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There's an easy and a hard problem of consciousness. You're addressing the easy one. These are technical terms, you can look them up.

by aaimnr 10y ago

visarga 10y ago
The hard problem is "why do we have qualia?" and it is explained by neural nets. You input sensations and you get latent representations that are mapped into a space of possible representations. So all those ineffable perceptions are just values in this space of representations. Thus, qualia appear by neural net processing of sensations, and are fed into a recurrent network that judges them moment to moment and updates its internal state, as well as perform actions. That is why we feel a stream of perceptions, not just separate moments. Qualia appear to be irreducible because the mapping from perceptions to representations is nonlinear - even if we can duplicate it in neural nets, we still can't assign semantic value to each neuron and weight in the network. So it appears magical because it is of a level of complexity that exceeds the human working memory. But it is not so magical that we can't replicate it. We can recognize objects better than humans on certain datasets, and we have word embeddings built on huge corpora of text that are being used for translation. We can compute the "feel" of a word or image.
- aaimnr 10y ago
  This explanation doesn't touch the hard problem. Please have a look at the 'easy' problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#Easy_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#... - you're still within the functional mindset of these problems. Are neural nets conscious of their representations? If not - why? What's the difference between neural net that has subjective experience of its intermediate representations and the one that doesn't? On a functional level it doesn't need any subjective experience, so why would it explain anything? Attempts like this definitely give us some intuitions, but they are working around the hard problem without addressing it.
  - meshr 10y ago
    I never understand this ‘qualia’ problem. For me, it looks like it is not scientific at all due to occam's razor principle. Is there smth like Turning test for ‘qualia’?

There's an easy and a hard problem of consciousness. You're addressing the easy one. These are technical terms, you can look them up.

by aaimnr 10y ago

There's an easy and a hard problem of consciousness. You're addressing the easy one. These are technical terms, you can look them up.

visarga 10y ago

The hard problem is "why do we have qualia?" and it is explained by neural nets. You input sensations and you get latent representations that are mapped into a space of possible representations. So all those ineffable perceptions are just values in this space of representations. Thus, qualia appear by neural net processing of sensations, and are fed into a recurrent network that judges them moment to moment and updates its internal state, as well as perform actions. That is why we feel a stream of perceptions, not just separate moments. Qualia appear to be irreducible because the mapping from perceptions to representations is nonlinear - even if we can duplicate it in neural nets, we still can't assign semantic value to each neuron and weight in the network. So it appears magical because it is of a level of complexity that exceeds the human working memory. But it is not so magical that we can't replicate it. We can recognize objects better than humans on certain datasets, and we have word embeddings built on huge corpora of text that are being used for translation. We can compute the "feel" of a word or image.

aaimnr 10y ago
This explanation doesn't touch the hard problem. Please have a look at the 'easy' problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#Easy_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#... - you're still within the functional mindset of these problems. Are neural nets conscious of their representations? If not - why? What's the difference between neural net that has subjective experience of its intermediate representations and the one that doesn't? On a functional level it doesn't need any subjective experience, so why would it explain anything? Attempts like this definitely give us some intuitions, but they are working around the hard problem without addressing it.
- meshr 10y ago
  I never understand this ‘qualia’ problem. For me, it looks like it is not scientific at all due to occam's razor principle. Is there smth like Turning test for ‘qualia’?