4 ms·

I think we have a pretty good explanation today - it's like embeddings from AI models. Experience is both content and reference, we represent new experience in

by visarga 4mo ago

I think we have a pretty good explanation today - it's like embeddings from AI models. Experience is both content and reference, we represent new experience in relation to old experience. That makes representation personal, being made of one's own past experience. This does not explain away pure feeling, but explains how we make discriminations of similarity and difference between our experiences, the contents of qualia, the qualitative aspects. We also know brains are locked inside a bone box only connected to the outside world by a bundle of unlabeled nerves, there is no direct access. So the brain can only compare patterns of signals it receives from outside. But since this representation-action-learning loop is recursive it cannot be inhabited or known from outside, 3p needs to pay the price of recursion to execute in order to get to 1p. The gap is that between description and execution, which cannot be crossed for free with cheap description. Execution costs, and that cost is part of what is like being a bat. We can't inhabit their cost pressures since we don't have their context and body. You can't remove the costs of being a bat from "what it is like being a bat" and still get your answer from the comfort of the philosophical armchair.

robwwilliams 4mo ago
You nailed it. Asking the question is asking to define from the outside what is an inner recursive process. The question is a simple confusion of domains. This is Humbert Maturana’s main point in Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980, now reissued). Recommend the whole book, as does Terry Winograd. The most intense part is the appendix specifically about the nervous system. Nagel and others knew no neuroscience and are clueless about recursion.
- EGreg 4mo ago
  Oh, I’d say they had some good clues.
- whakim 4mo ago
  Isn't Maturana's theory that consciousness has to do with language, and the use of language to make distinctions about ourselves and others? To me, this seems clearly insufficient to explain consciousness - qualia totally precede language; one could experience qualia without language, etc.
  - simiones 4mo ago
    > qualia totally precede language; one could experience qualia without language, etc. While I do believe this as well, I don't think there is any way to prove this with current knowledge. You can introspect and separate your experience of a color from your language, but this type of introspection can also be misleading. And that's about all you can do - we don't know of any way to objectively test if another organism experiences qualia, and any historical/evolutionary evidence is also lost.
    - whakim 4mo ago
      Sure. We can't prove that other organisms experience qualia; we can only look at the effects of qualia (e.g. behaviors that are likely to be the product of emotions) and assume that an organism is therefore conscious. The real point, though, is that suggesting language gives rise to consciousness lacks any explanatory power as to why language should be accompanied by consciousness.
      - simiones 4mo ago
        Most proponents of the existence of qualia regard them as fundamental to what they call the hard problem of consciousness. People like Chalmers and Searle assume that all of the externally observable behaviors of people could be (at least in principle) explained without the need for qualia; that is, they believe it's possible for p-zombies to exist; this then gives rise to this question of consciousness - if all physical behaviors can be explained without qualia, and yet everyone of us has qualia, how and why does this happen? I thought the point above was in a similar vein - that qualia and language are theoretically separable phenomena, so that we can imagine a being might have qualia without language, or language without qualia, and so these need to be explained separately. I was trying to point out that we have no proof for the existence of beings that possess these two qualities separately, so that I don't think the theoretical distinction is necessarily true. Just like any volume of gas has a temperature and a pressure, the existence of separate concepts doesn't mean they are physically separable.
    - visarga 4mo ago
KingMob 4mo ago
You've completely left out the Hard Problem, though, and missed the essay's point. A large part of the essay is that we have plenty of objective knowledge about how bat sonar works, but we don't know what the subjective experience of sonar is like, and more importantly, knowing about the physical representation, whether in neuronal patterns or embeddings, doesn't get you closer to the subjective experience. tl;dr RGB(1.0, 0.0, 0.0) !== the subjective experience of red.
- HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago
  No - he's right - it's all relative. Our experience of a color is based on recall of things of that color. Experimentally it's been shown that if a subject wears color goggle then initially everything will appear color tinted, but after a while normal color perception returns. The quale of "red" is not some absolute thing related to the wavelength (hence neural inputs) of red light.
  - KingMob 4mo ago
    > Our experience of a color is based on recall of things of that color. You're getting memory mixed up with current experience. I think you mean to say that experience is based on the neural substrate associated with a color (mostly area V4 in human brains, which causes achromatopsia when damaged bilaterally). (If memory is mandatory, then infants wouldn't see color when they first open their eyes, which seems unlikely. It also implies that cerebral achromatopsia would be impossible; but the damage that causes achromatopsia is in primary visual cortex, not memory areas.) --- But again, this misses the point. The RGB triplet is a fact known about the color, but knowing 100% of the facts of the representation does NOT tell you what it is like to experience red. Consider a perfect future neuroscience lab that uses nanomachines to safely record every neuronal firing, every dendritic voltage shift, every synaptic cleft's neurotransmitter levels, all at microsecond precision, while showing you red circles. This lab knows everything about what your brain does in response to red stimuli. Everything EXCEPT the subjective experience of redness in the participants.
    - HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago
MarceliusK 4mo ago
Describing that loop from outside is not the same as paying the cost of running it from inside

by visarga 4mo ago

robwwilliams 4mo ago

You nailed it. Asking the question is asking to define from the outside what is an inner recursive process. The question is a simple confusion of domains. This is Humbert Maturana’s main point in Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980, now reissued). Recommend the whole book, as does Terry Winograd. The most intense part is the appendix specifically about the nervous system. Nagel and others knew no neuroscience and are clueless about recursion.

EGreg 4mo ago
Oh, I’d say they had some good clues.
whakim 4mo ago
Isn't Maturana's theory that consciousness has to do with language, and the use of language to make distinctions about ourselves and others? To me, this seems clearly insufficient to explain consciousness - qualia totally precede language; one could experience qualia without language, etc.
- simiones 4mo ago
  > qualia totally precede language; one could experience qualia without language, etc. While I do believe this as well, I don't think there is any way to prove this with current knowledge. You can introspect and separate your experience of a color from your language, but this type of introspection can also be misleading. And that's about all you can do - we don't know of any way to objectively test if another organism experiences qualia, and any historical/evolutionary evidence is also lost.
  - whakim 4mo ago
    Sure. We can't prove that other organisms experience qualia; we can only look at the effects of qualia (e.g. behaviors that are likely to be the product of emotions) and assume that an organism is therefore conscious. The real point, though, is that suggesting language gives rise to consciousness lacks any explanatory power as to why language should be accompanied by consciousness.
    - simiones 4mo ago
      Most proponents of the existence of qualia regard them as fundamental to what they call the hard problem of consciousness. People like Chalmers and Searle assume that all of the externally observable behaviors of people could be (at least in principle) explained without the need for qualia; that is, they believe it's possible for p-zombies to exist; this then gives rise to this question of consciousness - if all physical behaviors can be explained without qualia, and yet everyone of us has qualia, how and why does this happen? I thought the point above was in a similar vein - that qualia and language are theoretically separable phenomena, so that we can imagine a being might have qualia without language, or language without qualia, and so these need to be explained separately. I was trying to point out that we have no proof for the existence of beings that possess these two qualities separately, so that I don't think the theoretical distinction is necessarily true. Just like any volume of gas has a temperature and a pressure, the existence of separate concepts doesn't mean they are physically separable.
  - visarga 4mo ago

KingMob 4mo ago

You've completely left out the Hard Problem, though, and missed the essay's point. A large part of the essay is that we have plenty of objective knowledge about how bat sonar works, but we don't know what the subjective experience of sonar is like, and more importantly, knowing about the physical representation, whether in neuronal patterns or embeddings, doesn't get you closer to the subjective experience. tl;dr RGB(1.0, 0.0, 0.0) !== the subjective experience of red.

HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago
No - he's right - it's all relative. Our experience of a color is based on recall of things of that color. Experimentally it's been shown that if a subject wears color goggle then initially everything will appear color tinted, but after a while normal color perception returns. The quale of "red" is not some absolute thing related to the wavelength (hence neural inputs) of red light.
- KingMob 4mo ago
  > Our experience of a color is based on recall of things of that color. You're getting memory mixed up with current experience. I think you mean to say that experience is based on the neural substrate associated with a color (mostly area V4 in human brains, which causes achromatopsia when damaged bilaterally). (If memory is mandatory, then infants wouldn't see color when they first open their eyes, which seems unlikely. It also implies that cerebral achromatopsia would be impossible; but the damage that causes achromatopsia is in primary visual cortex, not memory areas.) --- But again, this misses the point. The RGB triplet is a fact known about the color, but knowing 100% of the facts of the representation does NOT tell you what it is like to experience red. Consider a perfect future neuroscience lab that uses nanomachines to safely record every neuronal firing, every dendritic voltage shift, every synaptic cleft's neurotransmitter levels, all at microsecond precision, while showing you red circles. This lab knows everything about what your brain does in response to red stimuli. Everything EXCEPT the subjective experience of redness in the participants.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago

MarceliusK 4mo ago

Describing that loop from outside is not the same as paying the cost of running it from inside