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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).
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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