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Sure, waves exist, whatever. Not to be rude, but so what? This kind of comes across as "quantum waves therefore the Universe Is Love" or something. What about t

Sure, waves exist, whatever. Not to be rude, but so what? This kind of comes across as "quantum waves therefore the Universe Is Love" or something. What about the waves matters here? I'm not arguing that consciousness doesn't exist, I'm saying that it's not a binary thing, and trying to provide a useful, falsifiable definition of it that provides a way to actually communicate about it instead of talking past each other.

quantadev 2y ago
I partially answered this on the other post. Some people think Qualia is emergent purely from computation. Some people (like me) think there's a different and very specific and very unique thing going on inside brains that is responsible for Qualia, and I think to understand it scientifically it's going to be a "Wave Theory". I'm not even pushing the panpsychism view that "Everything has Consciousness, because all atoms have EM fields" at all, but when you get right down to it, EM fields are more "real" than a computation is. A computation is purely theoretical. We can build computer logic circuits out of water pipes or dominoes. So it's just obvious to me Qualia is not built on computations. Believing Qualia is made of computations is more of a naieve "Universe is Love" type position than believing that Qualia is built of something REAL like EM fields. Calculations are not even real. For example the number 0100101110110 in a computer is purely a "label" for something real. Numbers in computers are just labels. EM waves are the actual thing, and actually real. The Map is not the Territory. Computers are Maps. Qualia is a Territory.
- gaganyaan 2y ago
  Well we're not going to convince each other of fundamentally different worldviews over the internet. Until proven otherwise, I think qualia is just a trick smart people play on themselves to convince themselves humans are special because it makes them feel better, and indelibly tied to the concept of a soul and like woo. I'm willing to be proven wrong, and that's what science is for. Hopefully we'll see answers in our lifetimes.
  - quantadev 2y ago
    I think it takes more "faith" (belief without evidence) to deny the existence of Qualia as being real, than it does to accept that it's real. Of course even the word "real" is problematic because of the simple analogy: "Are Football Stadium waves real, or is it nothing but people's arms moving." Anything that's purely a dynamical set of state changes can be legitimately argued to "not exist".

quantadev 2y ago

I partially answered this on the other post. Some people think Qualia is emergent purely from computation. Some people (like me) think there's a different and very specific and very unique thing going on inside brains that is responsible for Qualia, and I think to understand it scientifically it's going to be a "Wave Theory". I'm not even pushing the panpsychism view that "Everything has Consciousness, because all atoms have EM fields" at all, but when you get right down to it, EM fields are more "real" than a computation is. A computation is purely theoretical. We can build computer logic circuits out of water pipes or dominoes. So it's just obvious to me Qualia is not built on computations. Believing Qualia is made of computations is more of a naieve "Universe is Love" type position than believing that Qualia is built of something REAL like EM fields. Calculations are not even real. For example the number 0100101110110 in a computer is purely a "label" for something real. Numbers in computers are just labels. EM waves are the actual thing, and actually real. The Map is not the Territory. Computers are Maps. Qualia is a Territory.

gaganyaan 2y ago
Well we're not going to convince each other of fundamentally different worldviews over the internet. Until proven otherwise, I think qualia is just a trick smart people play on themselves to convince themselves humans are special because it makes them feel better, and indelibly tied to the concept of a soul and like woo. I'm willing to be proven wrong, and that's what science is for. Hopefully we'll see answers in our lifetimes.
- quantadev 2y ago
  I think it takes more "faith" (belief without evidence) to deny the existence of Qualia as being real, than it does to accept that it's real. Of course even the word "real" is problematic because of the simple analogy: "Are Football Stadium waves real, or is it nothing but people's arms moving." Anything that's purely a dynamical set of state changes can be legitimately argued to "not exist".