Programming the Human Mind:

[bennyboy]

First you need to define what qualia is, how to recognise it and how to measure it.

Qualia is what things are like to a subjective agent. It's one thing to respond to red light. It's another to know what it's like to see red.

As for recognizing and measuring it: that's the mating call of the physicalist monist. I wake up, experience ideas and sensations, and the word for the subjective sense of experience of things is qualia. I don't have to be able to hold it up to a tape measure for the word to have meaning.

How do I know that qualia exists in your brain or whether you subjectively experience anything at all as opposed to reacting to stimuli? As far as I'm concerned you're just a biological automaton.

Then you are limited to considering brain function, and not mind.

The very concept of Qualia is just a quagmire that does not help anyone. Conversations involving Qualia never get anywhere, they never result in any conclusion or testable hypothesis.

That's your problem.

You feel like you have Qualia because you are your brain situated in your body situated in an environment. No one else feels what you are feeling.

I feel like I have qualia because I have qualia. Your narrative about WHY I have qualia would be more convincing if you could, for example, determine whether ANY physical structure does or doesn't have it. You can't, so you will say it's a "quagmire," or a useless term. But the problem is, when I see red, I see redness, and nobody has even an inkling why that is so.

But if you want to program a human mind, you will need to be able to address this question. You cannot, and therefore clearly cannot, at least with full knowledge that it is working, reproduce a human mind.

It seems mind is in a function of the organic animal brain, but this does not mean that reproducing the functions of the brain guarantees the existence of a subjective mind.  

We have absolutely no reason to expect that it won't. Of course you also need to define what it means for something to feel subjectively. You can do that while figuring out how to measure Qualia.

I don't need to measure Qualia. I just need to have a word which differentiates the difference between red light hitting the eye, and the subjective experience of redness.