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.
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.