> 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

> 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.