I noticed someone already linked a QRI talk and you didn’t think it was talking about the same thing, so I’m back to being confused.
When I wrote here “Thanks but I don’t see the connection between what I wrote and what they wrote”, I did not mean that QRI was talking about a different phenomenon than I was talking about. I meant that their explanation is wildly different than mine. Re-reading the conversation, I think I was misinterpreting the comment I was replying to; I just went back to edit.
Needless to say I disagree with the QRI explanation of valence, but there’s such a chasm between their thoughts and my thoughts that it would be challenging for me to try to write a direct rebuttal.
Again, I do think they’re talking about the same set of phenomena that I’m talking about.
My prior understanding of valence, which is primarily influenced by the Qualia Research Institute, was as the ontologically fundamental utility function of the universe. The claim is that every slice of experience has an objective quantity (its valence) that measures how pleasant or unpleasant it is. This would locate ‘believing valence is a thing’ as a subset of moral realism.
I don’t think there’s anything fundamental in the universe besides electrons, quarks, photons, and so on, following their orderly laws as described by the Standard Model of Particle Physics etc. Therefore it follows that there should be an answer to the question “why do people describe a certain state as pleasant” that involves purely neuroscience / psychology and does not involve the philosophy of consciousness or any new ontologically fundamental entities. After all, “describing a certain state as pleasant” is an observable behavioral output of the brain, so it should have a chain of causation that we can trace within the underlying neural algorithms, which in turn follows from the biochemistry of firing neurons and so on, and ultimately from the laws of physics. So, that’s what I was trying to do in that blog post: Trace a chain of causation from “underlying neural algorithms” to “people describing a state as pleasant”.
After we do that (and I have much more confidence that “a solution exists” than “my particular proposal is the 100% correct solution”) we can ask: is there a further unresolved question of how that exercise we just did (involving purely neuroscience / psychology) relates to consciousness and qualia and whatnot. My answer would be “No. There is nothing left to explain.”, for reasons discussed more at Book Review: Rethinking Consciousness, but I acknowledge that’s a bit counterintuitive and can’t defend it very eloquently, since I haven’t really dived into the philosophical literature.
When I wrote here “Thanks but I don’t see the connection between what I wrote and what they wrote”, I did not mean that QRI was talking about a different phenomenon than I was talking about. I meant that their explanation is wildly different than mine. Re-reading the conversation, I think I was misinterpreting the comment I was replying to; I just went back to edit.
That makes sense.
I don’t think there’s anything fundamental in the universe besides electrons, quarks, photons, and so on, following their orderly laws as described by the Standard Model of Particle Physics etc. Therefore it follows that there should be an answer to the question “why do people describe a certain state as pleasant” that involves purely neuroscience / psychology and does not involve the philosophy of consciousness or any new ontologically fundamental entities. After all, “describing a certain state as pleasant” is an observable behavioral output of the brain, so it should have a chain of causation that we can trace within the underlying neural algorithms, which in turn follows from the biochemistry of firing neurons and so on, and ultimately from the laws of physics. So, that’s what I was trying to do in that blog post: Trace a chain of causation from “underlying neural algorithms” to “people describing a state as pleasant”.
Ah, but QRI also thinks that the material world is exhaustively described by the laws of physics. I believe they would give a blanket endorsement to everything in the above paragraph except the first sentence. Their view is not that valence is an additional parameter that your model of physics needs to take into consideration to be accurate. Rather, it’s that the existing laws of physics exhaustively describe the future states of particles (so in particular, you can explain the behavior of humans, including their reaction to pain and such, without modeling valence), and the phenomenology can also be described precisely. The framework is dual-aspect monism plus physicalism.
You might still have substantial disagreements with that view, but I as far as I can tell, your posts about neuroscience and even your post on emotional valence are perfectly compatible, except for the one sentence I quoted earlier
the neocortex gets to decide whether or not to classify a situation as “pain”, based on not only nociception but also things like context and valence.)
because it has valence as an input to the neocortex’ decision rather than a property of the output (i.e., if our phenomenology ‘lives’ in the neocortex, then the valence of situation should depend on what the neocortex classifies it as, not vice-versa). And even that could just be using valence to refer to a different thing that’s also real.
Ok, thanks for helping me understand. Hmm. I hypothesize the most fundamental part of why I disagree with them is basically what Eliezer talked about here as “explaining” vs.”explaining away”. I think they’re looking for an explanation, i.e. a thing in the world whose various properties match the properties of consciousness and qualia as they seem to us. I’m much more expecting that there is no thing in the world meeting those criteria. Rather I think that this is a case where our perceptions are not neutrally reporting on things in the world, and thus where “the way things seem to us” is different than the way things are.
Or maybe I just narrowly disagree with QRI’s ideas about rhythms and harmony and so on. Not sure. Whenever I try to read QRI stuff it just kinda strikes me as totally off-base, so I haven’t spent much time with it, beyond skimming a couple articles and watching a talk on Connectome-Specific Harmonic Waves on YouTube a few months ago. I’m happy to have your help here :-)
As for valence, yes I think that valence is in an input to the neocortex subsystem (just as vision is an input), although it’s really the neocortex subsystem observing the activity of other parts of the brain, and incidentally those other parts of the brain also depend in part on what the neocortex is doing and has been doing.
PrincipiaQualia is definitely the thing to read if you want to engage with QRI. It reviews the science and explains the core theory that the research is structured around. I’m not sure if you want to engage with it—I begin from the strong intuition that qualia is real, and so I’m delighted that someone is working on it. My impression is that it makes an excellent case, but my judgment is severely limited since I don’t know the literature. Either way, it doesn’t have a lot of overlap with what you’re working on.
When I wrote here “Thanks but I don’t see the connection between what I wrote and what they wrote”, I did not mean that QRI was talking about a different phenomenon than I was talking about. I meant that their explanation is wildly different than mine. Re-reading the conversation, I think I was misinterpreting the comment I was replying to; I just went back to edit.
Needless to say I disagree with the QRI explanation of valence, but there’s such a chasm between their thoughts and my thoughts that it would be challenging for me to try to write a direct rebuttal.
Again, I do think they’re talking about the same set of phenomena that I’m talking about.
I don’t think there’s anything fundamental in the universe besides electrons, quarks, photons, and so on, following their orderly laws as described by the Standard Model of Particle Physics etc. Therefore it follows that there should be an answer to the question “why do people describe a certain state as pleasant” that involves purely neuroscience / psychology and does not involve the philosophy of consciousness or any new ontologically fundamental entities. After all, “describing a certain state as pleasant” is an observable behavioral output of the brain, so it should have a chain of causation that we can trace within the underlying neural algorithms, which in turn follows from the biochemistry of firing neurons and so on, and ultimately from the laws of physics. So, that’s what I was trying to do in that blog post: Trace a chain of causation from “underlying neural algorithms” to “people describing a state as pleasant”.
After we do that (and I have much more confidence that “a solution exists” than “my particular proposal is the 100% correct solution”) we can ask: is there a further unresolved question of how that exercise we just did (involving purely neuroscience / psychology) relates to consciousness and qualia and whatnot. My answer would be “No. There is nothing left to explain.”, for reasons discussed more at Book Review: Rethinking Consciousness, but I acknowledge that’s a bit counterintuitive and can’t defend it very eloquently, since I haven’t really dived into the philosophical literature.
That makes sense.
Ah, but QRI also thinks that the material world is exhaustively described by the laws of physics. I believe they would give a blanket endorsement to everything in the above paragraph except the first sentence. Their view is not that valence is an additional parameter that your model of physics needs to take into consideration to be accurate. Rather, it’s that the existing laws of physics exhaustively describe the future states of particles (so in particular, you can explain the behavior of humans, including their reaction to pain and such, without modeling valence), and the phenomenology can also be described precisely. The framework is dual-aspect monism plus physicalism.
You might still have substantial disagreements with that view, but I as far as I can tell, your posts about neuroscience and even your post on emotional valence are perfectly compatible, except for the one sentence I quoted earlier
because it has valence as an input to the neocortex’ decision rather than a property of the output (i.e., if our phenomenology ‘lives’ in the neocortex, then the valence of situation should depend on what the neocortex classifies it as, not vice-versa). And even that could just be using valence to refer to a different thing that’s also real.
Ok, thanks for helping me understand. Hmm. I hypothesize the most fundamental part of why I disagree with them is basically what Eliezer talked about here as “explaining” vs.”explaining away”. I think they’re looking for an explanation, i.e. a thing in the world whose various properties match the properties of consciousness and qualia as they seem to us. I’m much more expecting that there is no thing in the world meeting those criteria. Rather I think that this is a case where our perceptions are not neutrally reporting on things in the world, and thus where “the way things seem to us” is different than the way things are.
Or maybe I just narrowly disagree with QRI’s ideas about rhythms and harmony and so on. Not sure. Whenever I try to read QRI stuff it just kinda strikes me as totally off-base, so I haven’t spent much time with it, beyond skimming a couple articles and watching a talk on Connectome-Specific Harmonic Waves on YouTube a few months ago. I’m happy to have your help here :-)
As for valence, yes I think that valence is in an input to the neocortex subsystem (just as vision is an input), although it’s really the neocortex subsystem observing the activity of other parts of the brain, and incidentally those other parts of the brain also depend in part on what the neocortex is doing and has been doing.
PrincipiaQualia is definitely the thing to read if you want to engage with QRI. It reviews the science and explains the core theory that the research is structured around. I’m not sure if you want to engage with it—I begin from the strong intuition that qualia is real, and so I’m delighted that someone is working on it. My impression is that it makes an excellent case, but my judgment is severely limited since I don’t know the literature. Either way, it doesn’t have a lot of overlap with what you’re working on.
There’s also an AI alignment podcast episode.