Qualia (IMO) certainly is “information processing”: there are inputs and outputs. And it is a part of a larger information-processing thing, the brain. What I’m saying is that there’s information processing happening outside of the qualia circuits, and some of the results of the information processing outside of the qualia circuits are inputs to our qualia.
I think it’s likely that even simple “RL algorithms” might have a very limited, very shallow, non-self-aware kinds of experience: an image-classifier is doing visual-information-processing, so it probably also produces isolated “experiences of vision”
Well, how do you know that visual information processing produces qualia? You can match when algorithms implemented by other humans’ brains to algorithms implemented by your brain, because all of you talk about subjective experience; how do you, inside your neural circuitry, make an inference that a similar thing happens in neurons that just process visual information?
You know you have subjective experience, self-evidently. You can match the computation run by the neural circuitry of your brain to the computation run by the neural circuitry of other humans: because since they talk about subjective experience, you can expect this to be caused by similar computation. This is valid. Thinking that visual information processing is part of what makes qualia (i.e., there’s no way to replace a bunch of your neurons with something that outputs the same stuff without first seeing and processing something, such that you’ll experience seeing as before) is something you can make theories about but is not a valid inference, you don’t have a way of matching the computation of qualia to the whole of your brain.
And, how can you match it to matrix multiplications that don’t talk about qualia, did not have evolutionary reasons for experience, etc.? Do you think an untrained or a small convolutional neural network experiences images to some extent, or only large and trained? Where does that expectation come from?
I’m not saying that qualia is solved. We don’t yet know how to build it, and we can’t yet scan brains and say which circuits implement it. But some people seem more confused than warranted, and they spend resources less effectively than they could’ve.
And I’m not equating qualia to self-model. Qualia is just the experience of information. It doesn’t required a self-model, also on Earth, so far, I expect these things to have been correlated.
If there’s suffering and experience of extreme pain, in my opinion, it matters even if there isn’t reflectivity.
You know you have subjective experience, self-evidently. You can match the computation run by the neural circuitry of your brain to the computation run by the neural circuitry of other humans: because since they talk about subjective experience, you can expect this to be caused by similar computation.
Similarity is subjective. There is no fundamental reason that the ethical threshold must be on the level of similarity between humans and not on level of similarity between humans and shrimps.
I appreciate this comment.
Qualia (IMO) certainly is “information processing”: there are inputs and outputs. And it is a part of a larger information-processing thing, the brain. What I’m saying is that there’s information processing happening outside of the qualia circuits, and some of the results of the information processing outside of the qualia circuits are inputs to our qualia.
Well, how do you know that visual information processing produces qualia? You can match when algorithms implemented by other humans’ brains to algorithms implemented by your brain, because all of you talk about subjective experience; how do you, inside your neural circuitry, make an inference that a similar thing happens in neurons that just process visual information?
You know you have subjective experience, self-evidently. You can match the computation run by the neural circuitry of your brain to the computation run by the neural circuitry of other humans: because since they talk about subjective experience, you can expect this to be caused by similar computation. This is valid. Thinking that visual information processing is part of what makes qualia (i.e., there’s no way to replace a bunch of your neurons with something that outputs the same stuff without first seeing and processing something, such that you’ll experience seeing as before) is something you can make theories about but is not a valid inference, you don’t have a way of matching the computation of qualia to the whole of your brain.
And, how can you match it to matrix multiplications that don’t talk about qualia, did not have evolutionary reasons for experience, etc.? Do you think an untrained or a small convolutional neural network experiences images to some extent, or only large and trained? Where does that expectation come from?
I’m not saying that qualia is solved. We don’t yet know how to build it, and we can’t yet scan brains and say which circuits implement it. But some people seem more confused than warranted, and they spend resources less effectively than they could’ve.
And I’m not equating qualia to self-model. Qualia is just the experience of information. It doesn’t required a self-model, also on Earth, so far, I expect these things to have been correlated.
If there’s suffering and experience of extreme pain, in my opinion, it matters even if there isn’t reflectivity.
Similarity is subjective. There is no fundamental reason that the ethical threshold must be on the level of similarity between humans and not on level of similarity between humans and shrimps.