3 ms·
I have trouble accepting that existence of something that appears so high-level as consciousness could depend on implementation details. We don't experience mi
by red75prime 7y ago
I have trouble accepting that existence of something that appears so high-level as consciousness could depend on implementation details.
We don't experience minutiae of activations of billions of neurons, or the work of glia. We experience "executive summaries" of them. So it's natural to assume that those summaries can be represented in another physical form.
Why physical representation of those "summaries" are there? Because it's a way our brains do high level decision making.
This leaves out the question why we experience anything at all. And I have trouble imagining that there are physical processes (quantum or not), which create a mysterious consumer for "executive summaries". If it was so, we would have decision-making pathway and useless subjective experience pathway. It's hard to explain from evolutionary standpoint.
I prefer to think that "executive summaries" abstracted from physical representation just exist without any need for mysterious consumers. Not unlike how natural numbers exist according to mathematical platonists.
- red75prime 7y agoThe analogy also allows to look upon the philosophical zombie argument from an interesting angle. Is it logically possible for a universe that is physically identical to ours, but where physical representations of natural number 2 correspond to natural number 3 to exist? Or where physical representations don't correspond to any natural numbers? Another funny take on inverted qualia argument. We can subitize small numbers of items, that is feel the number of items without counting. Can you imagine someone identical to you, who feels the number of two apples as you feel the number of three apples?