If beauty doesn't require God, why should morality? (Bite me Dr. Craig.)

[The Grand Nudger]

A little bit in uni while getting a psych degree. But I don't think you're getting the point. Mind is not a category of anything else. A sphincter is a specialized muscle made of specialized proteins, etc.-- it is derived from other things, and is therefore a specific member of a more general category.

-and under the computational model I;m offering you, qualia is a collection of very physical things, in the same way that what you see on your monitor right now has an actual place, a location on your hardware. It's not attached, not associated, it -is-.

I suppose you could say that the human mind is a complex of more fundamental qualia. In that case, you'd want to identify the most basic possible "atomic" qualia, which aren't constructed of any others. But how would you know them for what they were even if you COULD make them?

A wonderful question. That's the sort of thing we're looking into.

If that's literally true, and if qualia are a category of brain function, then we should at least in theory have the ability to create an entity which actually experiences qualia, rather than just seeming to.

But how could we know that was the case?

We could just ask it. After all, that's all we're going on with regards to ourselves anyway, isn't it? I'd say that we're already at that point with hardware, we simply don;t ascribe the same level of "whateverness" to the phenomena as expressed by relatively simple machines. There's nothing fundamentally different, to my mind, about our own. It's just an issue of scale and preference. You know I'm fond of describing all of the ways that plants exhibit behaviors we ascribe to "consciousness" in ourselves..but - for some reason, call mechanical and chemical interactions in them. But ultimately....why are we assuming that there is some division - in reality- between "seeming to" experience qualia and experiencing qualia? It -is- seeming, isn't it? There's not actually an elephant inside of your mind when you have the subjective experience of viewing an elephant, now is there?

I've done some programming with ANNs. I'd say two things about that-- 1) given a complex enough networked system with a strong feedback mechanism, and I'd say the evolution of useful patterns would be the norm, rather than a big surprise. It's slightly frightening to think what a decent AI programmer with decent hardware could teach a computer to "think" by taking internet activity as sense data. 2) none of this leads me to think any particular physical system could actually experience qualia, or that we could ever had a non-arbitrary test to determine whether it did or not.

But why not? You see how you've already determined that qualia is "just different" - so it's not surprising to see that you reach such a conclusion no matter what angle you look at the problem.

Careful, there. Given how neurotransmitters work, this is an artificial (i.e. statistical) oversimplification-- unless you have a link that indicates otherwise?

As always, and as ever. None of our explanations can be said to be perfect images of reality. They are simply ways for us to conceptualize the issue and explain the observed behavior. Obvioously, dendrites and axons -aren't- logic gates in the strictest sense. That they could operate as such, and that such operation could lead to observed and recognizable functions - even if they aren't using that system is what fascinates me. I'd be positively dumbfounded if dendrites and axons worked exactly like logic gates - mostly because logic gates have been designed, top down. But I'm also dumbfounded as to why someone would feel that we needed to invoke any other explanation given what we do know about logic gates and our biology. There are limits to any framework, and clearly there are limits to this one, but so what? Until we've met that limit, we work with what we have.

Let me ask you this. Let's say you encoded an .mp3 song on a beach using black and white stones as bits. But the problem is, you are the last person on the beach, and you are so lonely that the act of encoding is your last hurrah-- once done, you commit suicide.

Assuming that no information about the encoding process remains, are those stones still an .mp3 song?

They are still information, in the same way that my old 8tracks still have "songs on them" even though I no longer possess the equipment to translate that information into a usable form, yes. But, in the sense of meaning, well - without a language or without a method to decipher that information - it would appear to be noise, static, meaningless. In the same way we could suppose that without our little system of consciousness, whatever that may ultimately be, the universe around us would be noise, if anything at all- from our pov, whatever that was (tons of modifiers we could use to describe this - is light "not light" if you are blind, for example?). In the context of our "qualia" if we didn't have a common language to describe them,and the equipment to use that language- then we couldn't say that they existed at all, in any form, like pebbles on that beach...even if they were there, as in the mp3 in stone. Thankfully, we aren't in such a position, eh?

Conflating self-referential data processing (or any other kind of data processing) with qualia is essentially begging the question-- you are defining qualia in a special way, and your model subsequently seems to make sense.

I'm concluding that qualia doesn't appear to be any different, based upon observational data, and that certain aspects of qualia are entirely recognizable in another class of things we don't see as having the "whateverness" we assume to possess ourselves. I don;t know what that "whatevrness" is supposed to be, but it doesn;t look so unique from this perspective. I'm attempting to explain the unknown by reference to the known. I've given repeated tips of the hat to the fact that, ultimately, it may be dead wrong, but I see no reason to make extraneous assumptions about something that doesn't seem to require them as of yet.

But this conflation is unsatisying philosophically.

Does the universe owe you philosophical satisfaction? I can think of a great many things that are "philosophically unsatisfying" -but so what?

Given that simple mechanism can explain all the functions of the brain, there's no reason why that mechanism would actually experience in the way that I experience redness or emotions.

You keep repeating this, so I know that you aren't actually absorbing this data. Your experience -is- a "simple mechanism". There are all sorts of biological reasons that your subjective experience is, what it is. Your experience of seeing out of your own eyes, for example, needs no special sauce to be explained. You aren't jacked into my eyes. Go down the list checking things off like that and when you're done, talk to me about what reasons are left unanswered? You seem to have a thing against what you perceive to be simple, as in "it;s too simple, that can;t be qualia"...but step onto the af minecraft server to get an idea of how "simple" machine logic can be - and that's in a freindly environment. Biology isn;t always so friendly. These "simple" things like logic gates are easily as complex, when fully contemplated, as your contemplation of qualia itself. As I mention, any question like this applies equally to why logic gates "can logic". There are reasons, those reasons are philosophically unsatisfying to you - but they do exist.

We can (at least hypothetically) make machines to replicate human function, and with ANNs we can make them self-referential. But there's nothing about supposing such a system to actually experience qualia that will improve our observations or understanding of the system.

Oh I beg to differ - perhaps people will spend the time they previously spent searching for the special sauce...actually looking into the clockwork of consciousness - all of this being a given, of course. It suggests a very good place to look....and thats where we're looking, and we're learning much more since looking at it this way than we ever did when we conceived of it as a soul, or any other wholly independent, immaterial, and mysterious "something". In fact, we (and by we I mean you, specifically, in this conversation) seem to be entirely hung up on what amounts to neural folklore, brain based phlogiston- the strange shit we thought up before we even had any idea what it was that we were considering. I'd say that getting people to at least consider that the "special sauce" hypothesis is bankrupt (thus explaining the utter lack of data in that regard) just might be(and I'm suggesting this largely because it already -has- been) useful.