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I very much agree with the call for precise communication. People with a behavioralistic/materialistic/empiric view and people more interested in "the hard prob

I very much agree with the call for precise communication. People with a behavioralistic/materialistic/empiric view and people more interested in "the hard problem" often seem to talk past each other as long as they both use just the word "consciousness". This tends to get cleared up when a keyword like "qualia" gets mentioned, but it's so common to see lots of words wasted before that happens, if it even does. It's interesting how impactful the breadth of a shared vocabulary can be.

danbruc 7y ago
This tends to get cleared up when a keyword like "qualia" gets mentioned [...] Well, qualia is exactly one of the things I would try to avoid. What do we really mean with that word, what are objective properties of qualia? As I said, I am increasingly entertaining the idea that we are just getting fooled by ourselves when our brains tell us that we obviously and undeniably have consciousness and experience qualia. What if this is just a hardcoded, meaningless phrase our brain spits out every time we or somebody else asks us whether we are conscious or experience qualia? Brain: Am I conscious? Brain: Yes. No more than five lines of code.
- sdfin 7y ago
  Maybe the people who talks about qualia means that the subject has some characteristic which is not objective or measurable. When we talk about subject as opposed object, what do we mean? Would you say that the concept of 'subjectivity' may be also a meaningless phrase?
  - danbruc 7y ago
    Would you say that the concept of 'subjectivity' may be also a meaningless phrase? No, ad hoc and without having thought too much about it, I would say subjectivity is a form of relativity. The temperature on a sunny day being 25 °C is an objective fact, depending on where you usually live that might be a subjectively cold or subjectively hot day to you. Maybe the people who talks about qualia means that the subject has some characteristic which is not objective or measurable. If you cut your finger, you will detect that, you will see the wound and nerves in your skin will sense the wound in it. That are objective things. There will also be objective reactions, blood clotting and other low-level biological reactions starting, you might take actions like looking for a plaster or saying that this hurts. Up to this point, I would argue, most people would agree that a sophisticated robot could behave identical to you. But then you might claim that there is a qualia to this event of cutting your finger, it is painful for you. You feel pain and this is more than you simply detecting the wound and saying it hurts. And we all know what this is supposed to mean, we all know what pain feels like. But now try to nail this down, what is that you claim to have or experience? What is it, that a robot is missing when its cameras see a cut in its skin and some kind of sensors in the skin signal damage, flipping some damage bit in turn starting repair processes and maybe even saying »I cut my finger, it hurts!« What do we have to add to make the robot feel pain? For a long time I was convinced that the robot is missing something, I just could not say what exactly it is. Now I am pretty seriously considering that nothing is missing, that me feeling pain is not much more than flipping the pain and the set of reaction triggered or influenced by that.
    - sdfin 7y ago
      What is it, that a robot is missing... When we see, the eye picks signals, when we touch something some cells pick the signals that inform about pressure or temperature. These signals are sent to the brain. They may be coded in binary form. The brain gets the signals and processes them and produces some reaction. Up to this point we are dealing with signals, and the signals apparently would be enough to transmit the information which would be processed, and the reaction would also consist of signals, which may be binary-like. But why, if signals are enough, we "see" an image, we feel the temperature? I mean, there's something else apart from the binary signals. How do the signals become the experienced perceptions?
      - danbruc 7y ago
        But why, if signals are enough, we "see" an image, we feel the temperature? I mean, there's something else apart from the binary signals. How do the signals become the experienced perceptions? That is the million dollar question. I have never been a camera attached to a computer running some object recognition software, but I am willing to at least consider the possibility that having an array of pixels and a list of regions with labels for the objects in memory is the same thing as me »seeing« a scene. I mean, what does it really mean that I »see« a tree? I am aware that light with some specific frequencies - mostly shades of green and maybe brownish bark - is coming from some direction in some specific pattern of a trunk and branches and leaves and I associate labels with the whole thing and parts of it. Maybe let's add that I reconstruct a kind of 3D model of the tree. What more does it mean to »see« a tree?
        sdfin 7y ago
        I may have a bmp file of a tree with bytes encoding the different colors of each pixel of the image, and then run some machine learning algorithm to process the image and generate a file that defines regions of the bmp and labels each region. I find it difficult to consider that my experience of seeing is similar to having those two files. I'm more likely to believe that there's an unexplained gap between the signals and the subjective experience. I may be wrong, I don't know.
- red75prime 7y ago
  > we are just getting fooled The same question can be asked. What are objective properties of "being fooled"? Can you see something? Yes, you can. Can you reflect on your ability to see? Yes. Can you think? Can you reflect on what you are thinking now? Can you reflect on your ability to think? Yes. Yes. Yes. What you are being fooled about?
  - danbruc 7y ago
    What are objective properties of "being fooled"? Getting convinced [by your brain] that an objectively wrong fact is true. For a example an optical illusion where your brain decides that two objectively identical colors are different colors. And we can find out about this by just asking you about your perception. And you can stop getting fooled by learning about that optical illusion so that in the future some part of your brain might raise doubt about the difference the other part of your brain detects which will in turn change your answer when asked to something expressing less confidence about the two colors. Can you see something? Yes, you can. Can you reflect on your ability to see? Yes. Can you think? Can you reflect on what you are thinking now? Can you reflect on your ability to think? Yes. Yes. Yes. What you are being fooled about? I am too lazy to work through all of them, but I would tend to argue along the following line. The fact that I can see can be verified from the outside - you show me different things and then ask me about them. We do not even need something as complex as you, maybe just an LED changing brightness or color from time to time and a button I am supposed to press every time the visible state of the LED changes. After controlling for things like me sensing the current through the LED, the amount of correlation between the signals to the LED and from the button will be a pretty good indicator of my ability for some basic vision capability. But what when you claim to feel pain? How would you try to convince me that there is more to this than the pain bit getting set and in turn causing and affecting your actions? And you can of course not just appeal to me also being a human and therefore just knowing that there is more to the experience of pain.
    - red75prime 7y ago
      > But what when you claim to feel pain? Decrease of performance on tasks unrelated to damaged area shows that something is going on beyond physical damage and usual stimulus processing. Worker ants, for example, continue to carry on their work even after fatal damage to their gaster. You will not continue to perform mental arithmetic with the same efficiency after your little toe has been struck by a hammer, despite it serves no purpose in doing mental arithmetic (or any purpose at all, for that matter). And if you will do, then you don't feel pain.
- mpartel 7y ago
  Well, qualia is exactly one of the things I would try to avoid. That can be useful depending on what you want to achieve in the discussion, but ignoring the qualia question altogether won't make it go away :) what are objective properties of qualia? If we could answer that, we would have solved most of the problem. The closest thing to an objective property is that we indeed talk about them i.e. they do objectively affect the external world. This is true whether they're illusory by nature or not. I've tried to understand the illusory explanation, but I really can't get over the sheer undeniability of actually having a subjective experience, that being (as Descartes put it) the only thing whose existence I can be really truly certain of. The illusory explanation feels too much like saying "if it doesn't fit our current scientific worldview, it's not real". How did you get over this hurdle?
  - danbruc 7y ago
    How did you get over this hurdle? I didn't. Not too long ago I was just thinking about what a sophisticated artificial intelligence based on essentially run of the mill algorithms would be missing compared to a conscious human and I tried to formulate it without using any words with fuzzy meaning. And then I just failed. Every aspect I considered could be more or less easily replicated with normal algorithms. It seems that only my brain is telling me that there is something more going on in humans but there is no evidence for that, at least none that I am aware of. And then I just tried to do the rational thing - if you are convinced of something but without having any evidence for it, then at least consider the possibility, that this conviction might be wrong. And last but not least I realized how incredible easy it would be to add just a few lines of code to an artificial intelligence so that it always argues with great conviction that it is of course self-evident, obvious, and undeniable that there is more going on inside of an artificial intelligence than inside a human. In some sense this would be a very simple and elegant solution for a very hard problem, wouldn't it?
    - mpartel 7y ago
      I agree, we can (vaguely) imagine an AI that simulates human behaviour faithfully and lies about having qualia without actually having them, just like a really accurate physics simulator can in principle simulate physics as accurately as we can hope to measure. But the implementation of a simulated physical machine is very different from the implementation of an actual physical machine. Similarly, if the AI implementation of qualia is based on lies, it does not follow that the human implementation is too. If we only care about externally observable behaviour, then yes, they can be equivalent, but I don't think that's all we should care about. In other words, knowing how to simulate a phenomenon is not for me a sufficient explanation of the phenomenon, nor even necessarily a very strong indication of what the phenomenon's actual implementation is like. It seems that only my brain is telling me that there is something more going on in humans but there is no evidence for that, at least none that I am aware of. Why such distrust in your own brain? :) I think (the existence of) your own immediate subjective experience is evidence, and compelling evidence at that. It's just not the kind of evidence that's currently easily accessible by science. Over the course of history, many things have been inaccessible to science, and then science has progressed. Science has at least one plausible angle of attack too. Qualia seem to be associated with only some processes in the brain (others are entirely subconscious), some of the time (attention can be redirected). This gives some hope of finding correlations between qualia and brain activity, which AIUI is a major topic in neuroscience currently.

danbruc 7y ago

This tends to get cleared up when a keyword like "qualia" gets mentioned [...] Well, qualia is exactly one of the things I would try to avoid. What do we really mean with that word, what are objective properties of qualia? As I said, I am increasingly entertaining the idea that we are just getting fooled by ourselves when our brains tell us that we obviously and undeniably have consciousness and experience qualia. What if this is just a hardcoded, meaningless phrase our brain spits out every time we or somebody else asks us whether we are conscious or experience qualia? Brain: Am I conscious? Brain: Yes. No more than five lines of code.

sdfin 7y ago
Maybe the people who talks about qualia means that the subject has some characteristic which is not objective or measurable. When we talk about subject as opposed object, what do we mean? Would you say that the concept of 'subjectivity' may be also a meaningless phrase?
- danbruc 7y ago
  Would you say that the concept of 'subjectivity' may be also a meaningless phrase? No, ad hoc and without having thought too much about it, I would say subjectivity is a form of relativity. The temperature on a sunny day being 25 °C is an objective fact, depending on where you usually live that might be a subjectively cold or subjectively hot day to you. Maybe the people who talks about qualia means that the subject has some characteristic which is not objective or measurable. If you cut your finger, you will detect that, you will see the wound and nerves in your skin will sense the wound in it. That are objective things. There will also be objective reactions, blood clotting and other low-level biological reactions starting, you might take actions like looking for a plaster or saying that this hurts. Up to this point, I would argue, most people would agree that a sophisticated robot could behave identical to you. But then you might claim that there is a qualia to this event of cutting your finger, it is painful for you. You feel pain and this is more than you simply detecting the wound and saying it hurts. And we all know what this is supposed to mean, we all know what pain feels like. But now try to nail this down, what is that you claim to have or experience? What is it, that a robot is missing when its cameras see a cut in its skin and some kind of sensors in the skin signal damage, flipping some damage bit in turn starting repair processes and maybe even saying »I cut my finger, it hurts!« What do we have to add to make the robot feel pain? For a long time I was convinced that the robot is missing something, I just could not say what exactly it is. Now I am pretty seriously considering that nothing is missing, that me feeling pain is not much more than flipping the pain and the set of reaction triggered or influenced by that.
  - sdfin 7y ago
    What is it, that a robot is missing... When we see, the eye picks signals, when we touch something some cells pick the signals that inform about pressure or temperature. These signals are sent to the brain. They may be coded in binary form. The brain gets the signals and processes them and produces some reaction. Up to this point we are dealing with signals, and the signals apparently would be enough to transmit the information which would be processed, and the reaction would also consist of signals, which may be binary-like. But why, if signals are enough, we "see" an image, we feel the temperature? I mean, there's something else apart from the binary signals. How do the signals become the experienced perceptions?
    - danbruc 7y ago
      But why, if signals are enough, we "see" an image, we feel the temperature? I mean, there's something else apart from the binary signals. How do the signals become the experienced perceptions? That is the million dollar question. I have never been a camera attached to a computer running some object recognition software, but I am willing to at least consider the possibility that having an array of pixels and a list of regions with labels for the objects in memory is the same thing as me »seeing« a scene. I mean, what does it really mean that I »see« a tree? I am aware that light with some specific frequencies - mostly shades of green and maybe brownish bark - is coming from some direction in some specific pattern of a trunk and branches and leaves and I associate labels with the whole thing and parts of it. Maybe let's add that I reconstruct a kind of 3D model of the tree. What more does it mean to »see« a tree?
      - sdfin 7y ago
        I may have a bmp file of a tree with bytes encoding the different colors of each pixel of the image, and then run some machine learning algorithm to process the image and generate a file that defines regions of the bmp and labels each region. I find it difficult to consider that my experience of seeing is similar to having those two files. I'm more likely to believe that there's an unexplained gap between the signals and the subjective experience. I may be wrong, I don't know.
red75prime 7y ago
> we are just getting fooled The same question can be asked. What are objective properties of "being fooled"? Can you see something? Yes, you can. Can you reflect on your ability to see? Yes. Can you think? Can you reflect on what you are thinking now? Can you reflect on your ability to think? Yes. Yes. Yes. What you are being fooled about?
- danbruc 7y ago
  What are objective properties of "being fooled"? Getting convinced [by your brain] that an objectively wrong fact is true. For a example an optical illusion where your brain decides that two objectively identical colors are different colors. And we can find out about this by just asking you about your perception. And you can stop getting fooled by learning about that optical illusion so that in the future some part of your brain might raise doubt about the difference the other part of your brain detects which will in turn change your answer when asked to something expressing less confidence about the two colors. Can you see something? Yes, you can. Can you reflect on your ability to see? Yes. Can you think? Can you reflect on what you are thinking now? Can you reflect on your ability to think? Yes. Yes. Yes. What you are being fooled about? I am too lazy to work through all of them, but I would tend to argue along the following line. The fact that I can see can be verified from the outside - you show me different things and then ask me about them. We do not even need something as complex as you, maybe just an LED changing brightness or color from time to time and a button I am supposed to press every time the visible state of the LED changes. After controlling for things like me sensing the current through the LED, the amount of correlation between the signals to the LED and from the button will be a pretty good indicator of my ability for some basic vision capability. But what when you claim to feel pain? How would you try to convince me that there is more to this than the pain bit getting set and in turn causing and affecting your actions? And you can of course not just appeal to me also being a human and therefore just knowing that there is more to the experience of pain.
  - red75prime 7y ago
    > But what when you claim to feel pain? Decrease of performance on tasks unrelated to damaged area shows that something is going on beyond physical damage and usual stimulus processing. Worker ants, for example, continue to carry on their work even after fatal damage to their gaster. You will not continue to perform mental arithmetic with the same efficiency after your little toe has been struck by a hammer, despite it serves no purpose in doing mental arithmetic (or any purpose at all, for that matter). And if you will do, then you don't feel pain.
mpartel 7y ago
Well, qualia is exactly one of the things I would try to avoid. That can be useful depending on what you want to achieve in the discussion, but ignoring the qualia question altogether won't make it go away :) what are objective properties of qualia? If we could answer that, we would have solved most of the problem. The closest thing to an objective property is that we indeed talk about them i.e. they do objectively affect the external world. This is true whether they're illusory by nature or not. I've tried to understand the illusory explanation, but I really can't get over the sheer undeniability of actually having a subjective experience, that being (as Descartes put it) the only thing whose existence I can be really truly certain of. The illusory explanation feels too much like saying "if it doesn't fit our current scientific worldview, it's not real". How did you get over this hurdle?
- danbruc 7y ago
  How did you get over this hurdle? I didn't. Not too long ago I was just thinking about what a sophisticated artificial intelligence based on essentially run of the mill algorithms would be missing compared to a conscious human and I tried to formulate it without using any words with fuzzy meaning. And then I just failed. Every aspect I considered could be more or less easily replicated with normal algorithms. It seems that only my brain is telling me that there is something more going on in humans but there is no evidence for that, at least none that I am aware of. And then I just tried to do the rational thing - if you are convinced of something but without having any evidence for it, then at least consider the possibility, that this conviction might be wrong. And last but not least I realized how incredible easy it would be to add just a few lines of code to an artificial intelligence so that it always argues with great conviction that it is of course self-evident, obvious, and undeniable that there is more going on inside of an artificial intelligence than inside a human. In some sense this would be a very simple and elegant solution for a very hard problem, wouldn't it?
  - mpartel 7y ago
    I agree, we can (vaguely) imagine an AI that simulates human behaviour faithfully and lies about having qualia without actually having them, just like a really accurate physics simulator can in principle simulate physics as accurately as we can hope to measure. But the implementation of a simulated physical machine is very different from the implementation of an actual physical machine. Similarly, if the AI implementation of qualia is based on lies, it does not follow that the human implementation is too. If we only care about externally observable behaviour, then yes, they can be equivalent, but I don't think that's all we should care about. In other words, knowing how to simulate a phenomenon is not for me a sufficient explanation of the phenomenon, nor even necessarily a very strong indication of what the phenomenon's actual implementation is like. It seems that only my brain is telling me that there is something more going on in humans but there is no evidence for that, at least none that I am aware of. Why such distrust in your own brain? :) I think (the existence of) your own immediate subjective experience is evidence, and compelling evidence at that. It's just not the kind of evidence that's currently easily accessible by science. Over the course of history, many things have been inaccessible to science, and then science has progressed. Science has at least one plausible angle of attack too. Qualia seem to be associated with only some processes in the brain (others are entirely subconscious), some of the time (attention can be redirected). This gives some hope of finding correlations between qualia and brain activity, which AIUI is a major topic in neuroscience currently.