How The Mind Works

[aufbahrung]

[Brian Peacock]

Your pain is special? We all get pain.

Are you hvating pain today? Dr Google would like you to state some details

Provocation / Palliation: What makes the pain worse or better?
Quality: What does it feel like? (e.g., sharp, dull, burning, throbbing)
Region / Radiation: Where is the pain, and does it travel anywhere else?
Severity: How bad is it based on the standard scales?Timing: When did it start, how long does it last, and is it constant or intermittent?

I'm not disputing the existence of pain nor that it's experienced by people and other living things. I'm saying that you're misusing/misunderstanding 'qualia' - using it to denote an objective phenomenon where it's used to denote aspects of subjective experience. "The qualia we call pain..." is meaningless because it assumes that some quality of a subjective experience (in this case 'pain') is the same for everything that's experiencing it. As I said, the physiological processes by which the experience of pain occurs (stimuli/response) are well understood (particularly in mammals) - so just call it 'pain' and leave the 'qaulia' out of it.

[aufbahrung]

Mind is a heavy subject. These qualia though, being at the cusp of meaning anything at all and nearer poetry than a real thing, can be discounted like Richard Dawkins AI mystification. Sounds credible and might have the credulous entranced but being fooled by statistics and the flip of the coin is exactly the same as being fooled that your version of the 'color blue' is sweeter than mine. Wine can go for vast amounts if old and from a good vinyard and year. The taster thinking they have something special. And maybe they have in their thinking. Not unusual.

[Tero]

I'm only discussing qualia, because I don't like the long essays on consciousness. The books say you have to be conscious to have your qualia.

The qualia can be thought of as the full Hollywood production your mind makes from some sloppy neuron info.

The dictionary tells me the singular is quale.

[aufbahrung]

Singular delusion, mass delusion, it's still a delusion. If it is useful at some level as a 'holywood studio or holodeck' of the mind then that can be taken apart and objectively studied as mechanism with sufficient investigative technology, but it's a mechanism, not magic of conciousness that's happening.

[Tero]

I's a good show, though, that evolution has created for us. Females having orgasms! (Sometimes)

[Brian Peacock]

...

The qualia can be thought of as the full Hollywood production your mind makes from some sloppy neuron info. ...

We have words like experience, perception, or sensation for that. 'Qualia' is not that. It's a philosophical anchor for some specific aspect of an experience, not a discriptor for types of experience generally. The "qualia of red" for example would be different when experiencing the skin of a ripe tomato, or the stripes along the body of a ribbon snake on your pillow, or the blood oozing from an open fracture. The frequency range of the reflected light might be very closely aligned in all three cases, but the experiences that include perceiving that colour are totally different. In other words, there is no "qualia of red" in the sense you've been using it.

If you can get to the end of this explanation and discussion you'll probably never give the term the time-of-day ever again!

[Tero]

These irreducibly subjective entities, are they in the room with you now?

One possible reaction to the view that machines might experience qualia is simple: silicon chips are the wrong sort of stuff to support qualia. Phenomenal consciousness is a biological phenomenon. But why suppose that? In the biological world...

That answer is lacking, because you have to throw in consciousness. The machines do a task that Google Gemini lists as "thinking." it is collecting data and lookind for the patterns. It has no task if you don't ask it something. Its senses would have to be some kind of security camera it is in charge of. But just sitting around getting bored does not give AI consciousness.

[Brian Peacock]

That seems to be to be the nub of the issue. Many people assume that 'consciousness' is purely the result of brain-function - that it exists or resides in the brain alone. Sure, smash the brain and consciousness goes away - but it's wrong to assume that it's all and only ever the brain. It's a whole body thing.

Ancient Greeks thought of consciousness as residing in the heart and that our inner-voice was a separate entity to us, pre-enlightement thinkers conceptualised it as kind of book that was read from by the soul and written to by the eyes, as medical science progressed post-enlightenment thinkers thought of it as something essentially mechanical like a clock driven by an engine, and now we think of it as computational; or in terms of software and hardware; of inputs and output - something we can 'upgrade' or 'hack' etc. It seems the mind/body problem doesn't ever go away - it just transforms as our technology changes.

Musk and his fellow travellers seem keen to upload their consciousness into some kind of silicon substrate. I think they believe this 'entity' will retain their essence and identity - that they'll some how be exactly who they are now, with the same drives and motivations, skills, relationships, autonomy, etc, just in a literally disembodied form. For them 'consciousness' involves only being aware of their own thoughts - of their own inner landscape and life. But what they'd discard by this is absolutely essential to them being the conscious creatures they are. An existence with no senses (other than the sense of their own intellect and genius!): no hormones, no emotions, no stimuli or responses, sights, sounds, smells, tastes, no mobility, no pleasures, no pains, etc. Nothing but their identity as reflected back to them by their own thoughts - and no doubt the legal rights of personhood and property. If he thought about it I don't think even Elon would really want his mind to be locked-in forever with only Elon for company.

[Tero]

The entire sense provided exprerience gives a lot of input. If you are missing one, such as vision, you may be able to ignore what you hear and think a lot better. But a blind person falling asleep must hear an awful lot of sound as they are trying to ignore the world and get some rest.

They are only aware of space and objects if they move around or touch them. On the other hand, they could be thinking of practical things: what do I make for dinner tomorrow, and where in the freezer is it?

[Brian Peacock]

I don't think blind people find sounds overwhelming in that sense. They may pay more attention to sound, but I don't think sound demands their attention like that.

[JimC]

I would like to think that one day I will taste the ideal gin...

[Brian Peacock]

I'm sure you'll get there if you keep putting in the work Jim.

[Svartalf]

I would like to think that one day I will taste the ideal gin...

well, if you ever do, tell us. I'd like to taste your ideal gin too.

[Tero]

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness Hardcover – October 19, 2021
by Anil Seth (Author)
Now, internationally renowned neuroscience professor, researcher, and author Anil Seth is offers a window into our consciousness in BEING YOU: A New Science of Consciousness. Anil Seth is both a leading expert on the neuroscience of consciousness and one of most prominent spokespeople for this relatively new field of science. His radical argument is that we do not perceive the world as it objectively is, but rather that we are prediction machines, constantly inventing our world and correcting our mistakes by the microsecond, and that we can now observe the biological mechanisms in the brain that accomplish this process of consciousness.

Seth has been interviewed for documentaries aired on the BBC, Netflix, and Amazon and podcasts by Sam Harris, Russell Brand, and Chris Anderson, and his 2017 TED Talk on the topic has been viewed over 11 million times, a testament to his uncanny ability to make unimaginably complex science accessible and entertaining.