5 ms·

There has to be an internal representation for the organism to function properly. E.g. if light with a 450nm wavelength hits your retina, certain neurons fire.

There has to be an internal representation for the organism to function properly. E.g. if light with a 450nm wavelength hits your retina, certain neurons fire. You get a pattern of electrical impulses. There's your internal representation. But why does that representation also carry with it an experience of the color blue? Why isn't it just the electrical impulses and that's it? The organism would still work. We could be like robots, behaving exactly the same as our nerve impulses move us around, with no inner experience at all. And what about electrical impulses in things other than brains? Are there qualia associated with them? Is there something it's like to be a computer, light bulb, thermostat, lightning bolt, or rock? If not, why not? If you and I both see that 450nm light, how do you know that I'm not having an experience of color that you have in response to 700nm, i.e. red? Maybe the rainbow of colors is upside-down in my experience compared to yours. Maybe my qualia are different entirely. We have no way to prove anything different, because all we can measure is the electrical impulses. And because we haven't the faintest hint of a theory that connects the physical stuff to the particulars of the conscious experience.

thechao 6y ago
> You get a pattern of electrical impulses. Is there something else in the brain that's not just protein cascades and electrical impulses? I'd be interested in a published paper describing this structure. Barring that, yes, experience really is just protein cascades and electrical impulses. A light bulb is orders of magnitude simpler — easily 10 or 12, maybe more; and, that's just spatial; the spatiotemporal complexity might be another 10 or 12 orders of magnitude. I don't think it's any stretch of the imagination to believe qualia arise somewhere between "uniform black body emitter" and "human brain learning and experiencing over time".
- DennisP 6y ago
  That's often people's assumption, that at some level of complexity, qualia just show up. But we don't actually have a clue why that might be the case, or how it happens, or why a pile of atoms banging against their neighbors should be considered a larger whole which thus has complexity and therefore consciousness. People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems there's no other option. But that's not an argument, it's just faith in materialism. And it's not true that there are no options besides simple materialism and crazy woo. E.g. it's possible that all matter has some level of conscious experience; you can believe that without believing anything contrary to physics. There are all sorts of possibilities being explored by people who grapple with these questions, instead of just assuming an answer.
  - mdifrgechd 6y ago
    > E.g. it's possible that all matter has some level of conscious experience I've tried to reason about this, and one hypothesis is that all matter has compulsions, like to get to lower gravitational potential energy, to react this way or that, etc. And that desire can be thought of as conciousness. So for more complex assemblies of matter, conciousness becomes the sum of those compulsions, but still reflects the sum of what the base components want to do - oxidize stuff, etc. But the point is, conciousness is the manifestation of the inherent desires we have, based on the rules of the universe. Just a hypothesis of course, not testable, but my demonstration is that if you pour water into a maze with an outlet, it will solve it, based on its desire to reach a lower potential energy, and to make hydrogen bonds.
  - jeremyjh 6y ago
    > People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems there's no other option. But that's not an argument, it's just faith in materialism. What other explanation is there? A magic fairy unicorn in the sky is making the qualia possible? How does that solve the problem you are pointing to, wouldn't we still want to get there via "first principals" ? And if we did find a magic unicorn in the sky, we'd study it and probably eventually understand how it works, what forces are acting upon it or vice versa. And once we'd done all that, someone on a forum would say of course this can't explain qualia because its "just materialism".
    - MacsHeadroom 6y ago
      If you start at first principles you don't find support for a fundamentally material reality. Idealist monism is the alternative. i.e. the universe and everything in it is fundamentally mental phenomena (qualia) which may only appear to have material properties by the extent of their disenfranchisement from more connected phenomenal clusters.
      - dr_dshiv 6y ago
        Right. See Bernard Kastrup's work. Or, Plato. Or Max Tegmark. In my experience, most people can't follow their arguments because their woo detector turns on and their rational faculty turns off.
- treeman79 6y ago
  I like that idea that at a deeper level quantum computing matters in the brain. Add a few digits to the layers of complexity. P I’m a Bnb
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
analog31 6y ago
Something that might help laypeople like myself, would be to relate them to the colors of things. That's the third dimension in this puzzle. There are wavelengths, and we have nerve impulses, but in addition, things interact with wavelengths in different ways. Talking about wavelengths and electrical impulses seems too abstract. Let's talk about a tomato. Do you experience a 450 nm (or maybe 550 to be fair) tomato the way I experience a 700 nm tomato? Do we have qualia for empty and full? Do you experience an empty beer bottle the way I experience a full beer bottle?
aeternum 6y ago
If you consider a brain as a sparsely connected graph then it also explains these experiences. The nodes nearby to the color blue perception nodes are those that we think of as clearly related (sky, water, certain crayons), but also those that are less directly related: water, cold, sadness.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Is the question about qualia even a meaningful one? It feels to me like running a program twice and asking whether it's really the same program that was run, given that each time, the addresses of library functions the program used were different[0]. It could be that when you see 450nm light, the pathways in your brain that process this information correspond to the pathways that respond to 700nm light in my head. But it doesn't matter; our experiences are adjusted to match, because they're synchronized, thanks to shared environment and language. In both of us, despite invoking different neuron groups, seeing a blue sky will evoke images of water, or Windows error codes, and not of roses or rust. If we talk, both of us will use the word "blue" to describe what we're experiencing. Whether the rainbow is upside-down or not in your head doesn't seem to be a meaningful question, if through all imaginable ways to observe and communicate it, it seems you perceive it the same way as the rest of us. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space_layout_randomization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space_layout_randomiza...
- DennisP 6y ago
  I would say the question of qualia is meaningful, in the sense that a good answer might teach us something about the nature of reality. It's just not a practical question. However, it might become a practical question, if someday we have to decide whether AGI should have rights, or whether we think a human uploaded to silicon would have qualia.

thechao 6y ago

> You get a pattern of electrical impulses. Is there something else in the brain that's not just protein cascades and electrical impulses? I'd be interested in a published paper describing this structure. Barring that, yes, experience really is just protein cascades and electrical impulses. A light bulb is orders of magnitude simpler — easily 10 or 12, maybe more; and, that's just spatial; the spatiotemporal complexity might be another 10 or 12 orders of magnitude. I don't think it's any stretch of the imagination to believe qualia arise somewhere between "uniform black body emitter" and "human brain learning and experiencing over time".

DennisP 6y ago
That's often people's assumption, that at some level of complexity, qualia just show up. But we don't actually have a clue why that might be the case, or how it happens, or why a pile of atoms banging against their neighbors should be considered a larger whole which thus has complexity and therefore consciousness. People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems there's no other option. But that's not an argument, it's just faith in materialism. And it's not true that there are no options besides simple materialism and crazy woo. E.g. it's possible that all matter has some level of conscious experience; you can believe that without believing anything contrary to physics. There are all sorts of possibilities being explored by people who grapple with these questions, instead of just assuming an answer.
- mdifrgechd 6y ago
  > E.g. it's possible that all matter has some level of conscious experience I've tried to reason about this, and one hypothesis is that all matter has compulsions, like to get to lower gravitational potential energy, to react this way or that, etc. And that desire can be thought of as conciousness. So for more complex assemblies of matter, conciousness becomes the sum of those compulsions, but still reflects the sum of what the base components want to do - oxidize stuff, etc. But the point is, conciousness is the manifestation of the inherent desires we have, based on the rules of the universe. Just a hypothesis of course, not testable, but my demonstration is that if you pour water into a maze with an outlet, it will solve it, based on its desire to reach a lower potential energy, and to make hydrogen bonds.
- jeremyjh 6y ago
  > People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems there's no other option. But that's not an argument, it's just faith in materialism. What other explanation is there? A magic fairy unicorn in the sky is making the qualia possible? How does that solve the problem you are pointing to, wouldn't we still want to get there via "first principals" ? And if we did find a magic unicorn in the sky, we'd study it and probably eventually understand how it works, what forces are acting upon it or vice versa. And once we'd done all that, someone on a forum would say of course this can't explain qualia because its "just materialism".
  - MacsHeadroom 6y ago
    If you start at first principles you don't find support for a fundamentally material reality. Idealist monism is the alternative. i.e. the universe and everything in it is fundamentally mental phenomena (qualia) which may only appear to have material properties by the extent of their disenfranchisement from more connected phenomenal clusters.
    - dr_dshiv 6y ago
      Right. See Bernard Kastrup's work. Or, Plato. Or Max Tegmark. In my experience, most people can't follow their arguments because their woo detector turns on and their rational faculty turns off.
treeman79 6y ago
I like that idea that at a deeper level quantum computing matters in the brain. Add a few digits to the layers of complexity. P I’m a Bnb

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

analog31 6y ago

Something that might help laypeople like myself, would be to relate them to the colors of things. That's the third dimension in this puzzle. There are wavelengths, and we have nerve impulses, but in addition, things interact with wavelengths in different ways. Talking about wavelengths and electrical impulses seems too abstract. Let's talk about a tomato. Do you experience a 450 nm (or maybe 550 to be fair) tomato the way I experience a 700 nm tomato? Do we have qualia for empty and full? Do you experience an empty beer bottle the way I experience a full beer bottle?

aeternum 6y ago

If you consider a brain as a sparsely connected graph then it also explains these experiences. The nodes nearby to the color blue perception nodes are those that we think of as clearly related (sky, water, certain crayons), but also those that are less directly related: water, cold, sadness.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

Is the question about qualia even a meaningful one? It feels to me like running a program twice and asking whether it's really the same program that was run, given that each time, the addresses of library functions the program used were different[0]. It could be that when you see 450nm light, the pathways in your brain that process this information correspond to the pathways that respond to 700nm light in my head. But it doesn't matter; our experiences are adjusted to match, because they're synchronized, thanks to shared environment and language. In both of us, despite invoking different neuron groups, seeing a blue sky will evoke images of water, or Windows error codes, and not of roses or rust. If we talk, both of us will use the word "blue" to describe what we're experiencing. Whether the rainbow is upside-down or not in your head doesn't seem to be a meaningful question, if through all imaginable ways to observe and communicate it, it seems you perceive it the same way as the rest of us. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space_layout_randomization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space_layout_randomiza...

DennisP 6y ago
I would say the question of qualia is meaningful, in the sense that a good answer might teach us something about the nature of reality. It's just not a practical question. However, it might become a practical question, if someday we have to decide whether AGI should have rights, or whether we think a human uploaded to silicon would have qualia.