Spirits (was RE: [extropy-chat] Qualia Bet.)

[Robin Hanson]

At 02:54 PM 11/28/2005, Brent Allsop wrote:
> > But how will you know *that* you are effing?  Say we find some weird
> > particle that interacts with brains and correlates with states of
> > awareness.  Say with the help of such particles we let you and your wife
> > mix up your minds, so that your brain gets input directly from her brain.
> > How will you know this isn't just some fancy hookup to her 
> brain-as-computer
> > that allows you to treat her as a video game?  How will you know you are
> > accessing her qualia?
>
>You are right, strictly speaking, effing, alone will not let you know with
>absolute surety that you have the right phenomenal property in the
>destination mind.
>
>You are hypothesizing that qualia will correlate with "some weird particle"
>that we find.  I am hypothesizing that it will be an additional causal
>property of matter (particles?) we already causally know about which
>correlates to phenomenal properties.  Whatever qualia turns out to be - the
>effing answers below will still be the same.

Whatever additional stuff you find that correlates with phenomenal properties,
how will you know that *that* is qualia?  We can already look at brains and
see that their activity correlates with phenomenal properties.  How will this
new stuff be different, so that we have more confidence that it is qualia?
Seems to me that it is turtles all the way down.


Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323