How The Mind Works

[Tero]

Functionalist theory of mind and qualia:

https://oecs.mit.edu/pub/sed0djko/release/1

[Tero]

However, although the discovery that heat is mean molecular kinetic energy provides a complete explanation of the nature of heat, the discovery that pain is c-fiber firing is not fully explanatory in the same way. Still left unexplained is why pain feels the way that it does. There does not seem to be anything about the process of c-fiber firing that would make sense of pain having one set of phenomenal properties rather than another. When it comes to qualia, there is a gap in the explanation provided by physicalist and functionalist theories.

the qualia of beer

Some have taken these definitional disagreements to suggest that there is a deep incoherence underlying the traditional conception of qualia (). Consider, for example, the fact that beer is often said to be an acquired taste. When one comes to like beer, a question arises as to whether one’s qualitative experience changes or one comes to have different reactions to the same experience. On the one hand, if there is no way to tell the difference, this would call into question the claim that we can tell what qualia we have by way of introspection. On the other hand, if the process of coming to enjoy the taste of beer changes the experience itself, then this would seem to allow relational properties (our attitudes and reactions) to constitute qualitative experience, thereby calling into question the claim that they are intrinsic. This point can be further defended by reflecting on interpersonal differences in taste experience (). Consider the fact that a small percentage of people experience a soapy-like taste when eating cilantro. This experiential variation, which can be traced to variation in olfactory receptor genes (), suggests that taste depends on the relations that properties of a substance have to one’s olfactory receptors and thus that taste qualia are not intrinsic properties after all.

A similar dialectic is in play concerning the moral status of AI systems. If, like humans and nonhuman animals, machines can feel pleasure and pain, then that seems to suggest that they too are deserving of moral status ().

[Tero]

Qualia in some sort of access model of consciousness
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-c ... _259249910

A conceptual map of the relationship of qualia, phenomenal consciousness, and access consciousness. Individual qualia (small circles) produced in V1 are bound together into phenomenal consciousness (larger light gray circles) by achieving the correct oscillatory range. Note the phenomenal conscious state shown below in this figure excludes many qualia that are not incorporated into this state (small circles to the left). Lamme and others postulate entrance into access consciousness (largest dark gray circle) is gated through attention and it is likely these phenomenal states (other light gray circles) compete for entrance into access consciousness (e.g., Necker cube). As phenomenal consciousness becomes part of access consciousness, bla bla bla

[Tero]

Really long article on whether "red" is physical or not
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/phpe.12190

[Tero]

wikipedia in Finnish gives the shortest summary:
Qualia ( Latin : singular quale , "what kind?"; plural qualia ) in philosophy of mind refers to conscious experience or sensory content , i.e. the experiential or phenomenal properties of mental states . [ 1 ] [ 2 ]

Examples of qualia include redness and feeling pain . Qualia are often described in the form of “what is it like to...?”: what is it like to see the red color of blood, what is it like to feel pain in the hand, and so on. Qualia are distinguished from the physical situations that caused them and the effects they have on behavior.

Much of the debate surrounding qualia has concerned their precise definition, as different philosophers emphasize or deny the existence of certain properties. Qualia are important in the philosophy of mind primarily because they are often seen to pose fundamental problems for physicalism : qualia are subjective only from the perspective of a conscious being. However, some philosophers deny qualia altogether. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] According to reductionism, qualia can be explained in terms of neurophysiological events in the brain. According to epiphenomenalism , qualia supervene on brain events, but cannot be directly derived from them. According to dualism , qualia are independent of physics and belong to the non-physical realm of the mind. [ 3 ]

Term:supervene
(philosophy, followed by on) To be dependent on something else for existence, truth or instantiation.

[Tero]

If "red" is not in the molecules, how about emotions?

Major Evolutionary PerspectivesBasic Emotion Theory: Postulates that certain innate emotions are hard-wired into the brain. These so-called "basic emotions" activate distinct evolutionary pathways to handle universal survival tasks.

Evolutionary Psychological Perspective: Expands the theory to state that emotions act as advanced, superordinate mechanisms designed to solve specific adaptive and social problems, including complex human-specific scenarios like navigating social hierarchies and romantic jealousy.

https://iep.utm.edu/theories-of-emotion/

a. Cognitive Theories
The cognitive theories contend that the early part of the emotion process includes the manipulation of information and so should be understood as a cognitive process. This is in contrast to theories that state that the generation of the emotion response is a direct and automatic result of perceiving the stimulus—these non-cognitive theories are discussed below.

Two observations demonstrate some of the motivation for the cognitive position. First, different individuals will respond to the same event with different emotions, or the same individual may at different times respond differently to the same stimulus. For example, one person may be relieved to be laid-off from her job, while a co-worker greets the same news with dread. Or one person may, as a young woman, be excited to be laid-off from her job, but several years later find being laid-off frightening. As the psychologists Ira Roseman and Craig Smith point out, “Both individual and temporal variability in reaction to an event are difficult to explain with theories that claim that stimulus events directly cause emotional response” (2001, p. 4).

Second, there is a wide range of seemingly unrelated events that cause the same emotion. None of these events share any physical feature or property, but all of them can cause the same response. Roseman and Smith provide an example using sadness and comment on the consequence of this example for a theory of emotion...

sadness may be elicited by the death of a parent (see Boucher & Brandt, 1981), the birth of a child (see, for example, Hopkins, Marcus, & Campbell, 1984), divorce (for example, Richards, Hardy, & Wadsworth, 1997), declining sensory capacity (Kalayam, Alexopoulos, Merrell, & Young, 1991), not being accepted to medical school (Scherer, 1988), or the crash of one’s computer hard drive … These examples pose problems for theories claiming that emotions are unconditioned responses to evolutionary specified stimulus events or are learned via generalization or association (2001, p. 4).

Cognitive theories account for these two observations by proposing that the way in which the individual evaluates the stimulus determines the emotion that is elicited. Every individual has beliefs, as well as goals, personal tendencies, and desires in place before the emotion causing event is encountered. It is in light of these factors that an individual evaluates the event. For example, different emotions will occur depending on whether an individual evaluates being laid-off as consistent with her current goals or inconsistent with them.

[Brian Peacock]

Really long article on whether "red" is physical or not
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/phpe.12190

"Red" is the name we give to a certain portion of the visible EM spectrum - so it's physical! Those frequencies exist in the world around us whether we exist to see them, or are awake or asleep, or colour-blind, or not. Whether people experience that colour-range the same way is somewhat moot because we don't have direct access to the perceptual experience of others. 'Qualia' are not a scientific fact. They're handy philosophical anchors that allow us to denote and discuss certain aspects, qualities or properties of subjective experience.

This has very little to do with a theory of mind though.

[Tero]

Physicalist! We can't be just molecules!

[Tero]

The real (narrow) term theory of mind just refers to a psychology term describing one feature of autism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

[Tero]

The leading theoretical models mapping qualia to the nervous system include:
(Google Gemini hallucinates/summarizes):

Integrated Information Theory (IIT): Championed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, IIT posits that consciousness is a fundamental property of any system with a high degree of interconnected, integrated information. This model uses a mathematical metric (\(\Phi \) or "Phi") to quantify how much information a neural network generates that cannot be broken down into independent parts. The specific geometric and causal structure of this integrated information equates to specific qualia. You can explore the mathematical foundations of this theory via the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

Predictive Processing & Query Acts: Frameworks developed by researchers like Andy Clark and Anil Seth suggest that the brain functions as an inference engine that continuously generates predictions about sensory inputs. In this model, qualia are not passively received; they are active, top-down predictions and "error signals." When the brain queries a specific sensory dimension (e.g., asking "what is it like to see red?"), the resulting subjective experience is the brain's internal prediction model interpreting that data.

Global Workspace Theory (GWT): Often referred to as the "theatre of the mind" model, GWT proposes that the nervous system has many unconscious, specialized processors. Qualia emerge when information from these specialized systems is broadcast to a central, globally interconnected network (the "global workspace"), making the information available to the rest of the brain, which allows for subjective reporting and experience.

Electromagnetic (EM) Field Theories: Models like Susan Pockett's and Johnjoe McFadden's propose that consciousness and distinct qualia are identical to, or intrinsically linked with, the physical spatiotemporal patterns of the brain's global electromagnetic field. In this view, qualia are not localized to single neurons, but are distributed, synchronous waves that interact with neural ion channels.

Attractor Network Models: This model suggests that when the nervous system processes information, it cycles messages through local cortical networks repeatedly until the system settles into a stable, highly constrained, "attractor state". The development of these brain-wide resonant and attractor states is argued to be the direct physical genesis of qualia, giving rise to experiences like a specific smell or a conscious memory.



consciousness studies
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sy ... 00022/full

[Tero]

there:
The Generation of Qualia
Orpwood (2013) argued that the ability of networks to identify their inputs as representations of the identity of their previous inputs could lead to the generation of qualia, but it is now felt that the argument presented in that article was overly complicated and not very clear. It also only dealt with the case of stable attractor states. The current article argues that in fact only two cycles of feedback information passage should be needed for qualia to result, and that the process could also involve interlinked networks in a stable resonant state.

It is perhaps easier to understand how the information processing discussed above could lead to qualia by using an example. Consider the situation of olfactory perception. Assume the nasal epithelium has been exposed to a chemical. The olfactory receptor neurons respond to this exposure, and following local processing of this information in the olfactory bulbs, a pattern of firing is generated along the olfactory tract. This firing pattern is an information structure. There is some debate about whether it is the olfactory cortex or the orbito-frontal cortex that is the site of odor consciousness (Shepherd, 2007), perhaps both, but for the purposes of this argument it doesn’t matter. Assume the information structure being conducted along the olfactory tract reaches the necessary cortical region (Figure 7). If there are ensembles of neurons in this region that recognize the input structure then the recognizing network of cells will generate its own output pattern of firing, an output structure. If there is an output structure generated then that structure must represent the identity of the input to the network. If the chemical that the nasal epithelium was exposed to was hydrogen sulfide then the output structure must be the network’s own representation of H2S. It only generates that output structure when the sensors feeding it are exposed to hydrogen sulfide. The output structure represents H2S to the network, but not in any conscious sense of course. It is just the network’s own depiction of a chemical that has been detected. It is a structure that embodies the identity “H2S” for this network. The incoming input structure was just an abstract set of neuronal firings, but because of the way that the olfactory cortical networks have been configured the output structure is the network’s own representation of the chemical that has been detected. It is a physical embodiment of the identity “H2S” for this network (Figure 7).

[Tero]

[BOOK] Modeling brain function: The world of attractor neural networks
DJ Amit, DJ Amit
1989•books.google.com
One of the most exciting and potentially rewarding areas of scientific research is the study of the principles and mechanisms underlying brain function. It is also of great promise to future generations of computers. A growing group of researchers, adapting knowledge and techniques from a wide range of scientific disciplines, have made substantial progress understanding memory, the learning process, and self organization by studying the properties of models of neural networks-idealized systems containing very large numbers of connected neurons, whose interactions give rise to the special qualities of the brain. This book introduces and explains the techniques brought from physics to the study of neural networks and the insights they have stimulated. It is written at a level accessible to the wide range of researchers working on these problems-statistical physicists, biologists, computer scientists, computer technologists and cognitive psychologists. The author presents a coherent and clear nonmechanical presentation of all the basic ideas and results. More technical aspects are restricted, wherever possible, to special sections and appendices in each chapter. The book is suitable as a text for graduate courses in physics, electrical engineering, computer science and biology.

In order to build a credible model of the neuronal processes of the brain, the author is aware that such a model has to be able to deal with input in the form of temporal sequences, and not just single patterns. He devotes an entire chapter to this in the book, motivating his discussion with the notion of a `central pattern generator' (CPG). The simplicity of CPGs is a concern and the author is aware that such simplicity does not exist in models of cognitive processes. Nevertheless the modeling of CPGs using neural networks can add credence to the program to model general brain processes in terms of neural networks, complex as they can be.


One of course must be able to deal with both the storage and the retrieval of temporal sequences. After discussing some of the early research dealing with these needs, the author then reviews a strategy for dealing with temporal sequences that involves the notion of a `quasi-attractor', which is a network state that acts like an attractor for a short period of time. Quasi-attractors are used to delay the transfer of information out of the attractor. Thus the transitions are governed by synapses that have a time delay. The influence of a pre-synaptic neuron through these synapses will arrive later than the influence coming through a `stabilizing' synapse. The latter type of synapse arises because of the `stabilizing' term in the network model that ensures that if the network is in a state that is identical to a stored pattern then the network will remain there. The author shows how the network can use these delayed transitions to deal with temporal sequences in a manner that is acceptable, i.e. in a way that the `cognition time' is of the order of magnitude of the delay. The author discusses an example dealing with the counting of chimes, in order to give credence to his constructions. In this example it is seen that the network resides in each of the quasi-attractors for a long enough time so as to allow the output neurons to identify the cognitive event.

[Brian Peacock]

Similar to the discussions we've had about AI's apparent (or otherwise) 'consciousness', thinking about the brain as a computational machine (such that a computational machine like an AI is therefore a brain equivalent) is reductive and misleading when considering consciousness. This is called computationalism btw.

Conceptually 'qualia' have somewhat limited explanatory power. We can talk about them in the abstract, and use them as placeholders for certain aspects of subjective experience, but we cannot reliably describe the necessary components of any particular qualis; describe what separates or distinguishes types of qualia from each other. If you don't believe me try and think about what makes something carroty - of what make the experience of something carrot-like or carrotish, or embodying carrotiness or carrothood etc?

In other words, you might think you're doing science but you're basically doing a philosophy.

[Sean Hayden]

The ideal carrot?

[Brian Peacock]

The ideal carrot?

Indeed. Plato would have said something is carroty by degree - the closer its form got to the ideal carrot the more carroty it would be: carrots are a general class of thing whose forms are so close to the ideal as to be indistinguishable from that ideal. Aristotle extended the argument to include function: carrots are a general class of thing that closely approach the ideal form while being observed to behave in a carroty way.

However, modern science shows us that the ideal carrot is actually one roasted with honey and parmesan.