It has always seemed to me that qualia exist, and that they can fully be explained by reductionism and physicalism
Can you point me to such an explanation??
Juno_Watt
Karma: 30
Reductionism says there is some thing existing X which is composed of, undestandable in terms of, and ultimately identical to some other existing thing Y. ELiminativism says X doesn’t exist. Heat has been reduced, phlogiston has been eliminated.
I agree with most of this, although I am not sure that the way strawberries taste to me is a posit.
If a change to the way your funcitonality is implemented alters how your consciousness seems to you, your consciosuness will seem different to you. If your funcitonality is preserved, you won’t be able to report it. You will report tomatos are red even if they look grue or bleen to you. (You may also not be able to cognitively access—remember or think about—the change, if that is part of the preserved functionality, But if your experience changes, you can’t fail to experience it).
Implying that qualia can be removed from a brain while maintaining all internal processes that sum up to cause talk of qualia, without deliberately replacing them with a substitute. In other words, your “qualia” are causally impotent and I’d go so far as to say, meaningless.
Doesn’t follow, Qualia aren’t causing Charles’s qualia-talk, but that doens’t mean thery aren’t causing mine. Kidney dyalisis machines don’t need nephrons, but that doens’t mean nephrons are causally idle in kidneys.
The epiphenomenality argument works for atom-by-atom duplicates, but not in WBE and neural replacement scenarios. if indentity theory is true, qualia have the causal powers of whatever physical properties they are identical to. If identity theory is true, changing the physcial substrate could remove or change the qualia.
Accounting for qualia and starting from qualia are two entirely different things. Saying “X must have qualia” is unhelpful if we cannot determine whether or not a given thing has qualia.
We can tell that we have qualia, and our won consciousnessn is the ntarual starting point.
“Qualia” can be defined by giving examples: the way anchiovies taste, the way tomatos look, etc.
You are makiing heavy weather of the indefinability of some aspects of consciousness, but the flipside of that is that we all experience out won consciousness. It is not a mystery to us. So we can substitute “inner ostension” for abstract definition.
There doesn’t appear to be anything inherently biological about what we are talking about when we are talking about consciousness.
OTOH, we don’t have examples of non-biological consc.
I don’t see anything very new here.
Charles: “Uh-uh! Your operation certainly did disturb the true cause of my talking about consciousness. It substituted a different cause in its place, the robots. Now, just because that new cause also happens to be conscious—talks about consciousness for the same generalized reason—doesn’t mean it’s the same cause that was originally there.”
Albert: “But I wouldn’t even have to tell you about the robot operation. You wouldn’t notice. If you think, going on introspective evidence, that you are in an important sense “the same person” that you were five minutes ago, and I do something to you that doesn’t change the introspective evidence available to you, then your conclusion that you are the same person that you were five minutes ago should be equally justified. Doesn’t the Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle say that if I do something to you that alters your consciousness, let alone makes you a completely different person, then you ought to notice somehow?”
How does Albert know that Charles;s consciousness hasn’t changed? It could have changed becasue of the replacement of protoplasm by silicon. And Charles won’t report the change because of the functional equivalence of the change.
Charles: “Introspection isn’t perfect. Lots of stuff goes on inside my brain that I don’t notice.”
If Charles’s qualia have changed, that will be noticeable to Charles—introspection is hardly necessary, sinc ethe external world wil look different! But Charles won’t report the change. “Introspection” is being used ambiguously here, between what is noticed and what is reported.
Albert: “Yeah, and I can detect the switch flipping! You’re detecting something that doesn’t make a noticeable difference to the true cause of your talk about consciousness and personal identity. And the proof is, you’ll talk just the same way afterward.”
Albert’s comment is a non sequitur. That the same effect occurs does not prove that the same cause occurs, There can mutliple causes of reports like “I see red”. Because the neural substitution preserves funcitonal equivlance, Charles will report the same qualia whether or not he still has them,
If we want to understand how consciousness works in humans, we have to accou t for qualia as part of it. Having an undertanding of human consc. is the best practical basis for deciding whether other entitieies have consc. OTOH, starting by trying to decide which entities have consc. is unlikely to lead anywhere.
The biological claim can be ruled out if it is incoherent, but not if it for being unproven, since the funciontal/computational alternative is also unproven.
Why? That doesn’t argue any point relevant to this discussion.
“qualia” labels part of the explanandum, not the explanation.
The argument against p-zombies is that the reason for our talk of consciousness is literally our consciousness, and hence there is no reason for a being not otherwise deliberately programmed to reproduce talk about consciousness to do it if it weren’t conscious.
A functional duplicate will talk the same way as whomever it is a duplicate of.
A faithful synaptic-level silicone WBE, if it independently starts talking about it at all, must be talking about it for the same reason as us (ie. consciousness),
A WBE of a specific person will respond to the same stimuli in the same way as that person. Logically, that will be for the reason that it is a duplicate, Physically, the “reason” or, ultimate cause, could be quite different, since the WBE is physically different.
since it hasn’t been deliberately programmed to fake consciousness-talk.
It has been programmed to be a functional duplicate of a specific individual.,
Or, something extremely unlikely has happened.
Something unlikely to happen naturally has happened. A WBE is an artificial construct which is exactly the same as an person in some ways,a nd radically different in others.
Note that supposing that how the synapses are implemented could matter for consciousness, even while the macro-scale behaviour of the brain is identical, is equivalent to supposing that consciousness doesn’t actually play any role in our consciousness-talk,
Actually it isn’t, for reasons that are widely misunderstood: kidney dyalisis machines don’t need nephrons, but that doens’t mean nephrons are causally idle in kidneys.
The argument against p-zombies is that there is no physical difference that could explain the difference in consciousness. That does not extend to silicon WBEs or AIs.
Because while it’s conceivable that an effort to match surface correspondences alone (make something which talked like it was conscious) would succeed for reasons non-isomorphic to those why we exhibit those surface behaviors (its cause of talking about consciousness is not isomorphic to our cause) it defies all imagination that an effort to match synaptic-qua-synapse behaviors faithfully would accidentally reproduce talk about consciousness with a different cause
For some value of “cause”. If you are interested in which synaptic signals cause which reports, then you have guaranteed that the cause will be the same. However, I think what we are interested in is whether reports of experience and self-awareness are caused by experience and self-awareness
We also speak of surface correspondence. in addition to synaptic correspondence, to verify that some
However it leaves the realm of things that happen in the real world, and enters the realm of elaborate fears that don’t actually happen in real life, to suppose that some tiny overlooked property of the synapses both destroys the original cause of talk about consciousness, and substitutes an entirely new distinct and non-isomorphic cause which reproduces the behavior of talking about consciousness and thinking you’re conscious to the limits of inspection yet does not produce actual consciousness, etc.
Maybe, But your stipulation of causal isomorphism at the synaptic level only guarantees that there will only be minor differences at that level, Since you don’t care how the Ems synapses are implemented there could be major differences at the subsynaptic level .. indeed, if your Em is silicon-based, there will be. And if those differences lead to differences in consciousness (which they could, irrespective of the the point made above, since they are major differences), those differences won’t be reported, because the immediate cause of a report is a synaptic firing, which will be guaranteed to be the same!
You have, in short, set up the perfect conditions for zombiehood: a silicon-based Em is different enough to a wetware brain to reasonably have a different form of consciousness, but it can’t report such differences, because it is a functional equivalent..it will say that tomatoes are red, whatever it sees!
I don’t see the relevance. I was trying to argue that bioloigical claim could be read as more specific than the functional one.
Instead, if structural correspondence allowed for significant additional confidence that the em’s professions of being conscious were true, wouldn’t such a model just not stop, demanding “turtles all the way down”?
IOW, why assign “top” probability to the synaptic level, when there are further levels.
This comment:
EY to Kawoomba:
This by itself retains the possibility that something vital was missed, but then it should show up in the surface correspondences of behavior, and in particular, if it eliminates consciousness, I’d expect what was left of the person to notice that.
Appeals to contradict this comment:
EY to Juno_Watt
Since whole brains are not repeatable, verifying behavioral isomorphism with a target would require a small enough target that its internal interactions were repeatable. (Then, having verified the isomorpmism, you tile it across the whole brain.
If chatting with cute women is utilitous for you, your decision was rational. Rationality doesn’t mean you have to restrict yourself to “official” payoffs.
Then why require causal isomporphism at the synaptic structure in addition to surface correspondence of behaviour?
What does “like” mean, there? The actual biochemistry, so that pieces of Em could be implanted in a real brain, or just accurate virtualisation, like a really good flight simulator?
That isn’t a reductive explanaiton, becuase no attempt is made to show how Mary;s red quale breaks down into smaller component parts. In fact, it doens;t do much more than say subjectivity exists, and occurs in sync with brain states. As such, it is compatible with dualism.
You mean p-zombie arguments?
Whatever,tThat doesn;t actuall provide an explanation of qualia.