Small nitpick: I am not talking about what is foundational to the way our world works. I am only making the fairly trite obsevation that subjective experience/qualia is the only thing we can directly experience; it would be really, really strange if something so basic to us turned out to be dependent on complicated configurations of neurons and glial cells, as naive physicalists suggest.
Do you question the consensus that you see using your eyes? Because the eye is a blatantly complicated mechanism directly in the middle of one of the direct experiences of the world you stake your theory on.
I’m not questioning the fact that complicated mechanisms are involved in creating your subjective experience; I question the physical description of that subjective experience as an incredibly complicated configuration in the brain. If your qualia are at all real in some sense, they should correspond to something far simpler than that on Occam’s Razor grounds. Alternately, you might just be a P-zombie. But then you’d have serious problems experiencing how your brain feels from the inside, although your brain would definitely be talking about its internal experiences.
I’m not questioning the fact that complicated mechanisms are involved in creating your subjective experience;
Why aren’t you? You just said that “[qualia] should correspond to something far simpler than that”. If a (say) visual quale is simple, then why does the human system need a complicated mechanism to capture large numbers of photons such that they form a coherent image on a surface coated with photosensitive neurons, which are wired so as to cause large-scale effects on other parts of the neural (and glial) system of the brain, starting with the visual cortex and spreading from there … to cause something simple? Light was simple to start with! If you expect things to be simple at the Cartesian theater, the visual system moves the wrong way.
Light is simple, but evolved organisms care very little about the fundamental qualities of light. They care a lot about running efficient computations using various inputs, including the excitation of photosensitive neurons. This is probably why the Cartesian theather feels very much like computation on high-level inputs and outputs, rather than objectively fundamental things such as wavelengths of light. And the computations which transform low-level data like excitation of sensory neurons into high-level inputs are probably unconscious because they are qualitatively different from conscious computation.
I would expect optimization for efficiency to be something evolution does—but I am compelled to note that I mentioned “the Cartesian theater” as a reference to Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, where he strenuously refuted the idea of the Cartesian theater. By Dennett’s argument—and even when Consciousness Explained came out, he had a lot of research data to work from—the collocation of all sensory data in a single channel to run past some homunculus recording our conscious experience is unlikely. After all, there already is a data-processing entity right there to collect all the sensory data—that’s the entire brain. So within the brain, it should not be surprising that different conscious experiences are saved to memory from different parts. Particularly since the brain is patently a parallel computer anyway.
Daniel Dennett’s “refutation” of the Cartesian theater has been widely criticized. Basically, he relies on perceptual illusions such as discrete motion being perceived as continuous, arguing that there should be a fact of the matter as to whether “the motion in the Cartesian theater” is continuous or not. But phenomenology is far simpler (or more complicated) than that: the fact that we perceive the quale of continuous_motion does not imply that a homunculous somewhere is seeing the object in an intermediate position at each given moment in time. It is a strawman argument.
Do you question the consensus that you see using your eyes? Because the eye is a blatantly complicated mechanism directly in the middle of one of the direct experiences of the world you stake your theory on.
I’m not questioning the fact that complicated mechanisms are involved in creating your subjective experience; I question the physical description of that subjective experience as an incredibly complicated configuration in the brain. If your qualia are at all real in some sense, they should correspond to something far simpler than that on Occam’s Razor grounds. Alternately, you might just be a P-zombie. But then you’d have serious problems experiencing how your brain feels from the inside, although your brain would definitely be talking about its internal experiences.
Why aren’t you? You just said that “[qualia] should correspond to something far simpler than that”. If a (say) visual quale is simple, then why does the human system need a complicated mechanism to capture large numbers of photons such that they form a coherent image on a surface coated with photosensitive neurons, which are wired so as to cause large-scale effects on other parts of the neural (and glial) system of the brain, starting with the visual cortex and spreading from there … to cause something simple? Light was simple to start with! If you expect things to be simple at the Cartesian theater, the visual system moves the wrong way.
Light is simple, but evolved organisms care very little about the fundamental qualities of light. They care a lot about running efficient computations using various inputs, including the excitation of photosensitive neurons. This is probably why the Cartesian theather feels very much like computation on high-level inputs and outputs, rather than objectively fundamental things such as wavelengths of light. And the computations which transform low-level data like excitation of sensory neurons into high-level inputs are probably unconscious because they are qualitatively different from conscious computation.
I would expect optimization for efficiency to be something evolution does—but I am compelled to note that I mentioned “the Cartesian theater” as a reference to Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, where he strenuously refuted the idea of the Cartesian theater. By Dennett’s argument—and even when Consciousness Explained came out, he had a lot of research data to work from—the collocation of all sensory data in a single channel to run past some homunculus recording our conscious experience is unlikely. After all, there already is a data-processing entity right there to collect all the sensory data—that’s the entire brain. So within the brain, it should not be surprising that different conscious experiences are saved to memory from different parts. Particularly since the brain is patently a parallel computer anyway.
Daniel Dennett’s “refutation” of the Cartesian theater has been widely criticized. Basically, he relies on perceptual illusions such as discrete motion being perceived as continuous, arguing that there should be a fact of the matter as to whether “the motion in the Cartesian theater” is continuous or not. But phenomenology is far simpler (or more complicated) than that: the fact that we perceive the quale of continuous_motion does not imply that a homunculous somewhere is seeing the object in an intermediate position at each given moment in time. It is a strawman argument.
Before I respond: are we actually getting anywhere in this discussion? I have this sinking feeling that I’m asking the wrong questions.