Mindfulness or Mindlessness?

[The Grand Nudger]

The mind is experiential.  It experiences its own recreations of the past, present, and future.  Qualia are part of that experience.  They are the mind's experience of the sensory inputs.

Do qualia need to exist in a computing machine?  No, if it is not organized like the mind, but yes if does operate like the mind.  The mind is far more than a computing machine.

b-mine

Need to, no.  Would it be useful..yes - particularly if "mind" is a control schema.  Just as any computing machine that needs to navigate in the world is greatly aided by a simulation of it's body - a computing machine which attends to detail would be greatly aided by a simulation of it's attention.

You might be a functionalist. Functionalists tend to take a "yeah whatever" attitude to qualia. I like functionalism. It's a tidy view. Very appealing to those with scientific sensibilities.

What makes qualia interesting to metaphysicians is that we have zero understanding about it. Yes, yes, we know the causal mechanism by which these conscious states are produced, but why we see red as red... (the actual world is colorless)... things like that... if you really think about it, it's quite mysterious that we experience things the way we do. It seems reasonable to want to ask questions about it.

b-mine

quick note about this....

The world isn't colorless, but human night vision is.  You see red because one of three spectrum filtering cone structures in your retina picks up red.  Counterintuitively, the rods responsible for night vision are more sensitive, but occupy a space mostly outside of the three cones structures.  If we really wanted to posit a mystery to seeing color, it wouldn't be on account of the world being colorless or seeing red, imo. 

Those rods, responsible for colorless night vision.....they're also responsible for the perception of purple - a non-color that none of us actually sees.   We experience purple when our cones and brain can't tell what's going on - but the rods are still detecting some radiation - and this is why a dark night has a purple tint...experientially, but not in mere reality as with red in a dying leaf, for example.

It's funny, because our brains don't explicitly inform us "I don't know what's going on, we're getting conflicting signals and dead spots" - they don't have that particular function or sensor - they just say...

"purplish?"

The functionalist wants to say that qualia are perceived the way they are because they serve that function to the organism. For instance, a pin prick to the finger produces pain. Pain (a qualitative experience) serves a function...-- and the function explains the quality of the experience. The problem with functionalism (to me) is that it works just as well without consciousness. The functionalist wants to "explain the mind away" so to speak.... when what's really at issue is that consciousness is a huge mystery.

But, again, I like functionalism. It's a pretty solid theory IMO.

Is that what functionalists do? If I told you that mind was an attention schema, and seeing red was attending to the details of a top end ping from one of three color filtering structures as a means of simulating yourself and your attention in the environment - all in a high stakes game of control and sensory ability...in what way has mind been explained away?

Functionalism applied to mind doesn't work equally well without consciousness. We don't expect a creature or machine with no body schema (or attention schema) to perform as well as one that has either - and that's actually what we see in our own technologies and...at least hypothetically, in life.

FWIW, there are probably other ways to attend to detail (functonalists would call this multiple realizability), and we could at least argue that some of those other ways in some scenarios would be equal to if not greater than our way - but this way wasn't arrived at in a vacuum with full freedom to choose the method or manner in which it arose. It's not designed. The world looks, to us, exactly as we would predict the world to look to any creature like us. Some alien species somewhere with better vision than us would be laughing it's ass off if it heard us positing the mystery of consciousness by way of the biological production of the experience of the color red...or the idea that we would work equally well without whatever a mind is or provides...in short. In human beings, seeing red is the processed product of rods and cones - but to some other creature (or machine - the distinction is a bit murky, really) with a different structure or biology - seeing red could be arrived at some other way - perhaps something like the way that seeing purple is...to us. There's no reason that a creature with no eyes to see red couldn't experience red, seeing as how we don't have eyes to see purple, and still do. One might wonder if it looked the same - it may not as the modification and combination of color values probably depends on the available set of reference colors in perception - but they would be attending to the same detail, and same sort of detail, and probably for the same reasons.

To dive even deeper with this talk of sight and color and experience - some of the earliest precursors to the way we do sight were photoreceptors hardwired to motors. If something blocked the light, it triggered an automatic response. Some connections were single surface - a geotropic organism with a photoreceptor "up" connected to a motor pushing down is a way to avoid predation and to swim deeper if you get to close to surface - but these systems are easily manipulated to the detriment of the organism. They can be spoofed or herded. Some mediation between sensory input and motor ability provides immediate and obvious advantage. Is that signal from the photorecptor a cloud or a predator? What's a cloud? What's a predator? Are there more of them....am I being directed into the mouths of their friends? What am I? What's a friend? Who's a friend? What was I just thinking, again?

So, without mind or consciousness or attention control, you might be able to swim up and down equally well - but you'll be able to answer none of those other equally important questions - and even if you were somehow magically gifted with sensors muuuuuuuuuch better than the photoreceptor/motor combo, you wouldn't be able to do anything with them.