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>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

>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.
krcz 6y ago
> 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)? What would that even mean? Is it based on some underlying assumption, that we have some hardwired, a priori subjective experience of red and blue colors and later we only associate these with perceptions of blood, roses, ripe apples and sky, water accordingly? That might be just an illusion and our color perception is learned, so blue is just the color of sky and water, and nothing more. > Why don't we have 'smell experience' for visual data and a 'visual experience' for smell data? Some people do (synesthesia), but generally lack of such experience mixes can be explained by different part of the brain getting different inputs, and impossibility of e.g. auditory stimulus to generate the same response as seeing red color would do.
- ImprobableTruth 6y ago
  >Is it based on some underlying assumption, that we have some hardwired, a priori subjective experience of red and blue colors and later we only associate these with perceptions of blood, roses, ripe apples and sky, water accordingly? The point is that we don't know. We know that we have a subjective experience of an image, where 'red' parts correspond to visual red light stimuli, but it's impossible for me as an individual to know what your subjective experience of an image looks like. If someone 'smelled' subjective images it would be impossible to tell the difference as long as they still 'smell' red light as red. >That might be just an illusion and our color perception is learned, so blue is just the color of sky and water, and nothing more. But where does that 'blue' experience come from? >Some people do (synesthesia), but generally lack of such experience mixes can be explained by different part of the brain getting different inputs, and impossibility of e.g. auditory stimulus to generate the same response as seeing red color would do. Sure, I'm just asking why there are different experiences to begin with. Why do we experience smell, sound, etc. the way we do?
  - the8472 6y ago
    > but it's impossible for me as an individual to know what your subjective experience of an image looks like This smells like a god of the gaps or argument from ignorance type of argument to me. And it's not impossible, just difficult to execute. All we would have to do is digitize your brain and swap out the responsible part, then you can form a memory of that, swap the original back in and do a comparison. Or something like that. All handwavy science-fiction of course since we currently lack detailed knowledge how this works, but that does not imply there's anything special about it, only that one human might be processing the data slightly differently than another human. The same way that one human may assign a different most-common-meaning to an ambiguous word than another.

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.

krcz 6y ago

> 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)? What would that even mean? Is it based on some underlying assumption, that we have some hardwired, a priori subjective experience of red and blue colors and later we only associate these with perceptions of blood, roses, ripe apples and sky, water accordingly? That might be just an illusion and our color perception is learned, so blue is just the color of sky and water, and nothing more. > Why don't we have 'smell experience' for visual data and a 'visual experience' for smell data? Some people do (synesthesia), but generally lack of such experience mixes can be explained by different part of the brain getting different inputs, and impossibility of e.g. auditory stimulus to generate the same response as seeing red color would do.

ImprobableTruth 6y ago
>Is it based on some underlying assumption, that we have some hardwired, a priori subjective experience of red and blue colors and later we only associate these with perceptions of blood, roses, ripe apples and sky, water accordingly? The point is that we don't know. We know that we have a subjective experience of an image, where 'red' parts correspond to visual red light stimuli, but it's impossible for me as an individual to know what your subjective experience of an image looks like. If someone 'smelled' subjective images it would be impossible to tell the difference as long as they still 'smell' red light as red. >That might be just an illusion and our color perception is learned, so blue is just the color of sky and water, and nothing more. But where does that 'blue' experience come from? >Some people do (synesthesia), but generally lack of such experience mixes can be explained by different part of the brain getting different inputs, and impossibility of e.g. auditory stimulus to generate the same response as seeing red color would do. Sure, I'm just asking why there are different experiences to begin with. Why do we experience smell, sound, etc. the way we do?
- the8472 6y ago
  > but it's impossible for me as an individual to know what your subjective experience of an image looks like This smells like a god of the gaps or argument from ignorance type of argument to me. And it's not impossible, just difficult to execute. All we would have to do is digitize your brain and swap out the responsible part, then you can form a memory of that, swap the original back in and do a comparison. Or something like that. All handwavy science-fiction of course since we currently lack detailed knowledge how this works, but that does not imply there's anything special about it, only that one human might be processing the data slightly differently than another human. The same way that one human may assign a different most-common-meaning to an ambiguous word than another.