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> A camera does this. No, it doesn't. > So does a camera pointed at a mirror. No, there is no 'reflecting' going on here. > You may have misunderstood quali

> A camera does this. No, it doesn't. > So does a camera pointed at a mirror. No, there is no 'reflecting' going on here. > You may have misunderstood qualia. Not at all. Been debating this stuff with vegans for years now. > The platonic thing, the redness that you feel on the level of conscious awareness, is a quale. You're assuming there is a 'redness' to feel at all. What yo describe is only possible with self-awareness. Otherwise, it's just sensory data. > feel like they're happening to me—that's what people mean when they talk about consciousness. I think that's all downstream from the illusion of qualia. I think it's the opposite. Qualia as you describe it is only possible as a result of self-awareness, not as a building block for it. > The camera or the log-ingesting program don't have any emotional sense of vivid lived experience, though. That and other reasons is why it's a poor analogy. The camera is not sensing, and is not reflecting on anything. Processing data is not reflecting. > If it isn't hard, then why do so many people struggle with it? It's a particular theory/view of conciseness that not everyone adapts. It's like asking why people struggle with any other philosophical idea. > The non-existence of "real" consciousness raises the question of why we believe we are conscious so strongly to begin with. I think if you slip away from the concept of qualia, you lose the ability to understand why we care so much about consciousness in the first place. I maintain qualia isn't at all important here. The hierarchy goes sensory data i.e. sentience, then self-awareness, then qualia. Basic sentience is a solved problem, and the more insight to qualia that you want will become clear once we have more insight into self-awareness.

bccdee 2y ago
> The camera is not sensing, and is not reflecting on anything. What is sensing, if not ingesting data from sensors? What is reflecting upon something, if not processing data related to that thing? What is self-awareness, if not processing data related to yourself? The camera which processes its own image is not truly conscious, even if there's an image recognition algorithm onboard which identifies its reflection as an image of itself, even if the image goes through extensive processing. But if the camera feels something about seeing itself, then it's certainly conscious. You say "the camera is not sensing,"—I would argue that it's trivially sensing, but I suspect that what you mean by "sensing" is similar to what I've been calling "feeling." I argued that qualia are the distinction between inanimate sensing (the thing a camera does) and sentient feeling, but you rejected that. How do you construct this relationship, then, between inanimate data processing and your sentient sensing? You said sentience is upstream of self-awareness ("The hierarchy goes sensory data i.e. sentience, then self-awareness"), so self-awareness can't play a role. > What you describe is only possible with self-awareness. It's not myself I'm aware of in that situation, though. It's the "redness." Why is awareness of "red" necessarily mediated by awareness of the self? > It's like asking why people struggle with any other philosophical idea. Yeah, it is. The philosophies we intuitively gravitate towards tell us a lot about ourselves. "Hard-problem"-ism in particular is deeply compelling to (I think) most people, even though there is no objective evidence in support of it. That's really interesting. > Not at all. Been debating this stuff with vegans for years now. I'm curious why this would come up in a discussion on veganism.
- ruthmarx 2y ago
  > What is sensing, if not ingesting data from sensors? Ingesting data from sensors with a level of awareness. > What is reflecting upon something, if not processing data related to that thing? You really don't think reflection via higher level cognition is equivalent to processing data at the lowest level, do you? That's like saying a digital representation of the mona lisa is no different from the output of /dev/urandom because "it's all just bits". Nuance and context matter. In this case, reflecting again requires a level of awareness, not just base processing. A camera is closer to a rube goldberg machine than even a gnat. > The camera which processes its own image is not truly conscious, even if there's an image recognition algorithm onboard which identifies its reflection as an image of itself, even if the image goes through extensive processing. The camera isn't conscious at all, but semantics aside I think we agree on this point. > But if the camera feels something about seeing itself, then it's certainly conscious. This would be self-awareness though. > You say "the camera is not sensing,"—I would argue that it's trivially sensing, but I suspect that what you mean by "sensing" is similar to what I've been calling "feeling." Perhaps. What I'm calling sensing is what happens when an organism senses something via one of it's senses - so I think 'sensing' is a perfectly apt term here. 'Feeling' is fine as well, but I would say it is less accurate. I would not say a worm sensing food is 'feeling' there is food out there - I would limit feeling to emotional or physical sensation as opposed to any kind of stimuli. > Why is awareness of "red" necessarily mediated by awareness of the self? If you can't reflect to any extent on the 'red', then all you are doing is sensing data like the camera as you suggest. The self-awareness is what separates a conscious being from a non-conscious organism or device. > I'm curious why this would come up in a discussion on veganism. The level of consciousness of a being has a direct relationship of to ethical considerations of how that being should be treated which comes up in some vegan arguments.
  - bccdee 2y ago
    > [Sensing is] ingesting data from sensors with a level of awareness. What does "awareness" mean to you? How can we tell whether one thing is aware of another? I would consider "x is aware of y" to only mean (fundamentally) that x is responsive to the state of y, but your notion of awareness clearly goes beyond that. > What I'm calling sensing is what happens when an organism senses something via one of it's senses. Well, no, because you've got this idea of "awareness" in there too. A camera can sense things with its sensors, but you don't consider that "true sensing" because there's no awareness going on. > You really don't think reflection via higher level cognition is equivalent to processing data at the lowest level, do you? I'm not sure what you consider the difference to be, beyond one being more complicated than the other. If a machine takes input from a sensor and runs an analytical algorithm on it, how complex does that algorithm need to be before it's considered an act of reflection? Does "awareness" involve a specific process that the algorithm may or may not perform, or is it an emergent property of any sufficiently complex algorithm?

bccdee 2y ago

> The camera is not sensing, and is not reflecting on anything. What is sensing, if not ingesting data from sensors? What is reflecting upon something, if not processing data related to that thing? What is self-awareness, if not processing data related to yourself? The camera which processes its own image is not truly conscious, even if there's an image recognition algorithm onboard which identifies its reflection as an image of itself, even if the image goes through extensive processing. But if the camera feels something about seeing itself, then it's certainly conscious. You say "the camera is not sensing,"—I would argue that it's trivially sensing, but I suspect that what you mean by "sensing" is similar to what I've been calling "feeling." I argued that qualia are the distinction between inanimate sensing (the thing a camera does) and sentient feeling, but you rejected that. How do you construct this relationship, then, between inanimate data processing and your sentient sensing? You said sentience is upstream of self-awareness ("The hierarchy goes sensory data i.e. sentience, then self-awareness"), so self-awareness can't play a role. > What you describe is only possible with self-awareness. It's not myself I'm aware of in that situation, though. It's the "redness." Why is awareness of "red" necessarily mediated by awareness of the self? > It's like asking why people struggle with any other philosophical idea. Yeah, it is. The philosophies we intuitively gravitate towards tell us a lot about ourselves. "Hard-problem"-ism in particular is deeply compelling to (I think) most people, even though there is no objective evidence in support of it. That's really interesting. > Not at all. Been debating this stuff with vegans for years now. I'm curious why this would come up in a discussion on veganism.

ruthmarx 2y ago
> What is sensing, if not ingesting data from sensors? Ingesting data from sensors with a level of awareness. > What is reflecting upon something, if not processing data related to that thing? You really don't think reflection via higher level cognition is equivalent to processing data at the lowest level, do you? That's like saying a digital representation of the mona lisa is no different from the output of /dev/urandom because "it's all just bits". Nuance and context matter. In this case, reflecting again requires a level of awareness, not just base processing. A camera is closer to a rube goldberg machine than even a gnat. > The camera which processes its own image is not truly conscious, even if there's an image recognition algorithm onboard which identifies its reflection as an image of itself, even if the image goes through extensive processing. The camera isn't conscious at all, but semantics aside I think we agree on this point. > But if the camera feels something about seeing itself, then it's certainly conscious. This would be self-awareness though. > You say "the camera is not sensing,"—I would argue that it's trivially sensing, but I suspect that what you mean by "sensing" is similar to what I've been calling "feeling." Perhaps. What I'm calling sensing is what happens when an organism senses something via one of it's senses - so I think 'sensing' is a perfectly apt term here. 'Feeling' is fine as well, but I would say it is less accurate. I would not say a worm sensing food is 'feeling' there is food out there - I would limit feeling to emotional or physical sensation as opposed to any kind of stimuli. > Why is awareness of "red" necessarily mediated by awareness of the self? If you can't reflect to any extent on the 'red', then all you are doing is sensing data like the camera as you suggest. The self-awareness is what separates a conscious being from a non-conscious organism or device. > I'm curious why this would come up in a discussion on veganism. The level of consciousness of a being has a direct relationship of to ethical considerations of how that being should be treated which comes up in some vegan arguments.
- bccdee 2y ago
  > [Sensing is] ingesting data from sensors with a level of awareness. What does "awareness" mean to you? How can we tell whether one thing is aware of another? I would consider "x is aware of y" to only mean (fundamentally) that x is responsive to the state of y, but your notion of awareness clearly goes beyond that. > What I'm calling sensing is what happens when an organism senses something via one of it's senses. Well, no, because you've got this idea of "awareness" in there too. A camera can sense things with its sensors, but you don't consider that "true sensing" because there's no awareness going on. > You really don't think reflection via higher level cognition is equivalent to processing data at the lowest level, do you? I'm not sure what you consider the difference to be, beyond one being more complicated than the other. If a machine takes input from a sensor and runs an analytical algorithm on it, how complex does that algorithm need to be before it's considered an act of reflection? Does "awareness" involve a specific process that the algorithm may or may not perform, or is it an emergent property of any sufficiently complex algorithm?