris game, because a Tetris game has no consciousness.

What does saying this get you over just saying "a Tetris game has no consciousness"?

>This is a standard, widely accepted characterization in consciousness studies. Even if you object to it, you should at least understand what it's saying.

I understand what it is saying only insofar as it is simply another way to say "consciousness". But it is clearly taken to be more than just an alternative phrase we can use in lieu of the words "consciousness" or "subjective experience" to vaguely gesture in the direction of these ill-defined concepts we are all familiar with. I disagree that "there is something it is like to be bondarchuk" has greater descriptory power than "bondarchuk is conscious", therefore I don't think we should draw any conclusions regarding consciousness from this phrasing, especially the conclusion Nagel draws which is that consciousness is highly likely to be non-physical or at least that our current understanding of "the physical" is insufficient to ever approach the problem of consciousness (because we can never hope to give proper account of "the something that it is like to be bondarchuk").

>And if you do object to it, the onus is on you to provide a better description, which I note you've declined to do on multiple occasions now.

Not really; my rejection of Nagel's argument can stand on its own regardless of whether I can offer an alternative argument.