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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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Only on a narrow definition of ‘exist,’ and only if you exclude the empirical observation of your own qualia, which you’re observing right now as you read this.

I could be GPT-7, then by your definition I would not have qualia. Of course, I am a human and I have observed my qualia and decided that it does not exist on any higher level than my Minecraft house exists. Perhaps you could consider it an abstract object, but it is ultimately data interpreted by humans rather than a physical object that exists despite human interpretation.

It’s your world, man, and you’re denying it exists. Cogito ergo sum.

Your computer has an inner world. You can peek into it by going in spectator mode in a game or even the windows on your computer screen are objects in your computer's inner world. Of course, I would not argue that a computer is conscious, but that is because I think consciousness is a property of neural networks, natural or artificial.

Artificial neural networks appear analogous to natural ones. For example, they can break down visual data into its details similar to a human visual cortex. A powerful ANN trained to behave like a human would also have its inner world. It would claim to be conscious the same way you do and describe its qualia and experience. And these artificial consciousness and artificial qualia would exist at least on the level of data patterns. You might argue quasi-consciousness and quasi-qualia, but I would argue there is no difference.

My thesis: simulated consciousness is consciousness, and simulated qualia is qualia.

More precisely, qualia are synaptic patterns and associations in a artificial or natural neural network. Consciousness is the abstract process and functionality of an active neural network that is similar to human cognition. Consciousness is much harder to define precisely because people have not agreed whether animals are conscious or even whether hyper-cerebral psychopaths are conscious (if they really even exist outside fiction).

I do start doubting when I read about behaviorists who don’t believe qualia exist or are important, though.

I think qualia does not exist per se. However, I do think qualia is important on the level that it does exist. We have entered such a low level of metaphysics that it is difficult to put the ideas into words.

Although I’m not certain, I extend the same recognition of some kind of qualia to most animals because they are like us, and from a similar origin and evince similar behavior

With AI, though, this goes out the window: computers are not the same sort of thing as you and me or as animals, and thus I have no reason to suspect it will have the same sort of consciousness as I do. It’s a fundamentally different beast, not even a beast, but a machine.

But why make the distinction? If you recognize animals as conscious, I think if you spent three days with an android equipped with an ANN that perfectly mimicked human consciousness and emotion, then your lizard brain would inevitably recognize it as a fellow conscious being. And once your lizard brain accepts that the android is conscious, then your rational mind would begin to reconsider its beliefs as well.

Hence, I think the conception of a philosophical zombie cannot survive contact with an AI that behaves like a human. We can only discuss with this level of detachment because such an AI does not exist and thus cannot evoke our empathy.