Some forms of computation / “information processing” apparently “produces” qualia, at least sometimes. (I think this because my brain, apparently, does. It’s notable that my brain is both producing qualia and doing a lot of “information processing” to support “agency”.)
“Information processing” is substrate agnostic: you can implement a computer program with transistors, or vacuum tubes, or mechanical gears and switches, or chemical reaction cascades.
I guess that the “produces qualia” effect of a computation is also substrate independent: there’s nothing special about running an computation on squishy neurons instead of on transistors, with regards to the qualia those computations produce.
As near as I can tell, all physical interactions “are” “computations”, in the senes that the universe is a process that computes the next state, from the current state, using the laws of physics as a transition function.
I don’t know what special features of a program are required to do the “producing qualia” thing.
[Case 1] First of all, the hard problem of consciousness leaves me sympathetic to panpsychism. Maybe there are no special features that distinguish programs that produce quaila from programs that don’t. Maybe every computation produces qualia, and consciousness is a matter of degree. That would make what is confusing about the hard problem much less astonishing.
Under this view, a system of two atoms interacting produces “a tiny amount” (whatever that means) of qualia.
But even putting aside the “all computations produce qualia” possibility, I still don’t know what the distinguishing factor is between the qualia-producing and non-qualia-producing computations.
[Case 2] It seems like maybe reflectivity, or loopiness, or self-representation, or something is necessary? If so, I don’t know that some version of that isn’t happening in any of the subsystems of a plant, some of which are (functionally speaking) modeling the environment (eg the immune system for instance). Thinking about it, now, I would guess that there’s not meaningful self-representation in almost any plants, but I wouldn’t rule it out.
[Case 3] But more importantly, I just don’t know what features a computation needs to have to produce qualia. I have super-wide error bars here, given that, I don’t know that none of the plant sub-systems are qualia producing.
(Oh. I’d assign a similar probability to my own immune system being a separate qualia-producing system from my nervous system (ie me).)
I think it would help if we taboo consciousness and instead talk about existence (“the hard problem”/”first-person-ness”/”camp #2“, maybe also “realityfluid”) and awareness (“the easy problem”/”conscious-of-what”/”camp #1”, maybe also “algorithm”). I agree with much of your reasoning, though I think the case that can be made for most cells having microqualia awareness seems very strong to me; whether there are larger integrated bubbles of awareness seems more suspect.
Edit: someone strong upvoted, then someone else strong downvoted. Votes are not very helpful; can you elaborate in a sentence or two or use phrase reacts?
Assigning 5% to plants having qualia seems to me to be misguides/likely due to invalid reasoning. (Say more?)
I don’t think there’s that much to say.
Some forms of computation / “information processing” apparently “produces” qualia, at least sometimes. (I think this because my brain, apparently, does. It’s notable that my brain is both producing qualia and doing a lot of “information processing” to support “agency”.)
“Information processing” is substrate agnostic: you can implement a computer program with transistors, or vacuum tubes, or mechanical gears and switches, or chemical reaction cascades.
I guess that the “produces qualia” effect of a computation is also substrate independent: there’s nothing special about running an computation on squishy neurons instead of on transistors, with regards to the qualia those computations produce.
As near as I can tell, all physical interactions “are” “computations”, in the senes that the universe is a process that computes the next state, from the current state, using the laws of physics as a transition function.
I don’t know what special features of a program are required to do the “producing qualia” thing.
[Case 1] First of all, the hard problem of consciousness leaves me sympathetic to panpsychism. Maybe there are no special features that distinguish programs that produce quaila from programs that don’t. Maybe every computation produces qualia, and consciousness is a matter of degree. That would make what is confusing about the hard problem much less astonishing.
Under this view, a system of two atoms interacting produces “a tiny amount” (whatever that means) of qualia.
But even putting aside the “all computations produce qualia” possibility, I still don’t know what the distinguishing factor is between the qualia-producing and non-qualia-producing computations.
[Case 2] It seems like maybe reflectivity, or loopiness, or self-representation, or something is necessary? If so, I don’t know that some version of that isn’t happening in any of the subsystems of a plant, some of which are (functionally speaking) modeling the environment (eg the immune system for instance). Thinking about it, now, I would guess that there’s not meaningful self-representation in almost any plants, but I wouldn’t rule it out.
[Case 3] But more importantly, I just don’t know what features a computation needs to have to produce qualia. I have super-wide error bars here, given that, I don’t know that none of the plant sub-systems are qualia producing.
(Oh. I’d assign a similar probability to my own immune system being a separate qualia-producing system from my nervous system (ie me).)
I think it would help if we taboo consciousness and instead talk about existence (“the hard problem”/”first-person-ness”/”camp #2“, maybe also “realityfluid”) and awareness (“the easy problem”/”conscious-of-what”/”camp #1”, maybe also “algorithm”). I agree with much of your reasoning, though I think the case that can be made for most cells having microqualia awareness seems very strong to me; whether there are larger integrated bubbles of awareness seems more suspect.
Edit: someone strong upvoted, then someone else strong downvoted. Votes are not very helpful; can you elaborate in a sentence or two or use phrase reacts?
Have you read the zombie and reductionism parts of the Sequences?
Yep.