I don’t seem to experience qualia as all-or-nothing. I doubt that you do either. I don’t see a problem with the amount of qualia experienced being a real number between 0 and 1 in response to varying stimuli of pain or redness.
Therefore I don’t see a problem with qualia being measurable on a similar scale across different informational processes with more or fewer neurons or other computing elements involved in the structure that generates them.
I don’t know. But I don’t think so, not in the sense that it would feel like a different kind of experience. More or less intense, more definite or more ambiguous perhaps. And of course there could always be differences too small to be noticeable.
As a wild guess based on no evidence, I suppose that different kinds of qualia have different functions (in the sense of uses, not mathematical mappings) in a consciousness, and equivalent functions can be performed by different structures and processes.
I am aware of qualia (or they wouldn’t be qualia), but I am not aware of the mechanism by which they are generated, so I have no reason to believe that mechanism could not be implemented differently and still have the same outputs, and feel the same to me.
I have just expanded on the argument that any mapping between “physics” and “phenomenology” must fundamentally be an exact one. This does not mean that a proposed mapping, that would be inexact by microphysical standards, is necessarily false, it just means that it is necessarily incomplete.
The argument for exactness still goes through even if you allow for gradations of experience. For any individual gradation, it’s still true that it is what it is, and that’s enough to imply that the fundamental mapping must be exact, because the alternative would lead to incoherent statements like “an exact physical configuration has a state of consciousness associated with it, but not a particular state of consciousness”.
The requirement that any “law” of psychophysical correspondence must be microphysically exact in its complete form, including for physical configurations that we would otherwise regard as edge cases, is problematic for conventional functionalism, precisely because conventional functionalism adopts the practical rough-and-ready philosophy used by circuit designers. Circuit designers don’t care if states intermediate between “definitely 0″ and “definitely 1” are really 0, 1, or neither; they just want to make sure that these states don’t show up during the operation of their machine, because functionally they are unpredictable, that’s why their semantics would be unclear.
Scientists and ontologists of consciousness have no such option, because the principle of ontological non-vagueness (mentioned in the other comment) applies to consciousness. Consciousness objectively exists, it’s not just a useful heuristic concept, and so any theory of how it relates to physics must admit of a similarly objective completion; and that means there must be a specific answer to the question, exactly what state(s) of consciousness, if any, are present in this physical configuration… there must be a specific answer to that question for every possible physical configuration.
But the usual attitude of functionalists is that they can be fuzzy about microscopic details; that there is no need, not even in principle, for their ideas to possess a microphysically exact completion.
In these monad theories that I push, the “Cartesian theater”, where consciousness comes together into a unitary experience, is defined by a set of exact microphysical properties, e.g. a set of topological quantum numbers (a somewhat arbitrary example, but I need to give an example). For a theory like that, the principle associating physical and phenomenological states could be both functional and exact, but that’s not the sort of theory that today’s functionalists are discussing.
The idea, more or less, is that there is a big ball of quantum entanglement somewhere in the brain, and that’s the locus of consciousness. It might involve phonons in the microfilaments, anyons in the microtubules, both or neither of these; it’s presumably tissue-specific, involving particular cell types where the relevant structures are optimized for this role; and it must be causally relevant for conscious cognition, which should do something to pin down its anatomical location.
You could say that one major prediction is just that there will be such a thing as respectable quantum neurobiology and cognitive quantum neuroscience. From a quantum-physical and condensed-matter perspective, biomolecules and cells are highly nontrivial objects. By now “quantum biology” has a long history, and it’s a topic that is beloved of thinkers who are, shall we say, more poetic than scientific, but we’re still at the very beginning of that subject.
We basically know nothing about the dynamics of quantum coherence and decoherence in living matter. It’s not something that’s easily measured, and the handful of models that have been employed in order to calculate this dynamics are “spherical cow” models; they’re radically oversimplified for the sake of calculability, and just a first step into the unknown.
What I write on this subject is speculative, and it’s idiosyncratic even when compared to “well-known” forms of quantum-mind discourse. I am more interested in establishing the possibility of a very alternative view, and also in highlighting implausibilities of the conventional view that go unnoticed, or which are tolerated because the conventional picture of the brain appears to require them.
Why?
I don’t seem to experience qualia as all-or-nothing. I doubt that you do either. I don’t see a problem with the amount of qualia experienced being a real number between 0 and 1 in response to varying stimuli of pain or redness.
Therefore I don’t see a problem with qualia being measurable on a similar scale across different informational processes with more or fewer neurons or other computing elements involved in the structure that generates them.
Do you think that there is a slightly different quale for each difference in the physical state, no matter how minute that physical difference is?
I don’t know. But I don’t think so, not in the sense that it would feel like a different kind of experience. More or less intense, more definite or more ambiguous perhaps. And of course there could always be differences too small to be noticeable.
As a wild guess based on no evidence, I suppose that different kinds of qualia have different functions (in the sense of uses, not mathematical mappings) in a consciousness, and equivalent functions can be performed by different structures and processes.
I am aware of qualia (or they wouldn’t be qualia), but I am not aware of the mechanism by which they are generated, so I have no reason to believe that mechanism could not be implemented differently and still have the same outputs, and feel the same to me.
I have just expanded on the argument that any mapping between “physics” and “phenomenology” must fundamentally be an exact one. This does not mean that a proposed mapping, that would be inexact by microphysical standards, is necessarily false, it just means that it is necessarily incomplete.
The argument for exactness still goes through even if you allow for gradations of experience. For any individual gradation, it’s still true that it is what it is, and that’s enough to imply that the fundamental mapping must be exact, because the alternative would lead to incoherent statements like “an exact physical configuration has a state of consciousness associated with it, but not a particular state of consciousness”.
The requirement that any “law” of psychophysical correspondence must be microphysically exact in its complete form, including for physical configurations that we would otherwise regard as edge cases, is problematic for conventional functionalism, precisely because conventional functionalism adopts the practical rough-and-ready philosophy used by circuit designers. Circuit designers don’t care if states intermediate between “definitely 0″ and “definitely 1” are really 0, 1, or neither; they just want to make sure that these states don’t show up during the operation of their machine, because functionally they are unpredictable, that’s why their semantics would be unclear.
Scientists and ontologists of consciousness have no such option, because the principle of ontological non-vagueness (mentioned in the other comment) applies to consciousness. Consciousness objectively exists, it’s not just a useful heuristic concept, and so any theory of how it relates to physics must admit of a similarly objective completion; and that means there must be a specific answer to the question, exactly what state(s) of consciousness, if any, are present in this physical configuration… there must be a specific answer to that question for every possible physical configuration.
But the usual attitude of functionalists is that they can be fuzzy about microscopic details; that there is no need, not even in principle, for their ideas to possess a microphysically exact completion.
In these monad theories that I push, the “Cartesian theater”, where consciousness comes together into a unitary experience, is defined by a set of exact microphysical properties, e.g. a set of topological quantum numbers (a somewhat arbitrary example, but I need to give an example). For a theory like that, the principle associating physical and phenomenological states could be both functional and exact, but that’s not the sort of theory that today’s functionalists are discussing.
What predictions does your theory make?
The idea, more or less, is that there is a big ball of quantum entanglement somewhere in the brain, and that’s the locus of consciousness. It might involve phonons in the microfilaments, anyons in the microtubules, both or neither of these; it’s presumably tissue-specific, involving particular cell types where the relevant structures are optimized for this role; and it must be causally relevant for conscious cognition, which should do something to pin down its anatomical location.
You could say that one major prediction is just that there will be such a thing as respectable quantum neurobiology and cognitive quantum neuroscience. From a quantum-physical and condensed-matter perspective, biomolecules and cells are highly nontrivial objects. By now “quantum biology” has a long history, and it’s a topic that is beloved of thinkers who are, shall we say, more poetic than scientific, but we’re still at the very beginning of that subject.
We basically know nothing about the dynamics of quantum coherence and decoherence in living matter. It’s not something that’s easily measured, and the handful of models that have been employed in order to calculate this dynamics are “spherical cow” models; they’re radically oversimplified for the sake of calculability, and just a first step into the unknown.
What I write on this subject is speculative, and it’s idiosyncratic even when compared to “well-known” forms of quantum-mind discourse. I am more interested in establishing the possibility of a very alternative view, and also in highlighting implausibilities of the conventional view that go unnoticed, or which are tolerated because the conventional picture of the brain appears to require them.