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My understanding of the thought experiment is that it is not about being able to detect red, but about experiencing the feeling that it is to see red. So in a h
by BoardsOfCanada 4y ago
My understanding of the thought experiment is that it is not about being able to detect red, but about experiencing the feeling that it is to see red. So in a hardware/software device, could we make the hardware experience seeing red the way you or I experience the color red.
My strong intuitive hunch is that we'll never build something electronic that can experience things (that it feels like something to be that device).
Compare this to how our immune systems works, it reacts on inputs and does very complex things but without experience. There could be beings or machines that could have this exact discussion like that, learning things, agreeing, disagreeing but without experiencing anything.
- Isinlor 4y agoI'm quite sure that my immune system provides me with experiences. For example, I certainly can feel swollen lymph nodes. My memory of swollen lymph nodes is about as vivid or detailed as that of headache.
- naasking 4y ago> My strong intuitive hunch is that we'll never build something electronic that can experience things (that it feels like something to be that device). The Bekenstein Bound tells that us that any finite volume has finite information. That means our brain is describable by finite information, including our feelings. So why can't that information be translated into an electronic form? The only way out of this conclusion is to assert that "experience" cannot be captured by physics. Is that your position?
- BoardsOfCanada 4y agoYes. I used to be a hardcore materialist, I studied applied physics at university as a young know-it-all, and never reflected on how absolutely weird "experience"/quale is until years later and changed my mind. But if anyone can explain how to get from matter to experience I would be relieved :) What do you think?
- naasking 4y agoI suggest reading the following paper for how neuroscience is starting to tackle this: A conceptual framework for consciousness, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119#fig01 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119#fig01
- BoardsOfCanada 4y agoThanks for the link. It seems to me though, that it's no easier to explain having the illusion of experience than to explain actual experience (and vice versa). I've heard Joshua Bach talk in similar terms and I frankly do not get it.
- naasking 4y ago> It seems to me though, that it's no easier to explain having the illusion of experience than to explain actual experience (and vice versa). The paper goes over that too: 1. The brain uses information to build models, 2. all brain models are necessarily inaccurate. Therefore quale are inaccurate models of perceptions and/or models of perceptual memory, where some information has been thrown away, as we do with all models. The redness of an apple is a distorted sense memory of the apple, just with all the "appleness" thrown away leaving only the "redness", which is why they seem so vague and ephemeral.
- BoardsOfCanada 4y agoI don't see how we're one step closer to qualia. I'm pretty sure I'm missing the main point of the paper and I'll read it again tomorrow. If I and some other people would follow a certain algorithm, the one in the paper, but refined and perfected for a thousand years... Calculating with pen and paper the progression of states from a suitable initial state... Would an illusion of experience/qualia appear somewhere just from our calculations? Would it feel like something to be the state represented in the numbers? Anyway, thanks for the discussion.
- 4y ago