So the theory purporting to actually solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness needs to shed some light onto the nature and the structure of the space of qualia, in order to be a viable contender from my personal viewpoint
I get “the nature” part, but why the structure is a part of the Hard Problem? It sure would be nice to have more advanced neuroscience, but we already have working theories about structure and can make you see blue instead of red. So it’s not a square zero situation.
Because qualia are related to each other. We want to understand that relation at least to some extent(otherwise it is unlikely that we’ll understand what they are reasonably well). Our subjective reality is made out of them, but their interrelations probably do matter a lot.
can make you see blue instead of red
But this example is about relationship between physical stimuli and qualia (in this particular instance, “red” is a not a quale, only “blue” is a quale (and “red” is a physical stimulus which would result in a red quale under different conditions).
But yes, we do understand quite a bit about color qualia (e.g. we understand that we can structure them in a three-dimensional space if we want to do so based on how mixed colors are perceived in various psychophysical experiments (so that’s a parametrization of them by a subset of physical stimuli), or we can consider them independent and consider an infinite-dimensional space generated by them as atomic primitives, and it’s not all that clear which of these ways is more adequate for the purpose of describing the structure of subjective experience (which seems to be likely to be much older historically than humanity experience with deliberately mixing the colors)).
Quoting my old write-up:
what is the dimension of the space of subjective
colors? This depends quite a bit on whether a particular person wants to state that brown is
a kind of dark orange (then one is probably heading towards three-dimensional space of
subjective colors), or if, contrary to that, one wants to state that brown is a very particular sensation,
quite independent from orange (then one is probably heading towards a high-dimensional or,
perhaps, even infinitely-dimensional space of subjective colors).
However, if one fancies to choose the infinitely-dimensional space, some colors are still similar to each other, they do change gradually, there is still a non-trivial metric between them, this space is not well-understood...
But when I say “we are at square zero”, “color qualia” are not just “abstract colors”, but “subjectively perceived colors”, and we just don’t understand what this means… Like, at all… We do understand quite a bit about the “physical colors ⇒ neural processing” chain, but that chain is as “subjectively colorless” as any theoretical model, as “subjectively colorless” as words “red” and “blue” in this text (in my perception at the moment)...
I do hope we’ll start making progress in this direction sooner rather than later...
I get “the nature” part, but why the structure is a part of the Hard Problem? It sure would be nice to have more advanced neuroscience, but we already have working theories about structure and can make you see blue instead of red. So it’s not a square zero situation.
Because qualia are related to each other. We want to understand that relation at least to some extent(otherwise it is unlikely that we’ll understand what they are reasonably well). Our subjective reality is made out of them, but their interrelations probably do matter a lot.
But this example is about relationship between physical stimuli and qualia (in this particular instance, “red” is a not a quale, only “blue” is a quale (and “red” is a physical stimulus which would result in a red quale under different conditions).
But yes, we do understand quite a bit about color qualia (e.g. we understand that we can structure them in a three-dimensional space if we want to do so based on how mixed colors are perceived in various psychophysical experiments (so that’s a parametrization of them by a subset of physical stimuli), or we can consider them independent and consider an infinite-dimensional space generated by them as atomic primitives, and it’s not all that clear which of these ways is more adequate for the purpose of describing the structure of subjective experience (which seems to be likely to be much older historically than humanity experience with deliberately mixing the colors)).
Quoting my old write-up:
However, if one fancies to choose the infinitely-dimensional space, some colors are still similar to each other, they do change gradually, there is still a non-trivial metric between them, this space is not well-understood...
But when I say “we are at square zero”, “color qualia” are not just “abstract colors”, but “subjectively perceived colors”, and we just don’t understand what this means… Like, at all… We do understand quite a bit about the “physical colors ⇒ neural processing” chain, but that chain is as “subjectively colorless” as any theoretical model, as “subjectively colorless” as words “red” and “blue” in this text (in my perception at the moment)...
I do hope we’ll start making progress in this direction sooner rather than later...