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The distinction is that I do not think «maps inputs to outputs» is the most relevant way to understand the former. There is nothing outside the true generative function of our universe (let's assume it really is the universal wavefunction) that it addresses, no heap of states. It is not an arbitrary "mapping", it is a self-contained entity (see Tegmark I guess); no part of state it describes is not generated by it, so the ordering of its states is unique and necessary. I think this, or something very close to this, is what makes a "universe", and so preconditions for "Universe X" to be coherent. Universe is absolute necessity.
In contrast, a table-governed «universe» is entirely made of slices that are not generated by any algorithm that is related to the table or that could impose order on them; thus they cannot have any particular order; thus, this is not a universe but a set of descriptions of states and an unrelated string that claims they have an assigned sequence, and it is incoherent to call this a universe.
We can do in-universe approximations of physical laws that have different properties and are «coherent» for utilitarian purposes, but it must be kept in mind that this is what they are. For a crayons universe, the equivalent is not the state table but the creative intent of Dan Harmon or what's his name. A crayons universe is coherent not as an actual self-contained universe but as a self-contained TV series episode.
I admit I might be very confused about this. Also, there can be even a coherent crayons-universe in this definition, at least it is imaginable that there can be.
I think you are just denying physicalism at this point.
No. Anosognosia was just a handy example of a differing information availability condition. Blindsight might be a better one. But specifically, I simply mean the delta between having sensation and perception. (I am not sure if discussing awareness or attention helps clarify this but they are discussed in this regard). A thing like "seeing red" is perception by canonical definition. We know how perception is implemented physically. Ergo we know one way for quale to work: it would be just for perceptions, implemented the way we know they are, to be informationally available to the mind.
Yes, it is.
It is logically necessary due to definitions of all elements involved, perception, quale, brain and so on. Perceptions are definitionally identical with quale, and this is how perceptions are implemented in the brain mechanically, the whole causal chain. Once more, you can insist until you are blue in the face that they are not available to a non-material Cartesian soul and therefore some other, fancier quale are needed. But you absolutely do not get to say that a physical human can have none.
It is not logically necessary that Cartesian souls outside normal causality stream do not exist. It is not logically necessary that they would have access to perceptions in the brain. It is not incoherent to demand that they be afforded something else. It's just scholastics. The brain has access to perceptions in the brain; the zombie totally has its zombie-quale.
Unless you can object to the identity of perception and qualia with something more than A) "it's not logically necessary that they be identical, although I don't have a definition for qualia that makes them non-identical and isn't just insistence that there are non-physical quale" or B) "physicalism actually sucks though" , I maintain that it is in fact necessary.
This is obviously circular. You insist that you can "coherently imagine" A since you can't observe B. But denying that you observe B does not automatically make it so you actually don't (again, there is such a thing as blindsight).
You can observe them with fMRI. This is just a difference in observing them from the outside versus from the inside. This isn't a problem unique for quale: for a thing to exist, there must be difference between contents included in that thing and everything else. This is how all things work. Your perceptions are events of self-attention in your nervous system, not in mine.
Reasons «there is a Hard Problem» include: narcissism, mental sloppiness, obsession with gut feelings, excessive funding, insight porn industry, aftershocks of psychedelic revolution, and popularity of Coachella with some well-connected types suffering from all the above. But they have nothing to do with logic. The idea of Hard Problem is dumb, embarrassing on par with an illiterate stoner's fascination about whether he has a "hand" or "five fingers plus a palm".
To be honest I'm bored of this debate. It feels dirty to even think back to times I cared for it.
Ok. Then the state table function I was describing is also a "generative function", it's also a "self-contained entity", etc. It doesn't really matter how you want to describe it, just pick your favorite story and run with it. "State table" was just a way of describing it that I had hoped would make the nature of the function clearer; it doesn't entail that there's literally a table on God's hard drive in an ethereal realm or something. A function is a function is a function, again there's no principled distinction you can draw between any of them at the level of logical coherence (unless it e.g. wasn't total over its domain or something pathological like that, but that's not what we're dealing with here).
This is the crux of the disagreement.
You observe the brain activity in the p-zombie brain and you say "look, the qualia are right there, you can't say that you both see the qualia here and you don't see the qualia here, that's incoherent, they're obviously here because here they are, I'm showing them to you." But this is what I deny. You are not observing qualia when you observe the fMRI readings (in the sense that, when you look at an apple, you don't "observe" quarks, in the sense that this observation of the apple by itself is not evidence for the existence of quarks. You can't look at an apple and go "yep, there's the quarks, I'm just reading it right off this observation". You might learn on independent grounds that apples are made of quarks, and thus you come to realize post facto that when you look at an apple you are also looking at quarks, but this is not the type of "observation" that is at issue here. It's conceivable that you might learn on independent grounds that when you look at brain activity you are also looking at qualia (I'd have further objections to this but let's just grant it), but you can't look at fMRI activity and go "yep, there's the qualia, I'm looking right at it" in any direct way.)
First we have to make sure we both have the same thing in mind when we're talking about qualia. A quale just is your first-person experience of a sensation. It's the actual pain you feel when you feel, well, pain. It could be other things too, in addition to this; it's possible that we can say more about its nature or properties. But fundamentally, it's just what you actually feel. That is its identity.
The fact that qualia besides your own can't be directly observed seems so obvious to me that it's hard to give an argument for why you should think so as well. But I can try.
I'm not 100% sure about this first one, but I think it's getting at something important, so I'll throw it out there: if there was a sense in which you could directly observe qualia, then it would no longer be an open question whether you were the only conscious mind in existence or not. You would have direct knowledge, on the same level of certainty that you have of your own perceptual experience, that other consciousnesses exist. But you don't have this type of direct knowledge, and it is an open question whether you are the only consciousness in existence or not. You could be hallucinating the whole universe, for example, and no one is having any actual conscious experience except you. Saying that you can directly observe qualia strikes me as akin to saying that you can directly observe that e.g. the apple in front of you actually exists in reality and isn't just a hallucination or a simulation. But as we know from philosophy 101, you can't simply observe this. You can observe the fMRI readings, but you cannot "observe" that they are not hallucinatory; similarly, you cannot observe whether they are attended by qualia or not. It's just something that you don't have access to.
Alternatively, just consider how people are already starting to have debates over whether GPT-4 is conscious or not. Can it actually feel pain? Can it actually feel anything? Most people still don't think so, but already a few are starting to say that it might. And as systems start to get more complex, as you start to put LLMs in humanoid robots and they consistently say "ouch" when you poke them, then people will be even more divided over whether those robots are actually feeling pain or not. What sort of empirical observation could settle this debate? It doesn't seem like there could be any. You can't just "see" whether the robot is feeling pain or not, in the way that you can "see" its performance on a benchmark test.
Obviously this is a doomed enterprise. I agree with you that, by this standard of skepticism, it is impossible to establish that someone has a mind at all. In practice I really do not believe that your mind is much similar to my own, so there isn't really a reason to believe that you can conceive of qualia in a way that I'd endorse, not matter what you type, and vice versa.
You are going in circles. This is worse than circular, this is contentless. "A qualia just is a first-person experience". Okay? "It's the actual pain you feel". Sure, and? The question is whether "a brain" "feels" "pain", in some way that can be operationalized.
If I were you, I'd try mindwipe myself at this point, because it's clear that the procedure you're using for reasoning has run into its inherent ceiling.
Is there any independent information content to a qualia of red, something that actually distinguishes it from other quale, and something that is not insistence on it being an ineffable experience that is "first-person"? (Information: "what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things.") Well, whatever that content is, it is isomorphic to the working bits of the corresponding brain state. The brain state contains that information, we know very well that it does. Maybe you can't be sure that you observe its traces "directly" on fMRI, but in theory it exists necessarily, so long as physical universe works by physical rules.
So the question is: can information (of a brain state, or perhaps any information encoded on any physical substrate) "feel like anything" for the identity to be valid. I do not see a well-formed argument for why it cannot, sans some talk about conceivability.
But that is just a mindless token stream. I straight up do not recognize that you have the capacity to evaluate whether this is conceivable or coherent.
And that's that I guess.
Irrelevant. The p-zombie thought experiment assumes physicalism, which means it assumes the conventional model where brains contain information.
There really is strictly nothing to your position than the exasperated feeling that there must be some honorable, justifiable escape from physicalism, that it must have a flaw, that it must not explain the whole picture, that there must be a "conceivable" way for brain states to somehow "not feel like anything to themselves" as they exchange information on their own plane of existence. But I maintain that A) this idea is not coherent and B) you are vendor-locked from stress-testing it because tokens like "I", "you" and "feel" are privileged in your design and you won't be able to look at the problem without them no matter how much I ask you to.
I've learned not to argue with LLMs and I stop arguing with you.
Well, maybe. But obviously our minds are similar enough that we're able to have a productive conversation. We took our initial disagreement, about the conceivability of p-zombies, and reduced it to a more fundamental claim: whether observation of fMRI activity counts as direct observation of qualia or not. That's genuine progress! That shows that we're communicating with each other and we aren't just talking past each other.
There is nothing circular about pain (or seeing red or hearing sound or etc). It's just pain; that's it. Of course you know what pain is. Nothing could be more familiar or self-evident to you.
Plainly, it does not! Assuming that this is what you mean by physicalism.
The fact that first-person experience exists is privileged, yes. It is more privileged than anything else. Certainly more privileged than any proposition about the "external world", more privileged than any purported law of physics. I can doubt that quarks exist. I can't doubt that pain exists.
I am of course well aware of the arguments that claim to demonstrate that there is no "self", no "I". I do not think I am committed to the denial of such arguments, nor do I think that that question is particularly material to the current discussion. I stake my claim at "qualia exists" rather than "I exist".
Well, I think you're getting at something here that leads back into my question about the consciousness of GPT-4 (which you did not address). Is a rock conscious? Does a rock encode "information" too, of the type that's needed for qualia? We can speculate on that - we can come up with a theory like IIT that allows us to infer that some systems are conscious and some aren't. But the important question is, how can we settle that question via empirical observation? It doesn't seem like we can - no matter how reasonable we think our inference is, the question will always remain fundamentally open. And that is because qualia other than your own can never be directly observed.
Okay, one last response and I block you for time-saving reasons.
No, this is a fair nitpick. I mean that p-zombie argument assumes our full model of physics, such that all external observations in it can be explained within physicalism. This means that brains of zombies instantiate a certain computation (computationalism follows). We've come a long way and we can see how a brain operates on information. Some of raw information is sensory, e.g pain that you bring up, starting as raw signals from receptors (usually). Some of the processing is perceptive, such as attending to that pain. This perceptive processing fits the definition of quale, in any definition that doesn't assume the premise of quale being something else. I claim that an information-processing system of such sort "knows how it feels" to see red or feel pain, and that you cannot express or imagine how it might be otherwise. Childish imagery like "light's on but nobody's home" doesn't count. Appeals to "come on you know what pain is" also do not count.
The only thing this sentence communicates is that you have nothing to communicate about pain but would like me to agree.
Wrong. I know what it means when I say it hurts, and I sort of know the biology of pain. But it doesn't follow that I know what pain is. I of course believe that pain is the latter from the first-person perspective where I say "it hurts". But if there's anything amusing to note here, it's that perspectives exist. And from your perspective,
What about logical coherence? Anyway, I disagree.
Quale (as pain from the first person perspective yadda yadda) might seem like ineffable ontological primitives to you, in the way text embeddings might seem to a self-aware LLM trained entirely on text, in the way categories were to Kant. I can't very well formulate why this is trivial and not a valid intuition pump for reasoning about ontologies.
Does a rock encode embeddings? Does a rock encode jpegs? Yes, of course it does, a function is a function is a function, like you say. No, of course it fucking doesn't, as I say – this is only possible with a tortured idea of encoding. Ironically, so says Chalmers (even more ironically, he punctures holes in your defense of crayons-universes).
A rock does not implement anything we can describe as information processing necessary and sufficient for "qualia".
A human brain clearly does, though.
Are you saying that you don't know what it feels like to feel pain?
You claim to know a lot of other things. Most of which seem to have a weaker evidentiary basis than the existence of pain. How are you going to tell me that you know, for example, the necessary conditions for what a possible set of physical laws looks like for any possible universe, but you don't know what pain is?
Ok, but - and I have to keep coming back to this - what is your empirical evidence for this claim? How can you empirically observe that the rock does or does not have qualia, or that GPT-4 does or does not have qualia. Or is it "just obvious" to you? If that's the case, then that's very strange. How can it be "obvious" to you what the necessary conditions are for a system to be able to experience pain, when you also claim that it's not obvious to you what pain even is in the first place.
I'm not sure why you felt the need to block me. Typically people just stop replying to a thread when they don't want to continue a discussion anymore. I'd be happy to continue this discussion with you at any time, if you ever decide that you want to.
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