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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).
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 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 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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