[extropy-chat] Qualia Bet.

[gts]

On Thu, 24 Nov 2005 02:13:36 -0500, Damien Broderick  
<thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:

> I have no reason to suppose that phenomenological aspects of  
> reality--the experience of self and world, however compromised, mediated  
> and partial--are acausal or intrinsically mysterious.

Like you I have no reason to think qualia are acausal. But are they  
intrinsically mysterious? I think so!

> But the best science assures us that at the deepest levels of reality,  
> quantum events...

QM goes to the question of causality but not to the question of how to  
understand qualia.

Consider a computerized robotic digital camera. It has a mechanism to  
analyze its digital records and a speaker through which to report its  
observations. It takes a  snapshot of the color red, analyzes it to  
determine the wavelengths of light that created its digital record, then  
reports through its speaker, "I see the color red".

Intelligent though this cameras may be, I think most people would say it  
did not actually experience the 'red' quale.

You and I know what red "looks like" (the qualia) but the camera was just  
doing mathematical computations. It never really experienced redness. Or  
did it?

-gts