Franky, I have never understood the problem of qualia - or why it is something in need of explanation at all. Maybe the correct answer is an "anthropic principle"-style non-answer: External stimuli have to affect the human brain and body somehow. There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve. Now we have the capability of reflection. To some extent, we can think about how we think, and we can perceive how we percieve. Naturally you then can wonder: Why/how does this stimuli lead to this internal state? But if the states were different, you would be wondering about those states. And you only wonder about it, because you can due to reflection.
There has to be an internal representation for the organism to function properly. E.g. if light with a 450nm wavelength hits your retina, certain neurons fire. You get a pattern of electrical impulses. There's your internal representation.
But why does that representation also carry with it an experience of the color blue? Why isn't it just the electrical impulses and that's it? The organism would still work. We could be like robots, behaving exactly the same as our nerve impulses move us around, with no inner experience at all.
And what about electrical impulses in things other than brains? Are there qualia associated with them? Is there something it's like to be a computer, light bulb, thermostat, lightning bolt, or rock? If not, why not?
If you and I both see that 450nm light, how do you know that I'm not having an experience of color that you have in response to 700nm, i.e. red? Maybe the rainbow of colors is upside-down in my experience compared to yours. Maybe my qualia are different entirely. We have no way to prove anything different, because all we can measure is the electrical impulses. And because we haven't the faintest hint of a theory that connects the physical stuff to the particulars of the conscious experience.
Something that might help laypeople like myself, would be to relate them to the colors of things. That's the third dimension in this puzzle. There are wavelengths, and we have nerve impulses, but in addition, things interact with wavelengths in different ways.
Talking about wavelengths and electrical impulses seems too abstract. Let's talk about a tomato. Do you experience a 450 nm (or maybe 550 to be fair) tomato the way I experience a 700 nm tomato?
Do we have qualia for empty and full? Do you experience an empty beer bottle the way I experience a full beer bottle?
Is the question about qualia even a meaningful one? It feels to me like running a program twice and asking whether it's really the same program that was run, given that each time, the addresses of library functions the program used were different[0].
It could be that when you see 450nm light, the pathways in your brain that process this information correspond to the pathways that respond to 700nm light in my head. But it doesn't matter; our experiences are adjusted to match, because they're synchronized, thanks to shared environment and language. In both of us, despite invoking different neuron groups, seeing a blue sky will evoke images of water, or Windows error codes, and not of roses or rust. If we talk, both of us will use the word "blue" to describe what we're experiencing.
Whether the rainbow is upside-down or not in your head doesn't seem to be a meaningful question, if through all imaginable ways to observe and communicate it, it seems you perceive it the same way as the rest of us.
I would say the question of qualia is meaningful, in the sense that a good answer might teach us something about the nature of reality. It's just not a practical question.
However, it might become a practical question, if someday we have to decide whether AGI should have rights, or whether we think a human uploaded to silicon would have qualia.
Is there something else in the brain that's not just protein cascades and electrical impulses? I'd be interested in a published paper describing this structure.
Barring that, yes, experience really is just protein cascades and electrical impulses. A light bulb is orders of magnitude simpler — easily 10 or 12, maybe more; and, that's just spatial; the spatiotemporal complexity might be another 10 or 12 orders of magnitude. I don't think it's any stretch of the imagination to believe qualia arise somewhere between "uniform black body emitter" and "human brain learning and experiencing over time".
That's often people's assumption, that at some level of complexity, qualia just show up. But we don't actually have a clue why that might be the case, or how it happens, or why a pile of atoms banging against their neighbors should be considered a larger whole which thus has complexity and therefore consciousness.
People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems there's no other option. But that's not an argument, it's just faith in materialism.
And it's not true that there are no options besides simple materialism and crazy woo. E.g. it's possible that all matter has some level of conscious experience; you can believe that without believing anything contrary to physics. There are all sorts of possibilities being explored by people who grapple with these questions, instead of just assuming an answer.
> E.g. it's possible that all matter has some level of conscious experience
I've tried to reason about this, and one hypothesis is that all matter has compulsions, like to get to lower gravitational potential energy, to react this way or that, etc. And that desire can be thought of as conciousness. So for more complex assemblies of matter, conciousness becomes the sum of those compulsions, but still reflects the sum of what the base components want to do - oxidize stuff, etc. But the point is, conciousness is the manifestation of the inherent desires we have, based on the rules of the universe.
Just a hypothesis of course, not testable, but my demonstration is that if you pour water into a maze with an outlet, it will solve it, based on its desire to reach a lower potential energy, and to make hydrogen bonds.
> People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems there's no other option. But that's not an argument, it's just faith in materialism.
What other explanation is there? A magic fairy unicorn in the sky is making the qualia possible? How does that solve the problem you are pointing to, wouldn't we still want to get there via "first principals" ?
And if we did find a magic unicorn in the sky, we'd study it and probably eventually understand how it works, what forces are acting upon it or vice versa. And once we'd done all that, someone on a forum would say of course this can't explain qualia because its "just materialism".
It's not much different than the magic unicorn in the sky that makes fermions pop into existence out of thin air (our current understanding of fundamental physics postulates just that). Every ontology gets a free miracle, you can't reduce everything in terms of something else, either you'll never stop or you'll get into circular reasoning. You get to choose your ontological primitive. A "particle" or "consciousness" do not have different woo-factor. But by choosing consciousness as a primitive you can explain much more of what we observe in nature (and as a nice side effect, there might be positive existential implications with such a worldview).
If you start at first principles you don't find support for a fundamentally material reality. Idealist monism is the alternative.
i.e. the universe and everything in it is fundamentally mental phenomena (qualia) which may only appear to have material properties by the extent of their disenfranchisement from more connected phenomenal clusters.
If you consider a brain as a sparsely connected graph then it also explains these experiences. The nodes nearby to the color blue perception nodes are those that we think of as clearly related (sky, water, certain crayons), but also those that are less directly related: water, cold, sadness.
"There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve."
I don't think this is necessarily true. It seems to me like the universe would get on exactly the same without internal representation. By "internal representation" I mean a universe without "embodiment" -- no experience of being me or being you, no feelings felt, no colors seen, no sounds heard, etc.. And yet those experiences "exist" in some sense. Call them illusions or whatever, but I am and you are. So the problem is, if we can imagine the universe getting on exactly the same without those experiences, why is it such that I am and you are. That seems to be the puzzling question to me -- that nothing has to be experienced, and yet things are being experienced.
1) The issue of what perceptions "actually" are will be impossible to answer because qualia are ireductible.
Let me explain: you feel pain in your foot.
As a scientist I cut your foot and you no longer feel pain in your foot.
Or I cut the pain nerves, or the spinal cord, or give you pain medicine.
Or I find a brain receptor and a chemical responsible for pain.
Or in the future, we find a couple of brain networks that when hacked turn of or exacerbate this and that sensation. We find the exact neuron microstructure that is actually a quantum computer and a certain process/instruction set can precisely manipulate sensations. We find the exact process that is responsible for the "self" sensation.
I know that would still not satisfy my question of "what are sensations?".
"Yeah, this and that neural network, but WHO is actually feeling that sensation?".
It would be a little bit like trying to "see" in 4D space -- impossible actually.
2) Why are sensations really needed?
If we get to that advanced level as to technically answer the first question, even without a gut feeling understanding, I think we could actually understand the answer to this question.
The answer might be -- "because AI can happily process numbers, but the biological quantum neural nets cannot, and they need this "sensation" representation to actually work in the most efficient way possible.
By "quantum" I mean some missing stuff we don't know yet, I'm not saying the brain is a "quantum computer".
This reminds me of a story from Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls. An early multiuser computer system did fine with a small number of users, but choked when one more was added, above a certain threshold. "No problem", said some wag "just find where that threshold is stored and increase it." The joke, of course, is that the number didn't exist as an explicitly-realized value; it emerged as a phenomenon out of how the system as a whole ran.
When you are in pain, your conscious mind - an emergent phenomenon from the physical processes of your body (primarily the brain), or so I suspect - observes itself. There is nothing mysterious in systems observing themselves; that's what a computer doing when it raises and responds to a segfault, for example.
Considerable vagueness is to be expected in any field so far from an explanation, and the situation is even worse in the dualist camp: to the best of my knowledge, they have never been able to offer one definite, affirmative claim about how the alleged non-physical aspects of the mind work. All they do is weave tendentious arguments against there ever being a physical explanation of the mind.
Emergent phenomena are pervasive in complex systems, and this stands as an effective response to naive dualist misconceptions such as that materialism requires that a quale must be identical with a single physical thing.
Even in airplanes, behavioral traits such as stability emerge from the interaction of several physical features.
> So the problem is, if we can imagine the universe getting on exactly the same without those experiences, why is it such that I am and you are.
The most plausible answer, in my opinion, is that our lack of knowledge about how our minds work means that we are free to imagine something that probably isn't so. Imagination is not a good enough guide to how things are to be the considered a basis of knowledge.
Most people, say 99% or so, can form an internally perceived image of something in their mind's eye. The rest aren't seeing things in their mind's eye, other than that which is built from direct sensory input. Both are form.
You see with your eyes
I see destruction and demise (that's right)
Corruption in disguise
From this fuckin' enterprise
Now I'm sucked into your lies
Through Russel, not his muscles but percussion he provides
For me as a guide
Y'all can see me now 'cause you don't see with your eye
You perceive with your mind
That's the inner
So I'ma stick around with Russ' and be a mentor
Bust a few rhymes so motherfuckers remember where the thought is
I brought all this
So you can survive when law is lawless (right here)
Feelings, sensations that you thought was dead
No squealing, remember that it's all in your head
I take internal representation to be an aspect of "embodiment", which you could also call the experience of being in the first person. If some idea is being represented internally, then it is being experienced, and the sum total of all these different experiences happening together (seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling etc..) are what you could call "embodiment".
I think philosophy is a difficult subject partially because people use different terms, or sometimes their own unique terms, to describe subtle and complex ideas.
When I mentioned embodiment, I was referring to the experience of being in the first person while feeling hot or cold, seeing colors and objects, hearing the sound your keyboard makes when you press keys, feeling the keys with the tips of your fingers, etc. All of that together at once.
I've sometimes wondered if people precieve things qualitatively different way then I do to give rise to this problem, since to me it seems like s non-problem. To me, i have trouble even conceptualizing what is meant by the qualia problem. What is the fundamental difference between something's "redness" and say a tall person's "tallness". Maybe "redness" is a bit more mysterious because its non-spatial, but still is it really that different of a quality it needs an explanation? What would even be explained in the explanation?
Qualia are easier to understand when you think about things you can't experience. For example, think about echolocation. We understand how it works, we understand what parts of a bat's brain light up when echolocation is used. However, I have no idea what the experience of echolocation might be like.
I guess it's kind of like hearing.. but different? Maybe a weird combination of hearing + seeing black and white? Or similar to one of those LIDAR depth-field renderings? In other words, I don't have access to the qualia of some echolocated object. Exactly how I wouldn't have access to the qualia of some red object if I were blind.
Tallness is a physical property of the thing itself.
Light also has its own physical properties, e.g. a wavelength of 700nm. But the qualia of red is the experience you have when that 700nm light hits your retina.
It's conceivable that when 700nm light hits my retina, I have an experience which you would call "blue." That's why the qualia and the physical property of the light are two different things.
We have a lot of evidence of how people perceive color, and the differences of perception. There are tests that measure the ability to distinguish color. Some people are only colorblind in one eye, and report perceptual differences that are predictable by phenotype. I would expect any meaningful difference in qualia would have some conceivable (if not performable) test. Otherwise we're calling two equivalent things different for no reason at all.
I personally tend to believe that non-falsifiable statements are necessarily non-physical.
Is that a meaningful difference in qualia? Does a relabeling of what are arbitrary labelings change my subjective experience. Is precieving the colour spectrum in reverse even a meaningful statement? Or is it more like saying you can't prove i added 2+1 instead of 1+2.
But you dont experience tallness as an objective property of the object. You view it relative to the scene, people who intimidate you appear taller, etc. The tallness might cause us different emotional experience too - maybe im intimidated, maybe it makes me feel safe, maybe it makes me feel trusting, etc
Its entirely possible that when the exact same light hits our eyes to form a scene, you and i would experience the tallness of the person in the scene differently.
“ Another way of defining qualia is as "raw feels". A raw feel is a perception in and of itself, considered entirely in isolation from any effect it might have on behavior and behavioral disposition. In contrast, a cooked feel is that perception seen as existing in terms of its effects. For example, the perception of the taste of wine is an ineffable, raw feel, while the experience of warmth or bitterness caused by that taste of wine would be a cooked feel. Cooked feels are not qualia.” — Wikipedia
Why does an internal state lead to an experience of color or pain? Computers have internal state without any expectation of them being conscious, and this internal state can be the result of external stimulus like a camera. But the internal state isn’t experienced as color.
> But the internal state isn’t experienced as color.
How would a conscious entity experience an internal state in a way that's not like color (or pain, etc)? I think the claim is that conscious entities must experience some internal states somehow (otherwise what are you concious of) - how else could they do that other than via sensation?
I don't think that internal states of non conscious entities has much bearing on what a conscious entity does or is.
Maybe qualia is generational knowledge; Certain distinct objects developed differentiation and over time wee learned to associate it visually with color. Initially in our evolution we only had two wavelengths of color differentiation, but somewhere along the line a mutation caused a third, offset wavelength to appear. This is what color blindness is - my third mutated wavelength is just slightly closer to the second wavelength.
The problem with qualia, as I understand it, is that we can build machines that process images, and in the future let's say, can exceed what cat is capable of, but that machine will never actually have sensations.
So there are two issues: what sensations actually are and why was it necessary for life to have those sensations, after all, a robot cat would do just fine without any sensation, just processing the inputs and reacting to those inputs.
You say the machine wouldn't have sensations. Yet a cat and a human also are just complex machines. Maybe being a sufficiently complex machine is all that is needed to have sensations.
And if we could imagine for example that an ant or a fly actually experiences things, if it too has some sort of degree of what we as humans have when we see or hear things, maybe there actually already are machines that "see" and "experience" things.
The difference might just be that we as humans have the extra layer of meta observation that allows us to reason about our experience in the context of the world and turn us into an active participant in that experience while an ant or a neural network are mostly just passive observers even though they too make decisions and process information.
I think people already simulated a worm's neural nets, but we simulated just high level abstractions of what those "simple", 200 neuron networks are.
Sure, by simulation tickling part of the worm, we get the exact reflex reactions a living worm would, but surely the simulated worm does not have sensations, I can do the same worm simulation with if-else statements, just because I see a worm realistically wiggling on the screen I do not believe it can suffer pain, or else I would never play Worms Armageddon.
I believe there is something to the chemical processes themselves that we will not be able to replicate in pure software.
That brings the question, what if we could simulate the quantum particles themselves, not just some high level representation of cells, would that simulated being have sensations/feelings?
If we perfectly simulated, at the quantum particle level a cat, would the cat behave like a real cat?
That is mindboggling to me; unfortunately we cannot do that yet.
