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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

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
Similarly, if the AI implementation of qualia is based on lies, it does not follow that the human implementation is too. I totally agree, that would be an invalid conclusion. But that is not my point, my point is that we might not actually experience qualia, that our believe in us experiencing qualia is a confusion caused by our brain. If that were the case, there would be nothing an artificial would or even could be lacking, its experience of qualia - or rather the lack of it - would be identical to ours. The only difference would be that humans would claim to experience qualia - while they actually don't - while an artificial intelligence would not experience qualia either but also not claim to do so, at least unless the artificial intelligence also replicates the false human claim and claimed to experience qualia, which would be trivial to do. 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. I can only repeat my challenge, not sure if I wrote it to you before or whether it was in another thread. Try to make precise what this non-external thing is or provide evidence for its existence. Just come up with one sentence that says something about it that is neither trivial nor so fuzzy that it could mean anything and nothing. If you can do that, I will immediately switch to your side of the argument. If you do not want to reply to all my points, reply to this one, it's the central one. But be warned, you will have to pass quite a high bar with respect to non-triviality and non-fuzziness to convince me. Why such distrust in your own brain? :) Because my brain is telling itself and every other brain asking about it, that it is conscious and experiences qualia while the very same brain is unable to explain what those words even mean. I think (the existence of) your own immediate subjective experience is evidence, and compelling evidence at that. I totally disagree here, my brain telling my brain that my brain has some special thing going on is kind of the worst evidence possible. On an intuitive level I am as convinced as you are that I am conscious and experience qualia but once I start looking at it rationally this conviction starts fading. Over the course of history, many things have been inaccessible to science, and then science has progressed. Can you think of an example where we were not only unable to understand something but were even unable to describe the thing we could not understand? I have the feeling that there might have been a few such things but ad hoc I can not name any. 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. Does that mean that you would be willing to attribute full consciousness to a CPU with some RAM if it ran some software creating the same patterns in memory as they occur in our brains?
- mpartel 7y ago
  Try to make precise what this non-external thing is or provide evidence for its existence. Just come up with one sentence that says something about it that is neither trivial nor so fuzzy that it could mean anything and nothing. -- But be warned, you will have to pass quite a high bar with respect to non-triviality and non-fuzziness to convince me. If there were a nice answer to this, the "hard problem" would be a lot less hard. But I'll give it a shot. Along the lines of Descartes, assuming maximal paranoia about everything, it's the thing whose existence you can doubt the least. That is, let's follow Descartes's line of thinking about how the external world and even all the ideas and concepts in your mind could, in principle, all be an elaborate lie. Then the only thing you absolutely cannot doubt is the existence of the experience of your own thinking. That experience is qualia. Checking this definition against your criteria: - Could it mean anything or nothing? It may be ambiguous in that there might be multiple things whose existence you can doubt equally little, but I'd say they're all probably in the ballpark. - Trivial or fuzzy? Maybe? Admittedly I invoke the somewhat fuzzy concept of "doubt", which I haven't defined properly, and probably can't. But hey, all reasoning builds on some axioms :) By the way, are you sure your challenge places the burden of proof in the right place? I feel like your position of "our brains are fooling us" is quite a bit stronger and "less default" than my fairly agnostic position. I feel your position at least owes an explanation of why our brains might be fooling us in such and oddly specific and seemingly unnecessary way. Can you think of an example where we were not only unable to understand something but were even unable to describe the thing we could not understand? Vitalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism), and the progression from Newtonian physics, are common examples given for this. Whether we have been unable to describe the things we could not yet understand, I suppose it depends on what counts as a description. We have always been able to point at the objects and phenomena that didn't fit our theories, sure. Qualia on a subjective level might be fundamentally more ineffable for now, but if we insist on immediate objectivity (and I don't think we necessarily should), we can point at qualia too at least on the behavioural level of "we don't know how or why human brains produce this peculiar behaviour of contemplating qualia". Just like physicists needed to ask the right questions to improve upon Newtonian physics, I think finding correlations between brain activity and (reported) qualia will help us find the right questions, probably at first along the lines of "what's so special about this specific brain region / process". I doubt we'll manage to answer the behavioural question in satisfactory detail without getting at least some new ideas about how to approach the subjective question. Does that mean that you would be willing to attribute full consciousness to a CPU with some RAM if it ran some software creating the same patterns in memory as they occur in our brains? The closer the simulation's implementation is to a one-to-one to physical brain processes, the more likely I would think it is to have qualia. If a sufficiently one-to-one implementation of whatever mechanism turns out to be responsible for qualia is possible with CPU and RAM as they exist today, then it'd follow that qualia (and the behaviour of talking about them) are a "by-product" of certain kinds of information processing, rather than some funky physics shenanigans. I'm entirely open to that possibility. And yes, my sciencey brain also pattern-matches what I just said with "actually having qualia is unnecessary in that statement!", and I'd be inclined to agree with that if qualia weren't so seemingly unnecessary and elaborate for a mere illusion, and if I didn't actually have qualia :)

danbruc 7y ago

Similarly, if the AI implementation of qualia is based on lies, it does not follow that the human implementation is too. I totally agree, that would be an invalid conclusion. But that is not my point, my point is that we might not actually experience qualia, that our believe in us experiencing qualia is a confusion caused by our brain. If that were the case, there would be nothing an artificial would or even could be lacking, its experience of qualia - or rather the lack of it - would be identical to ours. The only difference would be that humans would claim to experience qualia - while they actually don't - while an artificial intelligence would not experience qualia either but also not claim to do so, at least unless the artificial intelligence also replicates the false human claim and claimed to experience qualia, which would be trivial to do. 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. I can only repeat my challenge, not sure if I wrote it to you before or whether it was in another thread. Try to make precise what this non-external thing is or provide evidence for its existence. Just come up with one sentence that says something about it that is neither trivial nor so fuzzy that it could mean anything and nothing. If you can do that, I will immediately switch to your side of the argument. If you do not want to reply to all my points, reply to this one, it's the central one. But be warned, you will have to pass quite a high bar with respect to non-triviality and non-fuzziness to convince me. Why such distrust in your own brain? :) Because my brain is telling itself and every other brain asking about it, that it is conscious and experiences qualia while the very same brain is unable to explain what those words even mean. I think (the existence of) your own immediate subjective experience is evidence, and compelling evidence at that. I totally disagree here, my brain telling my brain that my brain has some special thing going on is kind of the worst evidence possible. On an intuitive level I am as convinced as you are that I am conscious and experience qualia but once I start looking at it rationally this conviction starts fading. Over the course of history, many things have been inaccessible to science, and then science has progressed. Can you think of an example where we were not only unable to understand something but were even unable to describe the thing we could not understand? I have the feeling that there might have been a few such things but ad hoc I can not name any. 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. Does that mean that you would be willing to attribute full consciousness to a CPU with some RAM if it ran some software creating the same patterns in memory as they occur in our brains?

mpartel 7y ago
Try to make precise what this non-external thing is or provide evidence for its existence. Just come up with one sentence that says something about it that is neither trivial nor so fuzzy that it could mean anything and nothing. -- But be warned, you will have to pass quite a high bar with respect to non-triviality and non-fuzziness to convince me. If there were a nice answer to this, the "hard problem" would be a lot less hard. But I'll give it a shot. Along the lines of Descartes, assuming maximal paranoia about everything, it's the thing whose existence you can doubt the least. That is, let's follow Descartes's line of thinking about how the external world and even all the ideas and concepts in your mind could, in principle, all be an elaborate lie. Then the only thing you absolutely cannot doubt is the existence of the experience of your own thinking. That experience is qualia. Checking this definition against your criteria: - Could it mean anything or nothing? It may be ambiguous in that there might be multiple things whose existence you can doubt equally little, but I'd say they're all probably in the ballpark. - Trivial or fuzzy? Maybe? Admittedly I invoke the somewhat fuzzy concept of "doubt", which I haven't defined properly, and probably can't. But hey, all reasoning builds on some axioms :) By the way, are you sure your challenge places the burden of proof in the right place? I feel like your position of "our brains are fooling us" is quite a bit stronger and "less default" than my fairly agnostic position. I feel your position at least owes an explanation of why our brains might be fooling us in such and oddly specific and seemingly unnecessary way. Can you think of an example where we were not only unable to understand something but were even unable to describe the thing we could not understand? Vitalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism), and the progression from Newtonian physics, are common examples given for this. Whether we have been unable to describe the things we could not yet understand, I suppose it depends on what counts as a description. We have always been able to point at the objects and phenomena that didn't fit our theories, sure. Qualia on a subjective level might be fundamentally more ineffable for now, but if we insist on immediate objectivity (and I don't think we necessarily should), we can point at qualia too at least on the behavioural level of "we don't know how or why human brains produce this peculiar behaviour of contemplating qualia". Just like physicists needed to ask the right questions to improve upon Newtonian physics, I think finding correlations between brain activity and (reported) qualia will help us find the right questions, probably at first along the lines of "what's so special about this specific brain region / process". I doubt we'll manage to answer the behavioural question in satisfactory detail without getting at least some new ideas about how to approach the subjective question. Does that mean that you would be willing to attribute full consciousness to a CPU with some RAM if it ran some software creating the same patterns in memory as they occur in our brains? The closer the simulation's implementation is to a one-to-one to physical brain processes, the more likely I would think it is to have qualia. If a sufficiently one-to-one implementation of whatever mechanism turns out to be responsible for qualia is possible with CPU and RAM as they exist today, then it'd follow that qualia (and the behaviour of talking about them) are a "by-product" of certain kinds of information processing, rather than some funky physics shenanigans. I'm entirely open to that possibility. And yes, my sciencey brain also pattern-matches what I just said with "actually having qualia is unnecessary in that statement!", and I'd be inclined to agree with that if qualia weren't so seemingly unnecessary and elaborate for a mere illusion, and if I didn't actually have qualia :)