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I recently learned about Sir Roger Penrose's research about Qualia. Then I formed my own conclusion of one of the universal truths;
That the "0th Dimension (The Nothing) Emerges/Balance All Infinite Possibility Across The Conceivable & The Inconceivable Reality"
I wrote an essay on it, as well as a wrap-up of our future. What do you think?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lqBvh5xohGid4U685aJBCp1h1a2RET7Wl6gBn3GhELk/edit?tab=t.0
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1loPX-ESVGv-0EevZxYkZ9bZgRzTVxbUNlVRq05HNPh8/edit?gid=0#gid=0
It always annoys me was 'esteemed' physicists venture into woo. That is a sign they ran out of ideas or are unserious about research and should retire to let the next generation of competent researchers in. This guy way overrated relative to his contributions.
Qualia always struck me as the basic material computation within biological systems. There's nothing magical about it.
If you begin things with the basic idea that consciousness is just at bottom, information processing at the level of the brain, that provides an easy pathway from hereon out to understand this. Whenever computers process information, there's always "something it's like" to be the computer doing that. That's just an inevitable consequence of computational task itself. This is just never experienced by anyone, unless the computation also includes a computed person that's experiencing it. When a computer experience's something, it's because it's computing the experience of that thing.
If you were to start with a simple visual process for example, where a computer needs to discriminate between areas of a space that are light or dark (say you're traveling to one trajectory and not the other), this will always be experienced in some way and necessarily so. The geometry that's being computed will be felt, and there will be something different about "what it's like" to be looking at a light area or a dark area. Because it couldn’t be otherwise. How could it? So there's nothing "extra" to explain about qualia. And the exact way this is experienced will depend on the computational circuit, it’s physical arrangement and how it behaves, etc. Other philosophers have reasoned the same way (including Dennett, Pat Churchland, etc).
This still sounds like a vacuous concept to me.
Also, take a 4-bit adder, which is a very simple computation device.
In the first experiment, we connect it to two digital light sensors. One reads 3, the other reads 5. The adder circuit does its job and outputs 8, which we then bitshift to get the average of 4. By your description that means our circuit is experiencing a certain amount of light.
In the second experiment, we connect two temperature sensors. One reads 3, the other reads 5. Again the adder does its job and outputs 8, which results in an average value of 4. But this time it is supposed to experience temperature, and depending on the scale of our sensors, it might experience very different temperatures!
To the degree either an adder or a human neuron experience anything, what they experience is simply voltage levels of their inputs. Either system is describable perfectly well without using a word like experience.
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Do you and I see the same red?
If we both look at the same object, which is red, we have the same wavelength of light reach our eyes. Our eyes are both human eyes and process this wavelength the same way. We both recognize that we are seeing what we commonly call red.
But, what if I am seeing what you would call "blue"? I would recognize it as red - all red objects were this "blue" to me my whole life (and all blue objects were something you don't have a concept of at all.)
These are the kinds of things I pondered as a kid and it's why I don't scoff at qualia. There are some things that we can't in principle measure, and these things are the most foundational to our subjective experience of the world.
If we're both using broadly the same kind of bio-neurological substrate (ie not colour-blind, no drugs, no pathologic photosensitivity, etc) I don't see why we would have a grossly different experience. I think there are subtle differences in processing and interpretation (some people might have visual snow, some cultures don't clearly distinguish blue from green) but nothing so different as experiencing the other person's blue qualia.
It's an interesting idea and I used to ponder it myself when I was a kid, but now I'm older I take the other side and ask why wouldn't we share similar qualia.
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If you see something crimson, and then something cardinal red, are those "the same red" to you? My guess is that you can distinguish those colors, if they are put side-by-side next to each other, but that the associations that each color in isolation brings up in your mind are quite similar.
I don't think there is "something it is like" to see the color crimson, aside from the associations with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc. And if you ask whether other people have the same associations, we dissolve the philosophical question of whether the qualia are "the same", and replace it with empirical one of "how similar are they". We know how to tackle that one.
Let's say you were to take a set of 500 colors, and a set of 50 random memories you have, you could rate how strongly you associate each color with each memory on a scale from 1 to 10. This would give you a 500 x 50 matrix of association strengths, which you could think of as a 50 dimensional space where each orthogonal direction in the space is how strongly one of the 50 random memories is associated, and each of the 500 colors is associated with one particular point in this 50 dimensional memory space. But those points will not be randomly distributed within the space, and in fact you can probably map those points to a 3 dimensional space without losing much information. The position of colors within this 3 dimensional space would be a fairly faithful representation of the association of colors with those 50 memories.
If you were to repeat the above procedure with 50 random concepts you know instead of 50 random memories you have, you would also get a 3 dimensional space with colors in particular points within that space. Generally, I would expect that the positions of colors in this space generated by concepts would be pretty similar to the positions of colors in the space generated by memories.
Well now let's say we repeat this experiment with the same 500 colors, and the same 50 concepts, but a different person, Bob. I would expect that that person maps probably maps colors to concepts in a similar way, as long as they speak the same language and neither you nor Bob are colorblind. If crimson maps to a similar location in your color map as it does in Bob's color map, I think it's fair to say that you see a similar red to Bob.
This also tracks with how we teach colors to our children. We don't say "red is an ineffable experience which I experience and you might too", we say "red is the color you see when you look at a fire truck, or a stop sign, or a strawberry". This provides anchors so that our children know how to bind qualia to language. We can see evidence that they really do bind qualia to language in similar ways to each other too.
Take two kids, Alice and Bob. Teach them red by example. This fire truck is red. This strawberry is red. This stop sign is red. Teach them orange by example. This carrot is orange. This traffic cone is orange. This orange (fruit) is orange (color).
Take Alice into a room with many objects of many colors. Ask Alice to bring you things which are halfway between red and orange. Note the things she brought you, then put everything back exactly where it was at the start. Bring Bob into the same room, and ask him to bring you things which are halfway between red and orange.
Alice and Bob probably both chose similar things. They both took two of their qualia, interpolated an intermediate quale, and mapped that quale back to the physical world. When they did, they got similar results to each other, implying that their qualia were similar (unless Bob is colorblind, in which case they got very different results, implying that their qualia were very different).
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I'm not talking about color associations or being able to distinguish between shades. I'm saying, when you look at an object, your brain seems to translate that into a "color" in your mind. This "color" is how you perceive that wavelenth to be, but there's no rule that says that I see the same "color" as you. All of the colors I see might be completely foreign to you. 100% of my colors might be ones you don't see at all ever. They all appear to gently blend together for me in shades and hues on a spectrum. We share the wavelengths together, but not the effect they produce in our minds.
My perception of the color is not a simple function of wavelength - see example of the blue+black/white/gold dress. My perception of a color is the effect it has on my mind. There is no perception of a color outside of the effect it has on my mind.
In terms of the effects colors have on our minds, we currently have limited direct visibility into this, but
I suppose one thing to check - do you agree that two identical-to-the-atom clones observing identical-to-the-photon sensory inputs would have identical qualia? Or do you think even that is not something we can have high confidence in?
I don't think we could have high confidence in. What if it's assigned randomly, like the first thing you ever see is assigned what I see as "red?" There's just no way of knowing, no conceivable test to find out.
Assigned by what? By "qualia" are you referring to anything you've ever experienced? If so, how do you know you've experienced qualia?
If the first color quale you ever experienced was "assigned" to red, and the second to blue, and then one day they magically switched, would you notice a difference?
If no, why do we care about "qualia"?
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I don't follow this. What is being associated with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc.? When you see a random drop of fresh blood on the ground during your walk, you might identify it as "red" because it appears similar to fire trucks and stop signs and strawberries which you were taught at a young age were "red," but what is it that you're comparing in order to associate these things in the first place? I would characterize it as comparing the qualia of observing a stop sign with observing fresh blood on the ground, which would be another way of describing "what it is like" to see the color red. If there's no there there, and there's no actual experience of seeing the color red when you observe fresh blood or a stop sign, then how is it that you're associating the color of the blood to the color of a stop sign?
You're associating your sensory inputs with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc. If you sever your optic nerve, and then you point your eyes at a stop sign, you will not experience redness.
I claim that qualia are what it feels like from the inside to ascribe meaning to your raw sensory experience.
Do those sensory inputs exist as an experience that I have outside of my memories, emotions, etc. though? If they don't, then how am I able to identify colors of entirely new things sans context? I'm not sure how that would make sense, so I conclude that I do experience sensory inputs, i.e. those sensory inputs are a form of qualia. Which then raises the question of if the qualia of me experiencing the sensory input from observing a stop sign is similar to that of someone else doing the same thing. We can empirically observe that the meaning that we ascribe to these sensory inputs are very similar, but that wouldn't actually get us to the similarity of the sensory inputs themselves.
It's also possible that, since qualia is intrinsically and, as-of-yet, inescapably subjective, the very concept of comparing qualia between two people is incoherent, and the best we can do is to figure out if the qualia of the meaning that we ascribe to sensory inputs are similar, as a proxy that we can never get better than.
No? What would they even be sensory inputs to?
I don't think that's a thing you're able to do sans context. Infants, lacking context, aren't able to identify the colors of anything.
I suspect we're using the word "context" differently - what exactly do you mean by "sans context"? Are your memories a part of the context? Are the innate saccade patterns that all humans use to look at things (e.g. gaze snaps to contrast, edges) part of the context? How about the learned saccade patterns (e.g. scanning in reading order)?
You don't experience unmediated sensory inputs. The map is not the territory, and you can only experience the map, never the territory directly. See exhibit 1932741: the blue/black or white/gold dress. There's an excellent diagram on that page which shows how the exact same colors on the screen can lead to the perception of a white/gold dress or a blue/black dress, in a way that makes it very easy to verify that your raw sensory data really is the same for the blue on one dress and the white on the other.
And so if you have a quale of seeing white on the ruffles of the dress, that quale is not just your raw sensory inputs.
I would say the question should be "how similar is it" rather than "is it similar", but yes.
True, but since we don't directly experience the raw sensory inputs, I don't know how much it matters how similar the raw sensory inputs are. We could quantify the similarity of those raw sensory inputs (e.g. by doing the same dimensionality reduction trick on optic nerve spike frequencies), but I don't think doing so would buy us anything beyond pretty pictures to look at and maybe some cures for diseases.
I reject the idea that qualia are inescapably subjective. People talk about qualia all the time. Therefore, those qualia are causally upstream of what they're saying. If you can figure out the full chain of causality from sensation to perception to meaning making to conversion to language to speech, I don't think there's anything left to explain. It's a lot of stuff to understand, and we don't yet understand all the links in that chain, but that's a statement about the inadequacy of our knowledge, not the unknowableness of the phenomenon.
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Qualia, Consciousness, Sapience etc. all strike me as conversation starters that are sufficiently vague yet overloaded with implied meaning to forever escape any demands for rigor or practical application. A thousand years from now we'll probably have harnessed the power of the stars to feed unimaginably powerful thinking machines and the best insight they'll have into those topics will be something like "It's whatever the fuck you want it to be".
Of course, I'm a barely literate peasant. It's probably all perfectly sensible. But man does it look like so much pseudobabble from here.
I was going to say as well like you, I'm not terribly well versed on this subject. But I am a geek who's read a book or 12 on the present state of cognitive science.
If you're asking me what qualia is, it's simply a catch-all term for all the features that are unique to conscious experience. Thomas Nagel's “What is it like to be a bat?,” or to see the color red or hear your favorite song or smelling chocolate or feeling angry. It's one of the last scientific frontiers in neuroscience and it's one that hasn't even been resolved hypothetically. And yes, the explanation for qualia most likely does have something to do with the inevitable physical effects of information processing. All evidence that we've amassed so far is converging on no other conclusion. But that still leaves us ignorant of a lot of the details.
That's because we can’t access the information we need to answer this question. For instance to tell what is actually causally different between a neural synaptic circuit whose activation causes us to smell dog shit rather than freshly baked bread, we need to have resolutions of brain anatomy which are still far beyond any present technology. The mere arrangement of synapses won’t be enough, and we still don’t even have that; and since the IO signal for any neuron is determined by something inside the neuron, such as (maybe?) methyl groups attached to the nuclear DNA of the cell, we’d need to be able to make a map even of that, and for every single cell in the brain, which is far beyond any present physical capability. By a long shot. Maybe AI research could get there sooner, if somehow they achieve general AI and can ask it about its personal phenomenology, but that’s also just another technological capability we presently don’t have.
But no matter how you want to look at the problem, you're still stuck needing to explain why chocolate doesn’t smell like vanilla. Why does activating one neural circuit causes you to experience a smell at all and not hear a musical instrument, or see the color red or feel lust, etc. Why does any of this happens at all to begin with? We already know what it's like to process this information without any of this phenomena. We call it our subconscious. So what makes the difference between just walking though life running purely on subconscious processes, and instead experiencing all these bizarre but also specific phenomena?
In this sense we don’t really mean by this the biomechanics of our sensory systems like I led with previously above. What's really being asked is what makes the difference between chocolate smelling like chocolate and not vanilla, people don’t mean what has to be different about the molecular receptors in the nose that distinguish between these two odors. Those don’t have anything whatever to do with what things smell like. No matter what molecule stimulates a certain neural track in the nose, that’s just a binary signal, “on or off,” that flows into the brain. At best, perhaps, it has a quantity scale. But there’s nothing qualitative about it. That wire could go anywhere. It could go to the circuit that makes you see red, rather than smell anything, much less some particular thing. And actually for some people, it does. Synesthesia is a real thing. (So why are only some people synesthetes?)
Qualia are undeniable. I don't think they can 'not' exist. Because it is literally 100% impossible that “I am experiencing a black field with whitemarkings inside it right now” is false; that it “isn’t happening” and thus “doesn’t exist.” That I am seeing letters on a computer screen as I type can be in doubt, maybe I’m hallucinating or dreaming this; maybe I am mistaken about what the sensory signals my brain is interpreting as letters on a computer screen actually signify; etc. But that I am experiencing seeing letters on a computer screen is impossible to doubt. And why that is has to be explained.
Qualia are also fictional (our brain invents them to be able to demarcate and navigate through information) and yes, their “existence” will have something to do with information processing. Because we know if you remove or numb the pertinent information-processing circuit that generates any given experience, you consequently remove the experience. And you can even cause the experience to occur by simply sticking a wire into the pertinent circuit and shocking it. So we know this is simply something that circuit does, this is scientifically established, and does differently than a circuit that doesn’t generate any phenomenological experience (as most circuits in our brain don’t) or that generates a different one than this (as all the remaining circuits in our brain do). What makes a “chocolate circuit” cause that experience and not some other (or none at all)?
One thing that often throws everyone off including the eliminativists is the completely unnecessary folk assumption that qualia are 'things'. That they're objects or entities. They are not things, they are events because the mind is a process, not an object. Qualia don’t “explain” things they are the thing to be explained. And they don’t exist separately from the physical process underlying them; they are the physical process underlying them. So the question is what is different about those physical processes, and other physical processes, which don’t generate such phenomena? That is exactly identical to the question of what causes those events of experience to occur, and to have the qualities they do (rather than others instead).
As an example, if there were anyone out there who can “experience” the difference between “324” and “325” as quantities, that logically entails that for them there is something experientially different between them. And that’s exactly what the word “qualia” means. Most of us though don't qualitatively experience any difference between such abstract numbers. We comprehend them in a computational sense that's absent any unique qualia. We generally have to work out in what way they differ. We don’t experience it directly, the way we do the difference between “two” and “three,” which are quantities we can directly apprehend in experience.
All that said, my cheap theory to offer you is that all qualia are just ways of discriminating the geometry of touch as a sense. And all other 4 senses remain subordinated to touch as a primary sense, simply generating complex mixtures of touch sensations. Complex emotions like love include psychosomatic feedback. Your internal monologue relies on the same neural circuitry you use to hear spoken voice. Touch more generally is just a way of discriminating geometries. If there were no qualia, you would not be able to discriminate between those things. And I think a summary of the evolutionary history of sensation lends support to this. One of the things pointed out in the article is how touch was the first sensation that developed. Vision later developed from the same circuitry and machinery as touch. And then smell came after that. In most animals sound is processed by touch sensors on the moving hairs of the ears. There's no inherent reason why that had to be the case, which indicates an evolutionary development: all senses ultimately go back to touch. It's also pretty well known that pain sensing cells evolved from touch sensing cells as a way to detect irritants. In general 'pain' is a touch sensation so intense that it disrupts and overloads other mental computations. Which is exactly what pain computes: an attention claiming condition report that needs immediate resolution.
I could keep going with other experiences like vision and pleasure, but it still follows the same evolutionary pathway.
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Actually not vague terms at all!
If you've ever pricked your finger and felt pain, that's a qualia.
If you've ever felt a sensation of hot or cold, that's a qualia.
If you know what the color blue looks like, and how it looks different from the color red, that's a qualia.
It's just conscious experience. That's it. It's that thing you have when you're alive and experiencing things, and that you lack when you're dead. Its nature might be mysterious, but the concept itself is about as straightforward as you can get.
I think what's happening is that people correctly notice that the people who like to use the word "qualia" also like to use other strange terms like "property dualism" or "epiphenomenalism" or "p-zombies" that seem to refer to very strange ideas. So they get nervous and they assume that any talk of consciousness in general must be BS. Independent of your evaluation of the philosophical literature on consciousness, it would simply be a mistake to write off the idea completely. That would be like saying that because people have come up with crank theories of physics before, physical reality itself must be a "vague" or "nonsensical" idea.
The rigor is that you know what pain is, that's the rigor.
As for "practical application", that seems like a category error. It's not clear how you can derive from first principles, starting with our current best theories of fundamental physics, that anyone is conscious at all. And yet we know they are. Surely you can appreciate that it's intrinsically interesting to try and figure out why that's the case?
But it's not. See above.
If you have specific examples in mind, or want to talk about specific terms or ideas, I'd be happy to try to explain them.
I do not think that this will get you anywhere. At most, you can convince me this way that I have qualia. But my temperature detection circuit is nothing special, an insect might have something rather similar. Does it have qualia? What if I replace it by electronics running an identical neural network and a temperature sensor? What about a rock which gets slightly larger when it is warm?
If qualia is a useful property systems of matter can have or not have, then you automatically run into p-Zombies.
At the end of the day, I want concepts which describe reality and pay their rent in anticipation of future events. The pH value of aqueous solutions is a good (if limited) concept. I can measure it, and it will give me good predictions about which reactions will tend to take place e.g. if I decide to take a swim in it.
Qualia is not such a concept. It does not make falsifiable predictions. There is no test to determine if a dog or a LLM has qualia.
I'm not certain this refutation of qualia's validity as a concept really works unless you also throw out a large portion of commonly-used language, in other words, it proves too much. "Qualia" is just meant to be a descriptive term for a phenomenon that is experienced and individually confirmable. Claims about why qualia arises and whether it is present in someone or something else are unfalsifiable and do not meet the standard for scientific inquiry or analysis, you could argue that debating that is a waste of breath (and I may even agree, actually), but that doesn't invalidate the concept of qualia.
The structure of this argument is kind of like stating that we should discard the concept of "feelings", for the very same reasons why qualia would be invalid. Or any kind of evaluative statement, really; "good", "bad", "immoral". Sometimes we just want to be able to refer to things. People aren't making testable predictions every time they open their mouths, and as such the purpose of language serves functions outside of making such statements. Hell, people even do this in the scientific world - for example debating interpretations of quantum mechanics is a common pastime among physicists, many of which are not testable and do not meet the criteria for science.
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Assuming you're not talking to eliminative materialists/illusionists that believe phenomenal consciousness is a complete myth in the first place. "Consciousness don't real" is certainly a take, and I have always wondered if these people are actual, honest-to-God p-zombies.
I've spent a lot of time joking about that, but I regret to inform you that they're not p-zombies since the definition requires external indistinguishability from people who do have internal experiences. (My partner gets mad at my mostly-joking position of "If people tell you they don't have internal experiences, believe them." -- then again she's a utilitarian and I'm a virtue ethicist or something. Even if no-one but me was conscious it wouldn't impact my moral reasoning much).
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They're pretty well aware of how insane their claims are. But, philosophers justify insane claims for a living.
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The easiest way to get away from pseudobabble is to state a testable hypothesis. Specific, falsifiable, measurable, and ideally: interesting. Do you have one?
Well, no, not really.
We can give multiple examples of statements that are clearly meaningful and aren't "pseudobabble", but which admit of no possibility of empirical verification or falsification, even in principle.
We can start by asking what happens when you turn your statement on itself: does "the easiest way to get away from pseudobabble is to state a testable hypothesis", make a testable hypothesis? It of course depends on exactly what you're trying to say here, and what you mean by "pseudobabble". If your statement was only intended to express something purely subjective, something like "I have no interest in statements that don't make testable hypotheses", or "I have no use for statements that don't make testable hypotheses", then it perhaps could be defensible (although even then there are significant difficulties). But if your statement was intended to express something objective -- that is, you were offering an objective criteria for distinguishing "pseudobabble" from non-"pseudobabble" -- then we run into some real problems. What is the empirical test for empirically verifying the statement "statements that don't make testable empirical predictions are 'pseudobabble'"? You could point to past successful empirical predictions made using claims that make empirical predictions, and the lack of successful empirical predictions made by claims that don't make empirical predictions. But this would just be circular. If someone hasn't already accepted the assumption that empirical verifiability is a guide to meaningfulness, they're going to be unimpressed by a track record of past successful empirical predictions.
Let's consider examples of inaccessible past information. There is a fact of the matter regarding what color shirt you wore on March 1st, 2009. There are probably no reliable records of what color shirt you wore that day, nor does anyone alive have a reliable memory of what shirt you wore that day; if there are reliable records of that day, just pick a different day for which there are no reliable records. This is not a "pseudobabble" question to ask. But there is (plausibly) no way of empirically verifying what color shirt you actually wore that day, even in principle. So, here we have another counterexample.
I am aware that the idea of fully simulating the past, starting from the universe's initial conditions, is a hot topic of discussion in AI spheres. It seems at least possible to me that due to a combination of time/energy constraints, inability to know the initial conditions with enough precision, and possible indeterminacy, there may be no way of actually fully simulating all past events with perfect accuracy. If you agree that this is a conceivable possibility, that's all that's needed for the counterexample to work. We may or may not be able to know what color shirt you wore on March 1st 2009, but it seems that even if we can't, that doesn't thereby make it a "pseudobabble" question. So the meaningfulness of the claim is not dependent on its empirical verifiability.
For a more grandiose example: there may be regions of the multiverse that are causally isolated from our own such that we can never empirically verify their existence, or empirically verify certain concrete facts about those regions, even in principle (could be a parallel universe, could be regions of our own universe that are beyond the limits of the observable universe, take your pick on whichever strikes you as the most physically plausible). But the question of the existence of these regions is not "pseudobabble". They could simply... exist. And there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with that. Your inability to verify the existence of these regions has no bearing on the meaningfulness of the claim that they do exist. (You could imagine, for example, a sentient inhabitant of one of these regions claiming that talk of anything beyond his own region of spacetime is "pseudobabble". Well, you know that your own existence is not "pseudobabble"!)
For an even more grandiose example: you have no way of empirically verifying that you are not the only consciousness in existence. It's possible that you're the only conscious being who actually exists, and the rest of the universe is just your hallucination. But the existence of other consciousnesses is not "pseudobabble". When you see someone who is not you prick their finger and experience pain, there is simply a fact of the matter as to whether or not there is a conscious experience of pain happening for some consciousness at that time. You have no way of empirically verifying it, but it's still not a meaningless question.
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This is assuming computers have consciousness, which I would emphatically argue they do not because they have no intentionality or ability to act.
Is intentionality and ability to act necessary for consciousness?
Suppose you have someone with locked-in syndrome. They have no (or extremely limited) ability to effect any kind of change in the outside world; perhaps they can blink or move their eyes, but let's say that they're taped over or removed. At the least, they have less ability to interact with the world than an LLM. Are they no longer conscious? I don't think so, so current ability to act isn't necessary for consciousness.
Intentionality is a bit trickier, but I'm not sure someone who's had locked-in syndrome for a decade has any remnant of intentionality; lack of opportunities to exercise intentionality leads it to wither. I still grant that unfortunate individual consciousness.
It may be necessary for action and intentionality to have at some point existed for consciousness to exist, though; I'm not sure a being that spent its entire existence in those conditions would be conscious.
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I don't think Windows Update fighting me so hard whenever Microsoft says it's update time makes my computer conscious, but it sure resembles intention and ability to act. Or do those terms have standard definitions in philosophy that I'm missing?
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Consciousness and intentionality sound like potentially two different things (that our correlated in our experience). Perhaps they necessarily entail each other, perhaps they do not. But it sounds like a thorny philosophical question that will be around for a few thousand years
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Not just computers. If conscious experience (qualia) is just an innate consequence of information being processed*, regardless of the substrate upon which that occurs, then e.g. a sundial must be very faintly self-aware.
*And just asserting that doesn't give any actual insight into how qualia arise or work
Edit: responded to the wrong comment
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