That is, qualia—the universalised experience of ‘redness’, of fundamental experience, or what-have-you—is a category which we dump neural firing patterns into. At the level of patterns in the brain physiology, there are only patterns, and some patterns are isomorphic to each other—that is, a slightly different pattern in a slightly different architecture nevertheless builds up to the same higher-level result.
It is a figment of your imagination because that’s an easy shortcut that our brains take. In attempting to communicate ideas—to cause isomorphic patterns to arise in the other’s brain—our brains may tend to create a common cause, an abstract concept that both patterns are derived from. There isn’t any such platonic concept! There’s just the neural firing in my head (completely simulable on a computer, no human brain needed) and the neural firing in your head (also completely simulable, no brain needed). There’s nothing that, in essence, requires a human brain involved in doing the simulating, at any point.
Hmm. Qualia’s come up a few times on LessWrong, and it seems like a nonzero portion of the comments accept it. I’ll have to go through the literature on qualia to build a more thorough case against it. Look forward to a “No Qualia” post sometime soon edit: including baseless speculation on why talking about it is so confusing! - unless, in going through the literature, I change my mind about whether qualia exist.
I mean #2 precisely.
That is, qualia—the universalised experience of ‘redness’, of fundamental experience, or what-have-you—is a category which we dump neural firing patterns into. At the level of patterns in the brain physiology, there are only patterns, and some patterns are isomorphic to each other—that is, a slightly different pattern in a slightly different architecture nevertheless builds up to the same higher-level result.
It is a figment of your imagination because that’s an easy shortcut that our brains take. In attempting to communicate ideas—to cause isomorphic patterns to arise in the other’s brain—our brains may tend to create a common cause, an abstract concept that both patterns are derived from. There isn’t any such platonic concept! There’s just the neural firing in my head (completely simulable on a computer, no human brain needed) and the neural firing in your head (also completely simulable, no brain needed). There’s nothing that, in essence, requires a human brain involved in doing the simulating, at any point.
Hmm. Qualia’s come up a few times on LessWrong, and it seems like a nonzero portion of the comments accept it. I’ll have to go through the literature on qualia to build a more thorough case against it. Look forward to a “No Qualia” post sometime soon edit: including baseless speculation on why talking about it is so confusing! - unless, in going through the literature, I change my mind about whether qualia exist.