Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications.
I also wonder whether Deep Blue could be said to possess chess qualia of a type which are similarly inaccessible to us. When we play chess we are somewhat in the position of the man in Searle’s Chinese Room who simulates a Chinese woman. We simulate Deep Blue when we play chess, and our lack of access to any chess qualia no more disproves their existence than the failure of Searle’s man to understand Chinese.
Do you think it will ever be possible to say whether chess qualia exist, and what they are like? Will we ever understand what it is like to be a bat?
Do you think it will ever be possible to say whether chess qualia exist, and what they are like? Will we ever understand what it is like to be a bat?
Being a bat shouldn’t be incomprehensible (and in fact Nagel makes some progress in his essay). You still have a body and a sensorium, they’re just different. Getting your sense of space by yelling at the world and listening to the echoes—it’s weird, but it’s not beyond imagining. The absence of higher cognition might be the hardest thing for a human to relate to, but everyone has experienced some form of mindless behavior in themselves, dominated by sensation, emotion, and physical activity. You just have to imagine being like that all the time.
Being a quantum holist[*] and all that, when it comes to consciousness, I don’t believe in qualia for Deep Blue because I don’t think consciousness arises in that way. If it’s like something to be a rock, then maybe the separate little islands of silicon and metal making up Deep Blue’s processors still had that. But I’m agnostic regarding how to speak about the being of the very simplest things, and whether it should be regarded as lying on a continuum with the being of conscious beings.
Anyway, I answer both your questions yes, and I think other people may as well be optimistic too, even if they have a different theoretical approach. We should expect that it will all make sense one day.
[*] ETA: What I mean by this is the hypothesis that quantum entanglement creates local wholes, that these are the fundamental entities in nature, and that the individual consciousness inhabits a big one of these. So it’s a brain-as-quantum-computer hypothesis, with an ontological twist thrown in.
Thomas Nagel’s classic essay What is it like to be a bat? raises the question of a bat’s qualia:
I also wonder whether Deep Blue could be said to possess chess qualia of a type which are similarly inaccessible to us. When we play chess we are somewhat in the position of the man in Searle’s Chinese Room who simulates a Chinese woman. We simulate Deep Blue when we play chess, and our lack of access to any chess qualia no more disproves their existence than the failure of Searle’s man to understand Chinese.
Do you think it will ever be possible to say whether chess qualia exist, and what they are like? Will we ever understand what it is like to be a bat?
Being a bat shouldn’t be incomprehensible (and in fact Nagel makes some progress in his essay). You still have a body and a sensorium, they’re just different. Getting your sense of space by yelling at the world and listening to the echoes—it’s weird, but it’s not beyond imagining. The absence of higher cognition might be the hardest thing for a human to relate to, but everyone has experienced some form of mindless behavior in themselves, dominated by sensation, emotion, and physical activity. You just have to imagine being like that all the time.
Being a quantum holist[*] and all that, when it comes to consciousness, I don’t believe in qualia for Deep Blue because I don’t think consciousness arises in that way. If it’s like something to be a rock, then maybe the separate little islands of silicon and metal making up Deep Blue’s processors still had that. But I’m agnostic regarding how to speak about the being of the very simplest things, and whether it should be regarded as lying on a continuum with the being of conscious beings.
Anyway, I answer both your questions yes, and I think other people may as well be optimistic too, even if they have a different theoretical approach. We should expect that it will all make sense one day.
[*] ETA: What I mean by this is the hypothesis that quantum entanglement creates local wholes, that these are the fundamental entities in nature, and that the individual consciousness inhabits a big one of these. So it’s a brain-as-quantum-computer hypothesis, with an ontological twist thrown in.