Monist vs. Dualist Experiment?

[bennyboy]

And how do we have behavior without awareness of the self and its surroundings? without experience of these things?
There are no zombies, except in Sci-fi and horror movies.

Computers have "awareness" with quotes: they can monitor and respond to their environment to varying degrees. Some robots have more of this kind of awareness than primitive organisms, like the ability to identify visual patterns; but I don't think anyone really thinks they have the subjective experience of qualia. I'm much more likely to believe that a worm experiences simple qualia than my desktop computer, no matter how clever the software it's running.

The question is WHY does an organism need to really experience the environment through qualia? We already know the brain can take in input, process it, and output behavior, without reference to whether a person REALLY experiences qualia or merely seems to.

No amount of physics will ever explain "why" there is a Universe, rather than not...
"Why" is the wrong question.

I didn't say Universe. I said qualia. Given that I'm arguing against physical monism, in which particles interact by predictable and unbendable rules, it must be explained WHY the brain needs qualia to successfully respond to the environment and output a behavior.

More important, though, is the idea that any question is "wrong." Wanting to know things is never wrong-- even if the things people want to know cannot be answered by your favored model, method or world view. There's absolutely nothing wrong with saying, "We can't know for sure, and probably never will, but let's talk about some of the possibilities."

Are you saying that one person can only be sure about qualia from himself? Everyone else's qualia is impossible to determine and they may as well be holodeck people?

I'm saying that everyone else's qualia must be taken as given. There's no way to show that someone ACTUALLY experiences qualia, rather than simply behaving as if they do.

Sight.... nice example...
The eye sees light intensity at different wavelengths.
The brain recognizes shapes and adjusts the focus of the eye to hone in on a particular subject.
The brain then recognizes a more exact shape of the subject and may recognize it as a person, a car, a window, whatever... and then, which car, person, window, etc..., based on prior stored information... information which arrived through the same mechanism of a light intensity pattern as a series of representations of a 3D object.
The brain performs these functions of sight, storage, recall, repeat. Qualia seems to be somewhere in there.

You are listing details that everyone knows. But what you are ignoring is how YOU became aware of any of these "truths." You did so by seeing light and sound, and interpreting it. That's qualia in action.

As for light-- it's a commonly held example of the difference between qualia and physical reality. For example, if I ask you what red is, you'll respond that it's light with a wavelength of about 700nm. But what about the red in my dreams? This is only an idea, and yet I experience the qualia of a dream firetruck the same as I would in real life. Also, what color are X-rays? X-ray colored? No. Red is only called a color because we're capable of the red qualia. We're not capable of seeing x-rays, and so it is not called a color: it's just called a frequency.

I'm not an expert or anything but my first post on this thread pointed to Artificial Intelligence... and I think that's where this qualia will first meet it's first big challenge.
It seems AI is close to a sort of qualia...
If an artificial intelligence can display qualia, would that mean that it IS an emergent property of a sufficiently complex neural network? or am I to think that some consciousness descended upon those machines and made them aware of them selves?

Robots are a perfect example of entities which will BEHAVE as though they are experiencing qualia, but may not actually be actually experiencing any more than a rock does.

[pocaracas]

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And how do we have behavior without awareness of the self and its surroundings? without experience of these things?
There are no zombies, except in Sci-fi and horror movies.

Computers have "awareness" with quotes: they can monitor and respond to their environment to varying degrees. Some robots have more of this kind of awareness than primitive organisms, like the ability to identify visual patterns; but I don't think anyone really thinks they have the subjective experience of qualia. I'm much more likely to believe that a worm experiences simple qualia than my desktop computer, no matter how clever the software it's running.

The question is WHY does an organism need to really experience the environment through qualia? We already know the brain can take in input, process it, and output behavior, without reference to whether a person REALLY experiences qualia or merely seems to.

No amount of physics will ever explain "why" there is a Universe, rather than not...
"Why" is the wrong question.

I didn't say Universe. I said qualia. Given that I'm arguing against physical monism, in which particles interact by predictable and unbendable rules, it must be explained WHY the brain needs qualia to successfully respond to the environment and output a behavior.

Are you saying that one person can only be sure about qualia from himself? Everyone else's qualia is impossible to determine and they may as well be holodeck people?

I'm saying that everyone else's qualia must be taken as given. There's no way to show that someone ACTUALLY experiences qualia, rather than simply behaving as if they do.

Sight.... nice example...
The eye sees light intensity at different wavelengths.
The brain recognizes shapes and adjusts the focus of the eye to hone in on a particular subject.
The brain then recognizes a more exact shape of the subject and may recognize it as a person, a car, a window, whatever... and then, which car, person, window, etc..., based on prior stored information... information which arrived through the same mechanism of a light intensity pattern as a series of representations of a 3D object.
The brain performs these functions of sight, storage, recall, repeat. Qualia seems to be somewhere in there.

You are listing details that everyone knows. But what you are ignoring is how YOU became aware of any of these "truths." You did so by seeing light and sound, and interpreting it. That's qualia in action.

As for light-- it's a commonly held example of the difference between qualia and physical reality. For example, if I ask you what red is, you'll respond that it's light with a wavelength of about 700nm. But what about the red in my dreams? This is only an idea, and yet I experience the qualia of a dream firetruck the same as I would in real life. Also, what color are X-rays? X-ray colored? No. Red is only called a color because we're capable of the red qualia. We're not capable of seeing x-rays, and so it is not called a color: it's just called a frequency.

I'm not an expert or anything but my first post on this thread pointed to Artificial Intelligence... and I think that's where this qualia will first meet it's first big challenge.
It seems AI is close to a sort of qualia...
If an artificial intelligence can display qualia, would that mean that it IS an emergent property of a sufficiently complex neural network? or am I to think that some consciousness descended upon those machines and made them aware of them selves?

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Robots are a perfect example of entities which will BEHAVE as though they are experiencing qualia, but may not actually be actually experiencing any more than a rock does.

You just make me think that qualia is some man-made concept to baffle everyone... It doesn't seem to be something real.


The red color is a electromagnetic wave which falls in a particular wavelength. Your dream of red is your recalling of your sensation of that electromagnetic wave. It's a memory. Memory on playback, mixed with other random elements from the same pool of memorized objects and concepts...

How do you distinguish perception from experience?

[bennyboy]

You just make me think that qualia is some man-made concept to baffle everyone... It doesn't seem to be something real.

The red color is a electromagnetic wave which falls in a particular wavelength. Your dream of red is your recalling of your sensation of that electromagnetic wave. It's a memory. Memory on playback, mixed with other random elements from the same pool of memorized objects and concepts...

Maybe. But my memory involves the actual experience of redness, not just the plugging in of the "700nm" figure into a behavioral algorithm. The qualia idea is the only one that is NOT made up. Every observation we make must be experienced by us before we can encode it into a system of ideas. All learning, all communication: all qualia. It's just a word for talking about actual experience of things, as opposed to just talking about them.

For example, let's take the lovely smell of roses. If I've never smelled roses, I can still identify brain activity that someone has if they think about roses. I may identify "rose-smelling" neural systems in the brain, and predict people saying "I smell roses" by 0.27 seconds on average when someone else puts the rose in front of their nose. But I won't know what it's like to enjoy the smell of a rose.

"What's it like to _______?" Can only be described in subjective terms, and often not even that. What's it like to have an orgasm? What's it like to watch a midsummer sunset with a pretty girl at your side? What's it like to eat a cream-filled donut? You can fully describe ALL the physical mechanisms, and theoretically describe in detail all the neural and hormonal systems that interact during these activities. However, saying "During orgasm, we measured increased blood flow in the pleasure centers of the brain" is a much less meaningful response than, "Dude, it made my toes curl. I heard angels. The earth wept. The angels sang." Because "What's it like to ______?" are about qualia, and qualia are intrinsically subjective.

[Angrboda]

Maybe. But my memory involves the actual experience of redness, not just the plugging in of the "700nm" figure into a behavioral algorithm.

The qualia idea is the only one that is NOT made up. Every observation we make must be experienced by us before we can encode it into a system of ideas. All learning, all communication: all qualia. It's just a word for talking about actual experience of things, as opposed to just talking about them.

How do you know that you 'experience' it? Does someone put something near your head and measure 'experiencing' in progress? And exactly what do you mean by 'experiencing', specifically? What is it? I've got a counter proposal to the OP. Can the dualists provide a physical or scientific experiment that would prove that you are not a zombie? If so, what is it, and how does it demonstrate this 'experience' which you've yet to describe and define?

[pocaracas]

The qualia idea is the only one that is NOT made up. Every observation we make must be experienced by us before we can encode it into a system of ideas.

You make it sound like classification/cataloging of sensations...

All learning, all communication: all qualia. It's just a word for talking about actual experience of things, as opposed to just talking about them.

hmmm... The actual experience of things, rather than things themselves...?
The concepts we internally create for things? The catalog?

For example, let's take the lovely smell of roses. If I've never smelled roses, I can still identify brain activity that someone has if they think about roses. I may identify "rose-smelling" neural systems in the brain, and predict people saying "I smell roses" by 0.27 seconds on average when someone else puts the rose in front of their nose. But I won't know what it's like to enjoy the smell of a rose. "What's it like to _______?" Can only be described in subjective terms, and often not even that. What's it like to have an orgasm? What's it like to watch a sunset with a pretty girl? What's it like to eat a cream-filled donut? You can fully describe ALL the physical mechanisms, but you will totally fail to answer these questions. Because they are about qualia, and qualia are intrinsically subjective.

Ahh.... I think I'm starting to get it...
qualia is the internal emotional response to any given experience/sensation, is that right?

[bennyboy]

Maybe. But my memory involves the actual experience of redness, not just the plugging in of the "700nm" figure into a behavioral algorithm.

The qualia idea is the only one that is NOT made up. Every observation we make must be experienced by us before we can encode it into a system of ideas. All learning, all communication: all qualia. It's just a word for talking about actual experience of things, as opposed to just talking about them.

How do you know that you 'experience' it? Does someone put something near your head and measure 'experiencing' in progress? And exactly what do you mean by 'experiencing', specifically? What is it? I've got a counter proposal to the OP. Can the dualists provide a physical or scientific experiment that would prove that you are not a zombie? If so, what is it, and how does it demonstrate this 'experience' which you've yet to describe and define?

Excellent point. Since we're doing this, why don't they also use physical or scientific experiments to show that we're not in the Matrix, or in the Mind of God? Why don't they prove that the entire universe and everything in it isn't a collection of ideas which manifest as things, rather than things which we symbolize into ideas?

---

Ahh.... I think I'm starting to get it...
qualia is the internal emotional response to any given experience/sensation, is that right?

Are you playing Socrates with me? Can't tell.

Qualia are about actual experience, as opposed to processing the environment as data.

[pocaracas]

Ahh.... I think I'm starting to get it...
qualia is the internal emotional response to any given experience/sensation, is that right?

Are you playing Socrates with me? Can't tell.

I... don't know what that means..

Qualia are about actual experience, as opposed to processing the environment as data.

I'm back at baffled...

[genkaus]

Yes, but the zombie's collected data meet the criteria for your definition of experience. We are talking about qualia.

And the difference would be?

Subjective qualia and objective measures of brain function clearly are different, because subjective and objective are different. The question is whether they are different processes, or just different properties of the same process.

Neither the measures of brain function nor qualia are necessarily processes. That's yet to be established.

[MindForgedManacle]

I think Apophenia hit the nail on the head earlier when she(?) noted how dualism doesn't actually solve the problems it instantiates. In other words, how does this second substance do what it is claimed "physical matter" cannot. I'd further like to know what non-physical matter or stuff is that substance dualists speak of, because it seems like a made up thing. It divorces a large part (if not the crucial part) of what we mean when we say something exists: spatial occupance.

As for my own position: I'm not too sure. My lack of familiarity wity both neuroscience and philosophy of mind doesn't do me any favors. I suppose I would be inclined towards a position that consciousness isn't some extra thing over brain activity, rather than the result of brain activity as a whole instead of one particular thing or area of the brain.

[bennyboy]

Yes, but the zombie's collected data meet the criteria for your definition of experience. We are talking about qualia.

And the difference would be?

The difference would be that the zombie only processes information, while I both process and subjectively experience it.

Subjective qualia and objective measures of brain function clearly are different, because subjective and objective are different. The question is whether they are different processes, or just different properties of the same process.

Neither the measures of brain function nor qualia are necessarily processes. That's yet to be established.

The measures of brain function are clearly processes: blood flow, EEG, etc. I'd call qualia processes because they arise and subside in response either to internal symbols or external objects.

Or the short answer: what are you talking about?

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I think Apophenia hit the nail on the head earlier when she(?) noted how dualism doesn't actually solve the problems it instantiates. In other words, how does this second substance do what it is claimed "physical matter" cannot. I'd further like to know what non-physical matter or stuff is that substance dualists speak of, because it seems like a made up thing. It divorces a large part (if not the crucial part) of what we mean when we say something exists: spatial occupance.

As for my own position: I'm not too sure. My lack of familiarity wity both neuroscience and philosophy of mind doesn't do me any favors. I suppose I would be inclined towards a position that consciousness isn't some extra thing over brain activity, rather than the result of brain activity as a whole instead of one particular thing or area of the brain.

The simplest observation of one's own experience shows that theres "I" the thinker/observer, and then ideas or physical objects which I think about or observe. The problem with both physical monism (with mind) or substance dualism (physical objects + mind) is that they BOTH fail to reconcile this subject/object duality.

In substance dualism, my question is: how is it possible for mind and matter to interact? How, for example, does one move? What is the bridge? It seems to me there must be something which is partly matter and partly mind. If so, that duality is collapsed anyway, since there's now mind/matter, which is pretty much the monist's description of the brain.

In the case of physical monism, the problem is that science takes as its target observable properties of matter. Brain function is observable, but the mind isn't. Mind is not an observable property of matter, nor is it a necessary explanation of how any material system behaves. It doesn't MATTER (snerk) whether a brain has a mind: the mechanism from eye, to brain, to behavior can be traced along physical structures without reference to qualia.

In the case of science, why wouldn't solipsism be the default, for example? Why posit extra properties of a brain which you cannot even confirm to exist? The answer isn't very scientific-- I already "know" that people think and feel pretty much as I do. And by "know," I mean "assume."