4 ms·

Sure, but the parent's claim was that there is no "want" and "like" in evolution. You might want and like things; perhaps (perhaps) cells and bacteria might wa

Sure, but the parent's claim was that there is no "want" and "like" in evolution. You might want and like things; perhaps (perhaps) cells and bacteria might want and like things, but evolution certainly does not.

benlivengood 6y ago
The fascinating question is where the line is between action and reaction and our qualitative experience of wanting and liking. Our wants and likes are (probably) physically implemented as a sequence of electrochemical reactions; almost certainly with nothing more than electromagnetism. So which instantiations/states of the electromagnetic field experience feelings and desires? Are they held in the energy potential or in the energy transfer, or both? Is it enough to have a sufficiently complex feedback loop simulating/predicting itself? The answer is likely to be both sort of simple but also profound. Eventually we'll have an a-ha moment studying electrocardiographs or FMRI or individual neural networks and be able to replicate experience in other electromagnetic substrates, and knowing precisely what we are, in a sense, will be pretty neat. Then what will we really know about experience? Is it truly in the electromagnetic field or does it exist in the mathematical relationships that determine the evolution of the fields? That might be a question we never definitely answer from an outside perspective, but is endlessly fascinating to me.
- selestify 6y ago
  Fascinating question indeed :) > So which instantiations/states of the electromagnetic field experience feelings and desires? Personally this is why I think that perhaps qualia is not an emergent phenomenon after all, and must come from outside the system. I.e. I suspect that philosophical zombies are possible
  - benlivengood 6y ago
    I find it utterly strange that drugs, hallucinogens, concussions, alcohol, electromagnetic stimulation, etc. could all reliably affect consciousness but that a brain identical to mine might be a pzombie. Like; who or what could possibly be doing the detailed-enough tracking to be sure to give my brain consciousness (but not my sleeping brain) while my molecular twin gets none?
- jmoss20 6y ago
  > Eventually we'll have an a-ha moment... Will we? How can we ever verify that our intervention produces this or that sort of qualia? (For the record, I'm a fan of theories like IIT [0] that aim to answer questions in the neighborhood of these -- but we should be sober about what is even, in principle, knowable to us. We can verify that intervention X gives behavior Y, but I don't see how we could ever verify that intervention X gives qualitative experience Z (intervening on ourselves aside, which in any case will only tell us about our sort of conscious experience).) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

benlivengood 6y ago

The fascinating question is where the line is between action and reaction and our qualitative experience of wanting and liking. Our wants and likes are (probably) physically implemented as a sequence of electrochemical reactions; almost certainly with nothing more than electromagnetism. So which instantiations/states of the electromagnetic field experience feelings and desires? Are they held in the energy potential or in the energy transfer, or both? Is it enough to have a sufficiently complex feedback loop simulating/predicting itself? The answer is likely to be both sort of simple but also profound. Eventually we'll have an a-ha moment studying electrocardiographs or FMRI or individual neural networks and be able to replicate experience in other electromagnetic substrates, and knowing precisely what we are, in a sense, will be pretty neat. Then what will we really know about experience? Is it truly in the electromagnetic field or does it exist in the mathematical relationships that determine the evolution of the fields? That might be a question we never definitely answer from an outside perspective, but is endlessly fascinating to me.

selestify 6y ago
Fascinating question indeed :) > So which instantiations/states of the electromagnetic field experience feelings and desires? Personally this is why I think that perhaps qualia is not an emergent phenomenon after all, and must come from outside the system. I.e. I suspect that philosophical zombies are possible
- benlivengood 6y ago
  I find it utterly strange that drugs, hallucinogens, concussions, alcohol, electromagnetic stimulation, etc. could all reliably affect consciousness but that a brain identical to mine might be a pzombie. Like; who or what could possibly be doing the detailed-enough tracking to be sure to give my brain consciousness (but not my sleeping brain) while my molecular twin gets none?
jmoss20 6y ago
> Eventually we'll have an a-ha moment... Will we? How can we ever verify that our intervention produces this or that sort of qualia? (For the record, I'm a fan of theories like IIT [0] that aim to answer questions in the neighborhood of these -- but we should be sober about what is even, in principle, knowable to us. We can verify that intervention X gives behavior Y, but I don't see how we could ever verify that intervention X gives qualitative experience Z (intervening on ourselves aside, which in any case will only tell us about our sort of conscious experience).) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory