What is it that you feel/see/touch/taste/think/etc. instead of simply acting? Why is there a “you” you experience, instead of mere rote action? We label these sorts of things that we use to distinguish between empty existence and our own subjective (personally observed/felt) experience. The thing about humans that distinguish them from P-zombies.
What is it that you feel/see/touch/taste/think/etc. instead of simply acting?
Why do you group together sense perceptions (which I have) with thoughts (which I have), and call them qualia (which I don’t have)?
Why is there a “you” you experience, instead of mere rote action?
How are these different?
We label these sorts of things that we use to distinguish between empty existence and our own subjective (personally observed/felt) experience.
How can existence be “empty”? Is subjective experience just sense perception? Because sense perception doesn’t seem like it warrants all this mysteriousness.
The thing about humans that distinguish them from P-zombies.
That’s odd. I thought the sequence on P-zombies made it pretty clear that they don’t exist. Why do we need to be distinguished from confused, impossible thought experiments?
Perhaps you simply do not have qualia or subjective experience. Some people do not have visual mental imagery, strange though that may seem to those of us who do. Similarly, maybe some people do not have anything they are moved to describe as subjective experience. Such people, if they exist, are the opposite of the logically absurd p-zombies. P-zombies falsely claim that they do have these things; people without them truthfully claim that they do not.
You might just be Socratically role-playing, but even so, there may be other people who actually do not have these things. That is, they would express puzzlement at talk about “the redness of red”, “awareness of one’s own self”, and so forth (and without having been tutored into such puzzlement by philosophers arguing that they cannot be experiencing what in fact they do experience).
Is there anyone here who does experience that puzzlement, even before knowing anything of the philosophical controversy around the subject?
To the best of my knowledge — which isn’t saying much: I’m not well-read in philosophy — I am in a minority of one on the subject of free will.
The discussion is always: do we have it, or don’t we?
My considered view is that some of us have it while the rest don’t. Like perfect pitch.
I’m pretty sure I don’t have free will; but I’ve encountered people who I’m pretty sure do have it.
I see that as a cheap way out, I think “do I have free will ?” is just a confused question whose answer depends of the way you unconfuse it. I’m just in the minority of humans who refuses to answer that confused question—I’d like to say I refuse to answer all confused questions, but that’s probably not true.
Still, it is possible that confusion and disagreement about “qualia” and “free will” are just due to differences in personal experience, not to different interpretation of those labels.
People who lack visual mental imagery have atypical performance on certain kinds of cognitive tests, as Yvain’s article describes, and if I believed that such people existed, I would expect that testable difference. What type of test should I expect to distinguish between those who have qualia and those who do not?
But you’d have to use naive subjects who haven’t philosophised themselves into ignoring their own experience.
A little more indirectly, people without qualia would profess puzzlement at the very idea, and argue that there is no such thing. If they are philosophers, they will write articles on the incoherence of the concept. If they are psychologists, they will practice psychology on the basis that mental phenomena do not exist. If they are teachers, they will see the brain as a pot to be filled, not the mind as a fire to be ignited. Those who do have qualia will be as tenacious on the other side.
Nothing that those who do have qualia say about qualia will make sense to those who don’t, and those who don’t will have no difficulty in demonstrating that it is nonsense. Those who do have qualia will be unable to explain them even to each other, since they know no more about what they are than they know about how thought happens. All of their supposed explanations will only be disguised descriptions of what it feels like to have them.
The most direct test would be this: “Do you have qualia?”
How is that direct? First you’d have to explain what you mean by that, and “understanding” such an explanation would pretty much require convincing oneself that there are such things to be had in the first place.
There are some things you can test by asking; I can imagine asking someone, “do you ever get a twisty kind of feeling in your stomach or nearby, when you’ve just had something very bad happen to you and it slipped your mind for a while but then it intrudes again on your awareness—and the twisty feeling comes precisely at that moment”.
That’s a feeling. It’s describable. I have it sometimes. It’s an empirical matter whether other people recognize an experience of theirs in that description, or not. It’s much like pointing to a red thing and asking people “is this red”, and then they confirm that it’s red to them.
The most direct test would be this: “Do you have qualia?”
How is that direct? First you’d have to explain what you mean by that, and “understanding” such an explanation would pretty much require convincing oneself that there are such things to be had in the first place.
It does. If psychologists came out with a study that 1 out of 10 people don’t experience qualia, I would feel rather certain that I was one of those out of 10 that don’t experience it. Just like WrongBot, I think. However, my actual expectation is that we are all the same at that level of brain organization, and wonder what aspect of my experience people are labeling ‘qualia’.
Seeing red doesn’t mean seeing something with a little XML “red” tag attached,
Actually, this is exactly what I hypothesized qualia were: little reference tags of meaning that we attach to things we recognize.
When using an entirely new medium, I feel like I experience the creation of new qualia. For example, here on Less Wrong, each comment has a username. After some experience on Less Wrong, it feels like the username is different from (and more than) a set of green underlined letters in bold font at the upper right hand corner that tells you the person who wrote the comment—it’s like a separate object that means the source of the comment, and as soon as it has that extra meaning, it gains this elusive quale-like aspect.
However, my actual expectation is that we are all the same at that level of brain organization
I have an opposite hunch: that the further removed any part of our internal constitution is from the world outside our skins, the more we vary.
My reason is that there are many ways of doing the right thing to survive and reproduce. The genome isn’t big enough to contain a blueprint for a whole brain, so evolution has come up with a general mechanism (which no-one actually knows anything about yet) for the whole thing to organise itself when the newborn is dropped into an unknown environment. The organisation an individual brain ends up with is constrained by nothing more than the requirement to make the organism function in that environment.
Look around you at the variation in people’s personalities. They’re even more different inside their heads than that.
What is it that you feel/see/touch/taste/think/etc. instead of simply acting? Why is there a “you” you experience, instead of mere rote action? We label these sorts of things that we use to distinguish between empty existence and our own subjective (personally observed/felt) experience. The thing about humans that distinguish them from P-zombies.
Why do you group together sense perceptions (which I have) with thoughts (which I have), and call them qualia (which I don’t have)?
How are these different?
How can existence be “empty”? Is subjective experience just sense perception? Because sense perception doesn’t seem like it warrants all this mysteriousness.
That’s odd. I thought the sequence on P-zombies made it pretty clear that they don’t exist. Why do we need to be distinguished from confused, impossible thought experiments?
Perhaps you simply do not have qualia or subjective experience. Some people do not have visual mental imagery, strange though that may seem to those of us who do. Similarly, maybe some people do not have anything they are moved to describe as subjective experience. Such people, if they exist, are the opposite of the logically absurd p-zombies. P-zombies falsely claim that they do have these things; people without them truthfully claim that they do not.
You might just be Socratically role-playing, but even so, there may be other people who actually do not have these things. That is, they would express puzzlement at talk about “the redness of red”, “awareness of one’s own self”, and so forth (and without having been tutored into such puzzlement by philosophers arguing that they cannot be experiencing what in fact they do experience).
Is there anyone here who does experience that puzzlement, even before knowing anything of the philosophical controversy around the subject?
There is this example:
I see that as a cheap way out, I think “do I have free will ?” is just a confused question whose answer depends of the way you unconfuse it. I’m just in the minority of humans who refuses to answer that confused question—I’d like to say I refuse to answer all confused questions, but that’s probably not true.
Still, it is possible that confusion and disagreement about “qualia” and “free will” are just due to differences in personal experience, not to different interpretation of those labels.
People who lack visual mental imagery have atypical performance on certain kinds of cognitive tests, as Yvain’s article describes, and if I believed that such people existed, I would expect that testable difference. What type of test should I expect to distinguish between those who have qualia and those who do not?
The most direct test would be this:
“Do you have qualia?”
Yes
No
But you’d have to use naive subjects who haven’t philosophised themselves into ignoring their own experience.
A little more indirectly, people without qualia would profess puzzlement at the very idea, and argue that there is no such thing. If they are philosophers, they will write articles on the incoherence of the concept. If they are psychologists, they will practice psychology on the basis that mental phenomena do not exist. If they are teachers, they will see the brain as a pot to be filled, not the mind as a fire to be ignited. Those who do have qualia will be as tenacious on the other side.
Nothing that those who do have qualia say about qualia will make sense to those who don’t, and those who don’t will have no difficulty in demonstrating that it is nonsense. Those who do have qualia will be unable to explain them even to each other, since they know no more about what they are than they know about how thought happens. All of their supposed explanations will only be disguised descriptions of what it feels like to have them.
Looks pretty much like our world, doesn’t it?
How is that direct? First you’d have to explain what you mean by that, and “understanding” such an explanation would pretty much require convincing oneself that there are such things to be had in the first place.
There are some things you can test by asking; I can imagine asking someone, “do you ever get a twisty kind of feeling in your stomach or nearby, when you’ve just had something very bad happen to you and it slipped your mind for a while but then it intrudes again on your awareness—and the twisty feeling comes precisely at that moment”.
That’s a feeling. It’s describable. I have it sometimes. It’s an empirical matter whether other people recognize an experience of theirs in that description, or not. It’s much like pointing to a red thing and asking people “is this red”, and then they confirm that it’s red to them.
How are “qualia” different?
Failing to understand would amount to a “No”.
It does. If psychologists came out with a study that 1 out of 10 people don’t experience qualia, I would feel rather certain that I was one of those out of 10 that don’t experience it. Just like WrongBot, I think. However, my actual expectation is that we are all the same at that level of brain organization, and wonder what aspect of my experience people are labeling ‘qualia’.
Above, Orthonormal wrote,
Actually, this is exactly what I hypothesized qualia were: little reference tags of meaning that we attach to things we recognize.
When using an entirely new medium, I feel like I experience the creation of new qualia. For example, here on Less Wrong, each comment has a username. After some experience on Less Wrong, it feels like the username is different from (and more than) a set of green underlined letters in bold font at the upper right hand corner that tells you the person who wrote the comment—it’s like a separate object that means the source of the comment, and as soon as it has that extra meaning, it gains this elusive quale-like aspect.
I have an opposite hunch: that the further removed any part of our internal constitution is from the world outside our skins, the more we vary.
My reason is that there are many ways of doing the right thing to survive and reproduce. The genome isn’t big enough to contain a blueprint for a whole brain, so evolution has come up with a general mechanism (which no-one actually knows anything about yet) for the whole thing to organise itself when the newborn is dropped into an unknown environment. The organisation an individual brain ends up with is constrained by nothing more than the requirement to make the organism function in that environment.
Look around you at the variation in people’s personalities. They’re even more different inside their heads than that.