> This means that our conscious experience (qualia) are the result of physical processes. Well then, what makes brains so special? I don't think they are > Ca

> This means that our conscious experience (qualia) are the result of physical processes. Well then, what makes brains so special? I don't think they are > Can other complex systems have qualia? Do they even have to be complex - how about a sliding scale of consciousness? How about most any modern computing system? We can reproduce the same features with layers of control, permissions and abstraction. Suppose a system consisting of two modules. The vision module is hooked up to a camera. The AI module has a low bandwidth, serial text communication with the vision module and a fixed API. It has similar connections to other subsystems. User -> AI: "This is a ball. Its color is red." AI -> Vision: [ color of current thing = "red" ] AI -> User: Understood (later) User -> AI: "What is the color of this ball?" AI -> User: Let's see... AI -> Vision: [ get color of current thing ] Vision -> AI: "red" AI -> User: "The ball is red" A system made in this way can learn a ball is red, can then apply the knowledge to other red objects, but would be completely unable to describe what "red" looks like. That is locked up deep in the guts of the vision module, and the AI "conscious mind" has no access to that. Different implementations of the vision module might use the same internal representations or might not. It's even conceivable that you could swap the vision module for something different (eg, a camera wired RGB or BRG), crossing the wires, and it being impossible for the AI to tell.