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Then you probably don't know what 'consciousness' means, because none of these processes give an explanation as to why or how qualia arise. Also, "trial-and-er

Then you probably don't know what 'consciousness' means, because none of these processes give an explanation as to why or how qualia arise. Also, "trial-and-error stateful processing" is so vague and broad that I don't feel that it meaningfully describes anything more than 'computation'.

killerstorm 6y ago
There's no evidence that qualia are anything more than clusters within some vector space which is useful to describe sensory inputs. They arise because they are useful for making sense of the external world. I know that philosophers like to believe in some mystical bullshit about a whole different category of things, but if you believe in evolution, things are simple. An animal receivers a sensory input, it tries to use it to improve its survival chances. It usually makes sense to tell signal from noise, by clustering and transforming it. You cannot derive any useful information from a single vibration of air, but if you transform from time domain to frequency domain, you can observe that certain frequencies relate to information about outside world, such as presence of predators, etc. If you do several layers of such transformations you arrive to qualia. If you study signal processing and NNs, these things become obvious. If you give a signal processing guy a task to detect human speech, for example, he will filter frequencies, then estimate loudness and compare to background noise. If you train NN, it will do the same -- you will likely get a neuron which represents "loudness in human speech". Same if you train a computational process using evolutionary process: loudness in specific frequency range carries out useful information, so no matter what process you use, you will have some representation of this quality. Same with "color red" or whatever other qualia you can think of -- it's just a region in a space which arises from useful transformations of the incoming signals which maximize useful information.
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  Yeah I think we need to maintain this distinction between a scientific understanding of the world and what human beings actually are, and the abstractions we invent in order to ensure we don’t destroy ourselves as a species. I firmly believe that without the latter we are doomed, which is why I intentionally deceive myself with ideas like the existence of a singular benevolent unifying presence (often referred to as “God”) in order to shape my own behavior.
  - bawana 6y ago
    what we need psychologically to survive is not the same as what is really there. Qualia is a bullshit word like trying to say there is a difference between the numeral '1' and the word 'one'. I do not dispute the fact that we are better people when we recognize that there are intelligences/forces greater than us. Presuming that our current science is 'good enough' reminds me of the time when a prominent physicist said that 'all that remains is to add decimal points of precision to our measurements'.
    - ImprobableTruth 6y ago
      >Qualia is a bullshit word like trying to say there is a difference between the numeral '1' and the word 'one' I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Are you saying that sense data is the same as the subjective experience of it?
      - jakear 6y ago
        Data comes in, response is determined by the associations built up in the brain both over the subject’s own life time and all of evolution. I don’t see the need to add some mystical third component, sounds to me like philosophers just made up something to talk about because they don’t get paid unless they have something to talk about. From wiki: Examples of qualia include the perceived sensation of pain of a headache, the taste of wine, as well as the redness of an evening sky. Nothing here seems to be above and beyond simple developed response to stimuli, same as a meal worm.
        ImprobableTruth 6y ago
        Yes, we collect sense data, process it and then respond to it, but we also have a subjective experience. We 'see an image in our minds' as part of processing it, but why and how? Something like the 'The taste of wine' isn't a response, but a subjective feeling. Why do we have a subjective experience of pain instead of reacting to it? To be honest though, if you're actually interested in discussing this your comment really isn't conductive to fruitful discussion (especially the part denigrating philosophers). If not, why even respond?
- ImprobableTruth 6y ago
  >There's no evidence that qualia are anything more than clusters within some vector space which is useful to describe sensory inputs. I'm sorry, but this just betrays that you have no clue what qualia refers to. It's about the _subjective experience_ of interpreting data. Why don't we have 'smell experience' for visual data and a 'visual experience' for smell data? Why aren't our interpretations of red and blue switched (so that we interpret red visual data as a blue visual experience and blue visual data as a red visual experience)? Hell, why do we need visual experience to act on it at all? Saying "they arose because they're useful' or trying to reduce it down to cluster analysis does absolutely nothing to explain qualia. There is absolutely no evidence that a NN neuron (or set of them) that can detect a certain trait such as loudness also has subjective experience. Frankly, we essentially know absolutely nothing about subjective experiences except that we ourselves have them. >I know that philosophers like to believe in some mystical bullshit about a whole different category of things, but if you believe in evolution, things are simple I genuinely recommend reflecting on this statement. You're essentially saying that you can solve in a single paragraph and using only knowledge that a CS undergrad might have (!) a problem that professional philosophers have grappled with for decades. Do you really think that is more likely than you simply not understanding the problem?
  - killerstorm 6y ago
    > Why don't we have 'smell experience' for visual data and a 'visual experience' for smell data? Many people do. It's called synesthesia. But usually vectors which have different meaning are not mixed together. While you can describe sound using a vector and you can describe a picture using a vector, adding these vectors makes no sense, it's not useful. So we just don't have pathways which mix data of different kinds. Except that sometimes there's mixing on some level, so one can talk about a blue sound and red word, for example. > There is absolutely no evidence that a NN neuron (or set of them) that can detect a certain trait such as loudness also has subjective experience. Not true. If we observe a correlation between a human interpretation of a signal and ANN neuron, then we can say that this neuron _represents_ the quality a person can talk about. That is, there's a correspondence between a neuron and experience human has. One implies another, so they must represent the same thing. > You're essentially saying that you can solve in a single paragraph and using only knowledge that a CS undergrad might have (!) a problem that professional philosophers have grappled with for decades. I do. What I'm saying is that professional philosophers specialize on creating various fictional concepts which do not exist in the real world and describe various problems with these stuff. So the thing is, there's no real problem with qualia -- it's a fictional concept. Suppose I tell you that I've been working on a problem of relating foobla to brantoblaze for decades. If I cannot describe what things things correspond to real world, it's a fictional problem which exists only within my brain. It cannot be solved, but also, doesn't need to be solved. Another example: Philosophers have been thinking about a nature of language for decades. Wittgenstein came up with revolutionary idea that language is used to communicate useful information between individuals. Any CS undergrad can design a system and a language which communicates useful information between instances of the system: he doesn't need decades of philosophical thought because he already understands concepts such as 'state' and 'information', which are sufficient. > Do you really think that is more likely than you simply not understanding the problem? It's far more likely that philosophers do not understand signal processing, vector spaces, ANNs and so on.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  "I know that philosophers like to believe in some mystical bullshit about a whole different category of things" I've found that it's the people who are most contemptuous of philosophy that could benefit most from taking a few good introductory philosophy courses, so they can finally realize that an enormous part of their own (often unconscious) understanding of and attitude towards the world derives from long established philosophy.
  - killerstorm 6y ago
    I didn't mean to disparage philosophy, but just point of that thinking pure in terms of abstract concepts is often unproductive.

killerstorm 6y ago

There's no evidence that qualia are anything more than clusters within some vector space which is useful to describe sensory inputs. They arise because they are useful for making sense of the external world. I know that philosophers like to believe in some mystical bullshit about a whole different category of things, but if you believe in evolution, things are simple. An animal receivers a sensory input, it tries to use it to improve its survival chances. It usually makes sense to tell signal from noise, by clustering and transforming it. You cannot derive any useful information from a single vibration of air, but if you transform from time domain to frequency domain, you can observe that certain frequencies relate to information about outside world, such as presence of predators, etc. If you do several layers of such transformations you arrive to qualia. If you study signal processing and NNs, these things become obvious. If you give a signal processing guy a task to detect human speech, for example, he will filter frequencies, then estimate loudness and compare to background noise. If you train NN, it will do the same -- you will likely get a neuron which represents "loudness in human speech". Same if you train a computational process using evolutionary process: loudness in specific frequency range carries out useful information, so no matter what process you use, you will have some representation of this quality. Same with "color red" or whatever other qualia you can think of -- it's just a region in a space which arises from useful transformations of the incoming signals which maximize useful information.

jkhdigital 6y ago
Yeah I think we need to maintain this distinction between a scientific understanding of the world and what human beings actually are, and the abstractions we invent in order to ensure we don’t destroy ourselves as a species. I firmly believe that without the latter we are doomed, which is why I intentionally deceive myself with ideas like the existence of a singular benevolent unifying presence (often referred to as “God”) in order to shape my own behavior.
- bawana 6y ago
  what we need psychologically to survive is not the same as what is really there. Qualia is a bullshit word like trying to say there is a difference between the numeral '1' and the word 'one'. I do not dispute the fact that we are better people when we recognize that there are intelligences/forces greater than us. Presuming that our current science is 'good enough' reminds me of the time when a prominent physicist said that 'all that remains is to add decimal points of precision to our measurements'.
  - ImprobableTruth 6y ago
    >Qualia is a bullshit word like trying to say there is a difference between the numeral '1' and the word 'one' I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Are you saying that sense data is the same as the subjective experience of it?
    - jakear 6y ago
      Data comes in, response is determined by the associations built up in the brain both over the subject’s own life time and all of evolution. I don’t see the need to add some mystical third component, sounds to me like philosophers just made up something to talk about because they don’t get paid unless they have something to talk about. From wiki: Examples of qualia include the perceived sensation of pain of a headache, the taste of wine, as well as the redness of an evening sky. Nothing here seems to be above and beyond simple developed response to stimuli, same as a meal worm.
      - ImprobableTruth 6y ago
        Yes, we collect sense data, process it and then respond to it, but we also have a subjective experience. We 'see an image in our minds' as part of processing it, but why and how? Something like the 'The taste of wine' isn't a response, but a subjective feeling. Why do we have a subjective experience of pain instead of reacting to it? To be honest though, if you're actually interested in discussing this your comment really isn't conductive to fruitful discussion (especially the part denigrating philosophers). If not, why even respond?
ImprobableTruth 6y ago
>There's no evidence that qualia are anything more than clusters within some vector space which is useful to describe sensory inputs. I'm sorry, but this just betrays that you have no clue what qualia refers to. It's about the _subjective experience_ of interpreting data. Why don't we have 'smell experience' for visual data and a 'visual experience' for smell data? Why aren't our interpretations of red and blue switched (so that we interpret red visual data as a blue visual experience and blue visual data as a red visual experience)? Hell, why do we need visual experience to act on it at all? Saying "they arose because they're useful' or trying to reduce it down to cluster analysis does absolutely nothing to explain qualia. There is absolutely no evidence that a NN neuron (or set of them) that can detect a certain trait such as loudness also has subjective experience. Frankly, we essentially know absolutely nothing about subjective experiences except that we ourselves have them. >I know that philosophers like to believe in some mystical bullshit about a whole different category of things, but if you believe in evolution, things are simple I genuinely recommend reflecting on this statement. You're essentially saying that you can solve in a single paragraph and using only knowledge that a CS undergrad might have (!) a problem that professional philosophers have grappled with for decades. Do you really think that is more likely than you simply not understanding the problem?
- killerstorm 6y ago
  > Why don't we have 'smell experience' for visual data and a 'visual experience' for smell data? Many people do. It's called synesthesia. But usually vectors which have different meaning are not mixed together. While you can describe sound using a vector and you can describe a picture using a vector, adding these vectors makes no sense, it's not useful. So we just don't have pathways which mix data of different kinds. Except that sometimes there's mixing on some level, so one can talk about a blue sound and red word, for example. > There is absolutely no evidence that a NN neuron (or set of them) that can detect a certain trait such as loudness also has subjective experience. Not true. If we observe a correlation between a human interpretation of a signal and ANN neuron, then we can say that this neuron _represents_ the quality a person can talk about. That is, there's a correspondence between a neuron and experience human has. One implies another, so they must represent the same thing. > You're essentially saying that you can solve in a single paragraph and using only knowledge that a CS undergrad might have (!) a problem that professional philosophers have grappled with for decades. I do. What I'm saying is that professional philosophers specialize on creating various fictional concepts which do not exist in the real world and describe various problems with these stuff. So the thing is, there's no real problem with qualia -- it's a fictional concept. Suppose I tell you that I've been working on a problem of relating foobla to brantoblaze for decades. If I cannot describe what things things correspond to real world, it's a fictional problem which exists only within my brain. It cannot be solved, but also, doesn't need to be solved. Another example: Philosophers have been thinking about a nature of language for decades. Wittgenstein came up with revolutionary idea that language is used to communicate useful information between individuals. Any CS undergrad can design a system and a language which communicates useful information between instances of the system: he doesn't need decades of philosophical thought because he already understands concepts such as 'state' and 'information', which are sufficient. > Do you really think that is more likely than you simply not understanding the problem? It's far more likely that philosophers do not understand signal processing, vector spaces, ANNs and so on.
pmoriarty 6y ago
"I know that philosophers like to believe in some mystical bullshit about a whole different category of things" I've found that it's the people who are most contemptuous of philosophy that could benefit most from taking a few good introductory philosophy courses, so they can finally realize that an enormous part of their own (often unconscious) understanding of and attitude towards the world derives from long established philosophy.
- killerstorm 6y ago
  I didn't mean to disparage philosophy, but just point of that thinking pure in terms of abstract concepts is often unproductive.