Monist vs. Dualist Experiment?

[pocaracas]

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And how do we have behavior without awareness of the self and its surroundings? without experience of these things?
There are no zombies, except in Sci-fi and horror movies.

Computers have "awareness" with quotes: they can monitor and respond to their environment to varying degrees. Some robots have more of this kind of awareness than primitive organisms, like the ability to identify visual patterns; but I don't think anyone really thinks they have the subjective experience of qualia. I'm much more likely to believe that a worm experiences simple qualia than my desktop computer, no matter how clever the software it's running.

The question is WHY does an organism need to really experience the environment through qualia? We already know the brain can take in input, process it, and output behavior, without reference to whether a person REALLY experiences qualia or merely seems to.

No amount of physics will ever explain "why" there is a Universe, rather than not...
"Why" is the wrong question.

I didn't say Universe. I said qualia. Given that I'm arguing against physical monism, in which particles interact by predictable and unbendable rules, it must be explained WHY the brain needs qualia to successfully respond to the environment and output a behavior.

Are you saying that one person can only be sure about qualia from himself? Everyone else's qualia is impossible to determine and they may as well be holodeck people?

I'm saying that everyone else's qualia must be taken as given. There's no way to show that someone ACTUALLY experiences qualia, rather than simply behaving as if they do.

Sight.... nice example...
The eye sees light intensity at different wavelengths.
The brain recognizes shapes and adjusts the focus of the eye to hone in on a particular subject.
The brain then recognizes a more exact shape of the subject and may recognize it as a person, a car, a window, whatever... and then, which car, person, window, etc..., based on prior stored information... information which arrived through the same mechanism of a light intensity pattern as a series of representations of a 3D object.
The brain performs these functions of sight, storage, recall, repeat. Qualia seems to be somewhere in there.

You are listing details that everyone knows. But what you are ignoring is how YOU became aware of any of these "truths." You did so by seeing light and sound, and interpreting it. That's qualia in action.

As for light-- it's a commonly held example of the difference between qualia and physical reality. For example, if I ask you what red is, you'll respond that it's light with a wavelength of about 700nm. But what about the red in my dreams? This is only an idea, and yet I experience the qualia of a dream firetruck the same as I would in real life. Also, what color are X-rays? X-ray colored? No. Red is only called a color because we're capable of the red qualia. We're not capable of seeing x-rays, and so it is not called a color: it's just called a frequency.

I'm not an expert or anything but my first post on this thread pointed to Artificial Intelligence... and I think that's where this qualia will first meet it's first big challenge.
It seems AI is close to a sort of qualia...
If an artificial intelligence can display qualia, would that mean that it IS an emergent property of a sufficiently complex neural network? or am I to think that some consciousness descended upon those machines and made them aware of them selves?

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Robots are a perfect example of entities which will BEHAVE as though they are experiencing qualia, but may not actually be actually experiencing any more than a rock does.

You just make me think that qualia is some man-made concept to baffle everyone... It doesn't seem to be something real.


The red color is a electromagnetic wave which falls in a particular wavelength. Your dream of red is your recalling of your sensation of that electromagnetic wave. It's a memory. Memory on playback, mixed with other random elements from the same pool of memorized objects and concepts...

How do you distinguish perception from experience?