As a physicalist, if I’m going to take subjective experience seriously as anything other than what some algorithms (or minds) like to talk about, then it’s reasonable to suppose that the physical substrate matters.
In a way that produces no distinguishable physical effect?
You seem to be hypothesizing the existence of an invisible dragon. Why? Explain to me how you came to select this hypothesis, out of all similarly complex possible hypotheses.
Like, for example, let’s say you grab a philosopher out of the past who insists that women don’t have men’s reasoning power because, you know, they’re not men, and that surely must be some physical reason why this is so!
Wouldn’t you want to know why he hypothesizes this? What his evidence is? Why he insists that, even if a woman were—hypothetically speaking, in his view—to make the same statements or draw the same conclusions as a man, from the same inputs as a man… then somehow, she still wouldn’t “really” be reasoning like a man, because she has female “qualia” instead of male “qualia”?
Pretty soon, you’d have to come to the conclusion that he’s arguing from the bottom line: trying to provide argumentative support for a conclusion he already had before he started, rather than simply investigating what truth there was to be found.
(Especially if he has nothing in the way of physical evidence for the existence of these “qualia” things… but appears to have just seized on them as a way to justify the already-existing intuitions.)
In a way that produces no distinguishable physical effect?
You seem to be hypothesizing the existence of an invisible dragon. Why? Explain to me how you came to select this hypothesis, out of all similarly complex possible hypotheses.
Like, for example, let’s say you grab a philosopher out of the past who insists that women don’t have men’s reasoning power because, you know, they’re not men, and that surely must be some physical reason why this is so!
Wouldn’t you want to know why he hypothesizes this? What his evidence is? Why he insists that, even if a woman were—hypothetically speaking, in his view—to make the same statements or draw the same conclusions as a man, from the same inputs as a man… then somehow, she still wouldn’t “really” be reasoning like a man, because she has female “qualia” instead of male “qualia”?
Pretty soon, you’d have to come to the conclusion that he’s arguing from the bottom line: trying to provide argumentative support for a conclusion he already had before he started, rather than simply investigating what truth there was to be found.
(Especially if he has nothing in the way of physical evidence for the existence of these “qualia” things… but appears to have just seized on them as a way to justify the already-existing intuitions.)
Whatever. How about the arguments of qualiaphiles who don’t think simulations will necessarily lack qualia?