RE: Trying to simplify my Consciousness hypothesis
February 16, 2017 at 12:06 pm
(This post was last modified: February 16, 2017 at 12:17 pm by bennyboy.)
(February 16, 2017 at 11:22 am)DLJ Wrote:Yep, and it will probably taste different to different people. But I know what it's like FOR ME to drink THAT hot chocolate.(February 16, 2017 at 10:53 am)bennyboy Wrote: ...
Qualia is the subjective experience of what things are like: what it's like to drink hot chocolate, what it's like to see something red, and so on.
...
Which makes it a variable. For example, hot chocolate will be less sweet if imbibed after eating pancakes with maple syrup.
Quote:I dunno, I wouldn't necessarily put those stipulations on the word. The way you present it makes it look much like a strawman to me.(February 16, 2017 at 10:53 am)bennyboy Wrote: ...
Qualia has only ever meant one thing, so far as I know.
In 1988, Dan Dennett attempted to pin it down by proposing that "the root concept of qualia has four conditions. Qualia are:
1) ineffable
2) intrinsic
3) private, and
4) directly apprehensible ways things seem to one.
That is to say, they are
1) somehow atomic to introspection and hence indescribable ("you had to be there");
2) not relational or dispositional or functional (the colour red may be anxiety-provoking to some people but that subjective disposition is not a quale of red);
3) "You had to be there, but you can't be, they're mine and mine alone!"; and
4) your qualia are known to you more intimately than anything else.
In Intuition Pumps he added: "This is still regarded as a good starting place in most circles, but since the point of that essay was to show that nothing could meet these four conditions, there has been ample discussion of revised or improved versions of the concept, with no emerging consensus."
(February 16, 2017 at 11:31 am)Khemikal Wrote:Okay. How does it work, and why is it there?(February 16, 2017 at 11:18 am)bennyboy Wrote: It's a mystery because we don't know how it works or why it's there.Probably a -bit- of an overstatement there, on your part.
Quote:So-- brute fact?Quote:What matters is the distal cause: why it is that objects may become subjectively aware at all.Because they can? Because it's possible? Because a set of biological processes exist which are capable of turning the possible into the actual? How about that for a why?
Quote:You're not really addressing the question. Given that you are not asserting that qualia adds something to a physical system, then why does it exist rather than not existing?Quote:What is it about the universe that allows me, or anyone else, to know what it's like to see the color red, or to enjoy a nice cup of hot chocolate?Material interaction, in both cases, and demonstrably so.
(February 16, 2017 at 11:23 am)Alasdair Ham Wrote: I think our consciousness is just a side effect of our complex brains. It has no purpose in itself.
In fact it couldn't have a purpose. If I was a P-zombie I'd be functionally identical.
To me, this is the most honest answer. However, it seems that since qualia can't interact with anything, there would be no mechanism for it to evolve, even by chance. It's not like scramble DNA leading to extra-thick skin or something-- it would be the spontaneous coming into being of subjective awareness into a universe that didn't have it before. This seems implausible to me-- why would a fully-formed ability to experience piggy-back other systems over billions of years and presumably many milions of species of organism if it was causally irrelevant?