Quantum consciousness...

[bennyboy]

Anyway, the evolutionary perspective is clearly the wrong tack to take here.  At best, you end up with an unprovable (and yet not disprovable) narrative that you think feels right.

Yet using terms like qualia and armchair philosophy no one has made any progress for a couple of thousand years.

Nor with begging the question in the name of science that really isn't proper science has anyone succeeded in observing the mind.

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The "being" of a skin cell is no different from the "being" of a muscle cell.  We have sensations because our tissues are innervated with nerve cells, and these nerve cells transduce one form of energy into another, an electrical impulse that is then interpreted by the brain to construct an experience.  This "what it's like to be" nonsense is founded on the intuition that I am my body.  But consciousness is effectively exterior to the body, not synonymous with it.  That's merely a feeling we have about the body.  It's a construct.  In experiments with blind subjects, they have placed a grid of tactile initiators against a patch of the skin, and fed the array of tactile prods with input from a light sensing grid.  The associated experience that the subjects had was akin to visual reception, not tactile reception.  So which is it, does skin feel itself to be like the sensation of touch, or the sensation of vision?  It's neither.  There is no such thing as a "what it's like to be."  That's just a metaphor and an intuition pump.

I think you may have misread the thing you quoted, so I won't respond just yet. I didn't say that qualia is "what it's like to be." I said qualia is the ability to subjectively experience what the self and its surroundings are like-- to see redness rather than only to respond to red, for example.

If you remap the nerves, fine-- now you're experiencing what it's like to see touch.

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Your so-called "definition" leaves far too much out.  It's nothing more than an intuition pump, designed to prime us to imagine a familiar experience, consciousness, and fill in the details on our own from our own experience.  As such, it's not so much a definition of function as it is a placeholder for the reader's own subjective experience.

No doubt. Sentience is an amazing and unfathomable thing, and I'm not qualified to give a perfect definition of it. That being said, that whatever-it-is that happens when the lights come on in the morning matters, and if semantics take the discussion to more operational definitions (like how something responds to its environment), pretending that in doing so we've solved any of that mystery is a mistake.