If beauty doesn't require God, why should morality? (Bite me Dr. Craig.)

[bennyboy]

Would it be useful to an organism to "know" the color of objects in its environment? Their shape? Their relative location?

Certainly it would if you like your fruit ripe, or are looking for a sexual display of a certain color, or require color vision to spot a predator in time. Consciousness for the win.

Data processing for the win.

[The Grand Nudger]

I think you may be trying to read too much into my analogy. Nevertheless, many of the things you mentioned about steam also hold for qualia. Not all, of course, because steam isn't qualia.

If there is a selective pressure for the mechanism - then all products, and byproducts of that mechanism are being selected for.

I'd also like to point out...that if we were to create a "dead" machine that was as advanced as we are, able to perform all of our functions....we probably wouldn't be able to tell with certainty that it was, in fact, "dead" or that we were "alive"-in the sense we're using those words. We might say "Oh, well, we know who created you, we watched you come together from parts, we see your wiring carrying a charge and we know your subroutines" - at which point, he'd point at our skulls.

[Whateverist]

Certainly it would if you like your fruit ripe, or are looking for a sexual display of a certain color, or require color vision to spot a predator in time. Consciousness for the win.

Data processing for the win.

Words. Precisely what about consciousness are you holding out for?

[bennyboy]

Words. Precisely what about consciousness are you holding out for?

I've been pretty clear that I'm talking about the ability to experience qualia.

[The Grand Nudger]

Is there an issue with qualia seen as a consequence of the machine (if not a feature)? And what is the difference, if perception or experience is the function(rather than just an effect)..between perception or experience and data processing, specifically?

[bennyboy]

Is there an issue with qualia seen as a consequence of the machine (if not a feature)? And what is the difference, if perception or experience is the function(rather than just an effect)..between perception or experience and data processing, specifically?

The difference is that data processessing doesn't require the existence of qualia. And since the physicalist model of behavior is physical input--> physical brain processing --> physical output, there's no plausible explanation of why the actual experience of qualia would have evolved, or by what mechanism it exists.

[The Grand Nudger]

I think you may be driving right over my grass. I'm suggesting that qualia -is- data processing. How would we determine that it wasn't? Sure, we could process data some other way - in the case of a punchcard reader, for example(which we assume has no qauaia)...but we aren't punchcard readers. If qualia is the sum total of experience, and an overview of it from some specific POV, the subjective experience of consciosness - what line are we drawing. Is a chain of origami swans not, ultimately, a chain of paper? If someone pointed to that and said "This is origami, these are swans- not paper" wouldn't we be a little bit mystified by that claim? What is the distinction between data processing -in humans, and qualia-in humans? I'm suggesting, in no uncertain terms..that we place too much value on qualia, creating a box for it simply because it is "ours" and important to us. Perhaps it is just data processing, and you are just a "dead" machine, or at least no different from one functionally and observationaly speaking.

Also, as I've been mentioning, no matter how you define qualia, so long as you do so by means of our brains or reference to our brains there is a plausible explanation for it's existence and it's evolution. If wings were blue, and selection favored wings...it would favor "blue" by association. Understand? In this manner, even harmful (either potentially or actually) ancillary traits can be preserved due to the strength of whatever trait is being selected for. We could conceptualize this with regards to our experience by reference to our experience making us easier to "trick" than a sunflower might be. We don't seem to have been selected out on the basis of this potentially harmful trait that comes as added baggage to our immense data processing power (especially relative to sunflowers).

[Angrboda]

Words. Precisely what about consciousness are you holding out for?

I've been pretty clear that I'm talking about the ability to experience qualia.

In cerebral achromatopsia, the ability to experience the qualia of color is lost. Not only are they unable to see things in color, they're unable to imagine colors, and their memories are all colorless. I'd say that's a pretty convincing display that the ability to experience qualia is tied to brain circuitry.

[Whateverist]

I haven't lost interest. Please carry on. I've just lost any sense of what is being contested. Maybe it'll come to me.

[Angrboda]

A case description of cerebral achromatopsia:

The Case Of The Colorblind Painter

It is almost two years since Mr. I. lost his color vision. The intense sorrow that was so characteristic at first, as he sat for hours before his (to him) black lawn, desperately trying to perceive or imagine it as green, has disappeared, as has the revulsion (he no longer sees his wife, or himself, as having "rat-colored" flesh).

There has, we think, been in his case a real "forgetting" of color — a forgetting at once psychological and physiological, at once strategic and structural. Perhaps this has to occur in someone who is no longer able to imagine or remember, or in any physiologically based way generate, a lost mode of perception. It does not, by contrast, happen in those who have become ordinarily blind or deaf, but their cerebral cortices, their powers of inner representation, are unimpaired; it is quite different for the blind or deaf, who become not only unseeing or unhearing, but as if they had never been seeing or hearing, as did a patient with cortical blindness described by one of us (see Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, Summit Books, 1985, p. 39).