Steven Pinker: prediction

Transcript context

…Right. You can sit up and feel something, taste something, and say, “Hey, I’m Steven Pinker,” and know introspectively that you’re saying it to yourself. You could have subjective experience of redness and sourness and warmth and so on without it including some concept of yourself. Conversely, you could imagine an intelligent system, a robot, say, where there’s no one home, where it monitors its own state, it presents itself in certain ways, and, at least as far as we know, it’s not actually feeling anything. Of course, we don’t know it and that may be the key. The philosophical problem of sentience or qualia or (sometimes called) the hard problem of consciousness I think might ultimately be a quirk of our own way of analyzing the world — that is, the mind reflecting on itself is naturally going to be puzzled by some aspects of itself. We know from neuroscience that there is no aspect of consciousness that does not have some physical correlate. There’s no ESP. There’s no life after death. There’s no mysterious action at a distance. It’s all information-processing and neurons. Why it should feel like something to me to be that network of neurons, I don’t think we have a satisfying answer to. It may not be a scientific puzzle at all. There are some philosophers who claim that it just isn’t a coherent intellectual question at all, Dan Dennett being the most famous. For some people this is a kind of escape hatch from materialism and a way to bring back some notion of the soul. The problem there is that you’d expect the mind to have some kind of nonmaterial powers, which it does not have. I tend to gravitate toward a view that sometimes has been credited to David Hume — Colin McGinn is the contemporary philosopher who has made it most prominent — sometimes I think misleadingly called “mysterianism.” Tom Nagel in his seminal article, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (whose title captures the essence of the problem), speculated in that article along the lines that I’m suggesting: namely, there may just be some facts about the universe that are true, and we’ll never be satisfied that we intuitively understand them. Not because there is some mystery in the sense of undiscovered scientific principle, but just that our very way of grasping reality might make certain things puzzling to us. Even though we know at a more explicit cognitive level that they’re true. A heap of neurons that registers the environment, that organizes the information, acts on it, including a model of itself: from my point of view, it feels like something. Why that should be true? I don’t know. Again, here I am inside me and almost by definition there are going to be some things about the view of me inside me that the me doing the view is not going to be able to articulate because the part that would do the articulating is part of the me trying to explain it. [laughter] hings about the view of me inside me that the me doing the view is not going to be able to articulate because the part that would do the articulating is part of the me trying to explain it. [laughter] I think there are some cases where human intuition hits a wall and this is one of them. The nature of time. What could have been before the Big Bang, if that was the beginning of everything. How can the universe either be finite or infinite? There’s no reason to think that every aspect of reality will be intuitive. There may be some aspects where our best science will give us a characterization and we’ll always scratch our head as we appreciate that it’s true, but it never feels totally satisfying.…

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