[ExI] Fwd: Paper on "Detecting Qualia" presentation at 2015 MTA conference

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Stathis,

On 2/1/2015 5:52 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
> Aspects of consciousness, or if you prefer of qualia, can certainly be 
> investigated scientifically, and a large part of neuroscience and 
> psychology is devoted to doing just this. However, it is impossible to 
> investigate scientifically if someone actually has qualia and what 
> those qualia are like.
>

When I say you believe this is not approachable via science, I am 
talking about the latter, which you clearly state is not approachable 
via science.  In the latter you are making the falsifiable prediction 
that you cannot eff the ineffable.

>
>
> If you claim to be able to detect qualia then what test do you propose 
> to use to decide whether CMOS sensors have "an intrinsic qualitative 
> nature" or not?
>

The prediction is that if CMOS's behavior is the same as some quality 
(which we have likely never experienced before) that we will be able to 
present it to our augmented binding system in a way that will enable us 
to compare it's quality to all the other qualities we have.   Before we 
do this, we will be like Mary, and know everything about the behavior of 
CMOS.  But once we know what our zombine information description of CMOS 
qualitatively represents, we will also know, qualitatively, what CMOS is 
like.

>
> It's not problematic imagining that the qualia would vanish if the 
> substitution were made with parts lacking the redness quality. What is 
> problematic - and the entire point of the experiment - is that the 
> qualia would vanish **without either the subject or the experimenters 
> noticing that anything had changed**.
>

That explains our miss communication, then.  What I was trying to say, 
and what this says you missed, is that the testable theoretical 
prediction is that you will not be able to get or experience redness 
without presenting glutamate (or replace glutamate with whatever your 
favorite theory predicts is responsible for elemental redness) to the 
binding system of your mind.  Only when you replace the entire binding 
system, with a binding system that is interpreting zombie information 
representing redness, as if it was real redness, will it behave the 
same.  So, it will be behaving the same, but the qualitative subjective 
nature of it's behavior will have completely faded, and be absent.  The 
system only behaves the way it does, because it contains interpreting 
hardware that is properly interpreting the zombie information as if it 
was the real thing. This is a form of the vanishing qualia case David 
Chalmers predicts is possible, right?

Brent Allsop