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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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Okay, one last response and I block you for time-saving reasons.

Assuming that this is what you mean

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.

There is nothing circular about pain (or seeing red or hearing sound or etc). It's just pain; that's it.

The only thing this sentence communicates is that you have nothing to communicate about pain but would like me to agree.

Of course you know what pain is.

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,

The fact that first-person experience exists is privileged, yes. It is more privileged than anything else.

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.

Is a rock conscious? Does a rock encode "information" too, of the type that's needed for qualia?

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.

The only thing this sentence communicates is that you have nothing to communicate about pain but would like me to agree.

Are you saying that you don't know what it feels like to feel pain?

But it doesn't follow that I know what pain is.

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?

A rock does not implement anything we can describe as information processing necessary and sufficient for "qualia".

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.