how anyone could assert that they possess internal mental experiences that "no amount of purely physical information includes.", or that such a thing can even exist with any level of confidence.

The justification seems to be the idea that because we cannot do something now, that thing cannot be done. I don't find that convincing.

its not just that we cannot do it now, its that it is literally definitionally impossible even conceptually to arrive at or explain subjectivity, assuming a physicalist model of the world that specifically discludes it in principle.

the claim is not that consciousness is 'unsolveable', but that it is unsolved, and that it is irreducible to terms of pure information processing. subjectivity is entirely separate from and unnecessary for information processing.

This might be going too far into the analogy

correct, it was merely to elucidate the difference between causation and correlation and the scientific method and attitude. the metaphor is not designed to interrogate subjectivity.

Instead, assuming that an undetectable intangible and fundamentally improvable mechanism is behind consciousness without proof is worse than lazy, it's magical thinking. While I don't think you could ever prove that that wasn't the case, it should only seriously be entertained once every other option has been thoroughly exhausted.

no, instead one should assume nothing, like a scientist should. you assume that you do not know until you actually do.

to go back to the analogy you are here like one of the uncontacted people encountering a radio, and, after much experimentation and analysis among your group has concluded that the voice cannot come from inside but form some as yet unknown source outside, you call them insane for positing even the hypothetical existence of such a thing instead of assuming it comes from inside in some way we don't yet understand (but are the assumed teleological inevitability of our current understanding which obviously never needs to be revised).

even just something like mental archetypes or cultural tropes are enough to influence our mood and state of being, it doesnt even have to be anything exotic

Some philosophers of mind, like Daniel Dennett, argue that qualia do not exist. Other philosophers, as well as neuroscientists and neurologists, believe qualia exist and that the desire by some philosophers to disregard qualia is based on an erroneous interpretation of what constitutes science.

My issue with, say, "love is chemicals" isn't that the experience of feeling love is neurochemical activity. It's the crude reductionist conclusion of "and therefore it is meaningless just like based Rick Sanchez said, get schwifty!"

Similarly, I don't hold a position that living brains are impossible to fully understand; it's that there's more left to know and a lot of unknowns left to explore. The implication of some people in this thread is that you must choose between "LLMs are at least as conscious as human beings or are getting there very soon" or "I am a faith healer crystal toucher sprinkled with fairy dust" which is a bullshit false dichotomy.

He's not though

life is necessarily more ordered and interesting than dead rocks

therefore it is a good thing to create more life, both on earth and eventually to turn dead planets life-ful (if this is even possible)

we are definitely conscious enough to at least massively increase the amount of life on earth (you could easily green all the world's deserts under ecocommunism)

"All knowledge is unprovable and so nothing can be known"

Silly meme that I had just posted aside, that isn't my actual position and I don't think that is the position others here have taken. I said that there is a lot more left to be known and the current academic leading edge of neuroscience (not tech company marketing hype or pop nihilistic reductionistic Reddit New Atheist takes) backs that up.

I shall both fight and perish.

From here it just looks like you're just touching the computer and doing the heavy lifting for LLM hype marketers.

I mean, "meaning has to come from within" is sort of solipsistic but, depending on your definition, completely true.

The biggest problem with Camus (besides his credulity towards the western press and his lack of commitment to trains, oh and lacking any desire for systemic understanding) is that he views this question in an extremely antisocial manner. Yes, if you want affirmation from rocks and you will kill yourself if you don't get affirmation from rocks, there's not much to do but get some rope. However, it's hard to imagine how differently the rhetorical direction of the Myth of Sisyphus would have gone if he had just considered more seriously the idea of finding meaning in relationships with and impact on others rather than just resenting the trees for not respecting you. Seriously, go and reread it, the idea seems as though it didn't even cross his mind.

The Myth of Solipsists

i look up 'daniel dennet' and the first ted talk i see is literally titled 'the illusion of consciousness'. i don't know what else to make of that.

wikipedia defines qualia as "In philosophy of mind, qualia (/ˈkwɑːliə, ˈkweɪ-/; SG: quale /-li/) are defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience. " which is how i have been using the word. i do not care about any other usage.

all of those things you mention - privacay, ineffability, etc - are logical consequences of being a subjective phenomena.

i am familiar with quining qualia, i quite dislike it and disagree with its arguments fundamentally. his 'intuition pumps' are frankly nonsense.

two examples:

the coffee taste and brain surgery experiments claim to show that we cannot tell the difference between our qualia changing and our reflective juddgments and predispositions to those qualia being changed, in an attempt to prove that qualia cannot be directly apprehended by consciousness. in fact, this is quite unrelated to the direct apprehend-ability in consciousness of qualia. in the brain surgery case, whichever surgery is performed, whether the patient can realize this through introspection or not, there IS a particular qualia being experienced and there is a fact of the matter as to whether or not this qualia has changed and as to which of the surgeries was performed, even if the patient's memory has been altered such that they cannot know this - we could even empirically verify which surgery took place! yes, we are not necessarily infallible in our comparison of non-simultaneous Qualia - how does this mean that we do not apprehend the current Quale directly in consciousness? or that we did apprehend past Qualia? Direct conscious apprehension is not equivalent to accurate memory and consistent disposition/judgment regarding that direct conscious apprehension - these are information processing tasks, not subjectivity or qualia. To be aware of ANY qualitative state is to be aware of your current REAL qualitative state, and the fact that we might misremember it or otherwise interpret it differently in the future (due to neurosurgery or not) makes it no less directly apprehended.

the beer argument is equally spurious - he claims that because our qualia can change in response to environmental stimuli (i.e. we 'acquire a taste' for beer and enjoy it more when we are drunk, or enjoy it by associating it with the positive drunk feelings), that qualia is not 'intrinsic' but 'relational'. no one would deny that qualia are part of a causal chain - everything is causal. qualia and consciousness obviously correlate to the physical brain, and are in a causal relationship with it and therefore less directly with the wider external world. but the existence of some kind of qualia/subjectivity in a conscious organism is not a relational property - the conscious organism, while conscious, always has qualia and subjectivity of some kind or another, regardless of what environment the consciousness exists in. specific features and minutiae of the subjects of qualia and subjective experience do have a causal relationship with the external world, but again, these are information processing tasks that are affected, not the very subjectivity of the organism. the contents of experience might change, but the fact that the current experiencer (the experiencer in its context) experiences them does not. the apprehended object might change, but the fact that it is being apprehended does not.

I'm not sure if scallops can run... But if you mean something like a mollusc, for example a snail, then I think it depends on which organism it is. I think a snail probably does feel fear yes in a very primal way. A bivalve like a scallop I'm not so sure, they have very basic nervous systems. An octopus I think is capable of fear and other more advanced emotions too, most likely. However, I think when we ascribe emotions to these animals we are anthropomorphising them. We have no way to know what their experience is like and we are sticking our human labels on them. Especially for a group such as molluscs, which diverged a very long time ago from the lineage that led to us. The feeling of fear, the understanding of danger and need to get away from it could be very primal and exist in many animals, but they may also feel it very differently to how we do. For example ants, I imagine a worker and does not feel fear for itself but rather the colony.

Unicellular organisms mostly move on the basis of concentration gradients, towards food and away from toxic things or predator signals. When one is struggling and being engulfed by a hydra or other unicellular organism, I don't think it feels anything no. I think it is just trying to move away from the predator because it detects a molecular signal that it is "programmed" to move away from. By programmed I mean that behaviour is encoded in the complex interaction of the many systems that make it up, such as through the concerted action of it's receptors, signalling pathways, enzymes, genes etc.

Rocks and water are not what I was talking about. Take for example cell-free translation systems. These are basically all of the contents of a cell but without any of the membranes. Like empty a cell into a (small) bucket. They still perform all of the biochemical reactions that took place in the normal cell. But they are not in a sack. There is no unified "thing" and it doesn't move. If you did that to a paramecium, could that liquid still feel fear? It cant move away from anything. Is it alive? What makes something alive? Life is ultimately the sum of many complex biochemical reactions, but no one part of it is alive. Enzymes themselves are not alive surely. One single neuron is not alive.

If you had a human brain in a jar and, for arguments sake, it could still think as normal. It is intelligent and sentient, but it cannot replicate itself. But a virus, which is still much more simple than the brain in a jar, can. When you say that rocks don't make more rocks, you seem to imply that the quality of life is in replication.

i don't think its about a lack of exposure to the concept of subjectivity and objectivity as much as it is a fundamental disbelief in anything approaching metaphysics whatsoever, which yes, stems from the absolute belief in a purely physicalist understanding of the universe. the difference between physicalists and myself is similar to the difference between an atheist and an agnostic. the atheist assumes that there is and can be no god or gods, whereas the agnostic makes no assumptions whatsoever regarding this. the physicalist assumes the ability of their belief system to be refined into perfection without much in the way of fundamental revision, assumes the nonexistence of any phenomena that cannot be described by physics, whereas i believe that one or several paradigm shifts in philosophy and science and the philosophy of science are necessary to improve our understanding of reality, i do not assume that the physicalist model of the universe is correct or able to be trivially modified to be correct. and when analysis in fact shows the inability of physicalism to explain a phenomena we all experience every waking moment of our lives like subjectivity or qualia, i take that as evidence against the model, instead of ignoring it in the hope that someday the model might be trivially revised somehow to account for this fundamental explanatory gap.

a 'unified theory of everything' may or may not be possible, but it should be especially possible under physicalism - if everything is indeed reducible to physical matter and physcial processes, then surely we should eventually be able to describe matter and related physical processes in sufficient detail to describe all of reality, including subjectivity. but i don't think its necessarily physicalist to believe humans can comprehensively understand existence, for example if subjectivity is fundamental to reality in a way similar to matter, then understanding subjectivity and matter both, and their relationship to one another or to whatever reality they both refer to, could help us understand existence in a more coherent sense.

thats' the entire point. if the existence of complex unconscious behaviors (or even just computers and math) proves that information processing can be done without internal subjective experience (if we assume a stone being hit by another stone, for example, is not experienceing subjectivity), and if there is something humans do beyond what is possible for pure information processing, then that is proof that consciousness is fundamentally irreducible to it. if there is something we can do that a philosophical zombie (a person with information processing but not subjectivity) could not, it is because of subjectivity/qualia, not information processing. subjectivity can influence our information processing but is not identical with it.