[extropy-chat] Qualia Bet

[Emlyn]

If I understand correctly what Brent is saying, it is that there is
such thing as qualia, they are essential to our subjective experience
of being, and they wont necessarily just be present in any general
intelligence.

That third point is crucial. If it were so that they would just
emerge, then there would be no argument between the materialists and
the phenomenalists (or can I call them dualists?), because if you
believe in them they would be there, and if you don't then they
aren't, either way it's just metaphysics.

But the argument comes up because the supporters of qualia say that
it's possible that you can produce a general intelligence without
qualia. This is what is refered to casually as a zombie. It's
behaviourally indistinguishable from a "real" person, with qualia, but
it doesn't have subjective experience.

So what is being hypothesised is that we are general intelligences
made up of the mundane causal, natural world stuff (matter & energy
doing their thing) plus something else, by definition not part of the
material world, which is (or is responsible for) the phenomenal aspect
of our internal lives.

The problem is, that we can talk about Qualia. We can discuss this
subjective, otherworldly, phenomenal being-ness. Which is excellent,
of course, because it makes for all kind of deep conversation, highly
impressive and entertaining in general, the good stuff.

But the embarrassing bit about such high falutin discourse is that we
use our lowly mouths to do the speaking, or our excruciatingly
material fingers to tap out our brilliant theories. And, these contain
muscles and tendons and all kinds of gristly nasty stuff, that connect
up to nerves, and on and upward,
the-knee-bone's-connected-to-the-thigh-bone wise, finally to our
admittedly impressive yet ultimately mundane material brain.

Here, we've got a truly impressive information processing machine.
It's capable of taking all the information from our senses, and from
our thought processes and memories, grind away, and produce new
thoughts and new impulses to action.

But we are still in Zombie territory. Somewhere, we had the impulse to
talk about phenomenal consciousness. Where did that impulse come from?
If we are truly reporting on the experience of a phenomenal subjective
experience, it must bridge over into our lowly brain matter somewhere.
If we could map out the connections in the brain entirely, we must
eventually find something completely inexplicable in the processing by
natural means. Somewhere, for there to be a non-material part of
conscious life, a ghostly signal must enter the brain from no material
cause. A neuron must fire somewhere, with absolutely no reason for
doing so.

So if this is true, we'll find it eventually. We'll find the cable to
the phone unplugged, and yet the telephone still rings, and it'll be
just that spooky.

But let's assume that we don't find this, that we find the brain as a
whole, mapped down to the atomic level, is entirely internally
consistent, and its function is, at least in principle, reproducible
by a machine.

Where does that leave subjective experience? Well, let's look at the
case of zombies. Let's confine it to the class of zombies that are
constructed in the future by us, using entirely materialist system
architectures which are totally internally consistent in the way they
work (ie: a closed causal system except for its well defined sense and
action interfaces with the rest of the world).

These zombies can be broken into two classes. Those that report
subjective phenomenal experience, and those that do not.

The zombies that refute any suggestion that they have subjective
experience, or just can't understand the concept, are clearly GIs
without subjective phenomenal experience (or liars).

The zombies that protest that they do indeed have subjective
phenomenal experience, though, raise a problem. They clearly work
without input from a non-material component. Yet, they claim that they
do have that phenomenal experience. So, we can only come up with two
possibilities:
 1 - The subjective phenomenal experience exists, and is entirely
material, thus is epiphenomenal.
 2 - They lie.

>From this and the earlier discussion, I think we have two
alternatives. Either, there is indeed a "magic signal" that propogates
into the brain somehow from outside the physical world, which we must
eventually find by the absense of cause at some point in the structure
of the brain, or subjective experience is an ephenomenon of purely
material processing.

So, I agree with you in a way Brent... I think this question will be
put to bed once and for all some time in the next decade or two, by
straightforward brain science. But I wouldn't bet on qualia.

--
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com   * blogs * music * software *
NaNoWriMo word count: 34048 (http://nanowrimo.org)


On 23/11/05, Brent Allsop <allsop at extropy.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> gts:
>
>
>  >>> I think we know a great deal about physics,
> but we know practically nothing about how
> consciousness arises from inert matter. <<<
>
> All we know about physics is its causal
> properties.  If something causes something it
> will set in motion a string of cause and effects
> that will eventually produce a phenomenal
> property in our brain, which will be our
> conscious awareness of the initial causal
> property we perceive.  Because of their
> subjective and to date unshare able or ineffable
> nature we have been completely ignoring anything
> additional to this.  That is why we know so
> little about them.  But just because we have been
> ignoring the red in our consciousness (or worse,
> thinking red is a property of something that
> reflects 700 nm light and thinking we need
> nothing like this in our brain) doesn't change
> how phenomenal it is and how entirely different
> it is from anything that is only causal.
>
>
>  >>> In your view does all matter have these
> phenomenal properties? And by that do you mean
> all matter is aware? This is pan-psychism -- one
> way to approach the 'hard problem'. Pan-psychism
> removes the need to explain the seemingly magical
> transformation from inert to aware. All matter is
> aware, and becomes self-aware in higher animals. <<<<
>
> A camera can be "self aware" by pointing it in a
> mirror.  The picture it takes of itself is
> information that represents itself – hence it has
> knowledge of itself or is "self-aware".  But
> again this knowledge of itself is not composed of
> phenomenal properties like our conscious knowledge of ourselves is.
>
>  From what you describe of "Pan-psychism" here it
> doesn't sound reasonable.  We don't know if all
> matter has phenomenal properties – or if matter
> only achieves these phenomenal properties when it
> is in particular complex states in highly
> organized groups of neurons or whatever.  We just
> know absolutely what red is like, how it is
> different than green, salty, and so on and how
> this is very different than something that is
> purely abstractly causal.  Knowing the answer to
> these types of question in great detail will be
> one "test" of whether this phenomenal property
> theory is correct or not.  This is what we must
> discover and indeed what this theory says we
> should be looking for.  Not some way for
> consciousness to "arise from some causal
> property" as Chalmers so brilliantly points out.
>
>
>  > > Red is and always will be red.  Certainly the neural
>
>  > > correlate that has red will always have the same red
>
>  > > in any mind.
>
>
>
>  > I'm not so certain.
>
> Why?  Has red ever changed during your life
> time?  Has salty?  Have you ever confused red
> (the A qualia) with green (the B qualia) or
> salty?  Red is and always will be red – no
> confusion whatsoever and we always know very
> reliably that A is like A and not like B.
>
> Sure, taste is a bit more nebulous and fleeting
> and obviously people taste things very
> differently (represent the same chemical content
> of food with different quale) – To me that simply
> says we should focus on the plain, simple, and
> constant ones, like color, first and an
> understanding of the others will follow.
>
>
>  > I'm game, but you'll need first to think of a way to test it. :)
>
> You must not be paying attention.  When or if we
> discover what part of matter, in what state, has
> these phenomenal properties – we will be able to
> reliably tell when someone is experiencing red or
> green...by causally observing the particular
> correlates of matter that have those phenomenal
> properties.  When we can eff qualia to other
> minds (including artificial minds) by
> reconstructing the matter in the proper state in
> other minds, enabling us to know what other
> conscious minds are like or which quale they use
> to represent various types of information, that
> will be the proof of the theory.
>
> True, it might be a bit hard to define precisely
> what I am claiming will happen within the next 10 years.
>
> I'm mainly saying that someone will finally
> recognize that we should not be looking for some
> property to emerge from only causal properties of
> nature.  Someone will realize there must be
> phenomenal properties in nature in addition to
> causal properties.  And with this theory –
> someone will start looking in the right place and
> finally discover them (i.e. be able to reliably
> predict when people are experiencing red and
> cause people to experience red when they throw
> the switch…)  I am also claiming this will be
> popularly accepted as the greatest and most earth
> changing scientific achievement to date.  It will
> finally solve the "problem of other minds", make
> the ineffable effable, tell us what spirits are
> (and are not) make Turing (and all others) seem
> stupid for coming up with the Turing test as the
> best way to know if something else is conscious
> rather than something more like just asking them
> "what is red like for you"… and so on.
>
> If all of this happens before 10 years, I will
> win.  I am betting this will obviously be the
> case and that there will be no argument from any
> intelligent person.  If any of this doesn't come
> to pass – or if it turns out to be something
> different than phenomenal properties (could red
> really "emerge" from or be nothing more than
> abstractly simulated by a complex set of causal properties?) – then I lose.
>
> Can you think of some better ways to better pin
> this down based on what I'm trying to say?
>
> Brent Allsop