Yeah but at that point you have to ask, what makes you think qualia, or rather, “the choice of qualia as supposed to a different representation” is a kind of information about the world? It seems to me more plausible that it’s just a fact about the way our minds work. Like, knowing that the bat uses qualia is an implementation aspect of the batmind and can thus probably be separated from the behavior of the bat. (Bats make this easier because I suspect they don’t reflect on the fact that they perceive qualia.) Are there functions that can only be expressed with qualia?
As a similar example, imagine a C-Zombie, a human that is not conscious and does not speak of consciousness or having qualia. This human’s mind uses qualia, but his model of the world contains no quale-of-qualia, no awareness-of-awareness, no metarepresentation of the act of perception. Can I reimplement his mind, without cheating and making him lie, to not use qualia? Is he a different person after? (My intuition says “yes” and “no”.)
[edit] My intuition wishes to update the first response to “maybe, idk”.
Yeah but at that point you have to ask, what makes you think qualia, or rather, “the choice of qualia as supposed to a different representation” is a kind of information about the world? It seems to me more plausible that it’s just a fact about the way our minds work. Like, knowing that the bat uses qualia is an implementation aspect of the batmind and can thus probably be separated from the behavior of the bat. (Bats make this easier because I suspect they don’t reflect on the fact that they perceive qualia.) Are there functions that can only be expressed with qualia?
As a similar example, imagine a C-Zombie, a human that is not conscious and does not speak of consciousness or having qualia. This human’s mind uses qualia, but his model of the world contains no quale-of-qualia, no awareness-of-awareness, no metarepresentation of the act of perception. Can I reimplement his mind, without cheating and making him lie, to not use qualia? Is he a different person after? (My intuition says “yes” and “no”.)
[edit] My intuition wishes to update the first response to “maybe, idk”.
Qualia are information for us: if you have no visual qualia, you are blind, etc.