Re: Qualia Question

lesterDELzick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Lester Zick) wrote:

> It's only gotten lost because behaviorists and memists pretend it
> isn't there. There are at least three metaphors for the subjective in
> this respect: behavior, qualia, and memes. None of them explain
> anything about subjective behavior. They just rename the effects and
> then go on to pretend they aren't there.
>
> Regards - Lester

The subjective aspect of experience seems so simple and obvious to me I
don't understand why people have such problems with it.

We are machines which react to the environment. But we are also part of
the same environment which we are able to react to. That means we are able
to react to our own actions. We can sense our own actions, both
internally, and externally, and that's what creates our subjective
sensations.

We are not a single entity. We are a large and complex machine made up of
billions of independent parts, all which have the ability to react in
complex ways to the other parts. If my brain tells my hand to move, and
then the brain receives new visual signals in response to seeing the hand
move, our body had created a subjective experience which then goes on to
cause more behavior in the future, and more subjective experience.

If we have an edge detector in our visual hardware, the reason we can see
"edges" and not just light, is because we are able to sense the output of
that edge detector just as easily as we can sense the raw outputs from the
eye. It's just one part of the brain sensing what another part of the
brain/CNS is doing. It's just one part of the CNS reacting to another
part of the CNS. Just like the brain can externally make a hand move and
then sense that it has happened.

This is all "subjective experience" is. This is why we have a subjective
experience we can not share with others. When my edge detectors activate,
only I can sense that activity. It's my personal subjective experience.
It's my qualia.

When I look at English words, I don't just see light, and edges. I also
see letters with names to them, and I have a subjective experience of the
sound of the words as I read them to myself and I have a subjective
experience of the "meaning" of the words. This is because my brain is
activating different neurons in response to that input which are associated
with each of these various qualia. The brain is creating a behavior
response to the sensation of that word internally and I'm able to sense
that internal behavior created by the brain.

When I look at words in a language I don't know made up of symbols I don't
know, all I see is light and edges and shapes. There is no subjective
experience of the sound of the word or the meaning of the word in any other
sense because my brain has not been trained to produce any type of special
internal behavior in response to those symbols. There are no extra qualia
associated with those sensory signals for me.

memes likewise are simply learned behavior passed from one person to the
next. There is nothing complex or confusing about the idea when talked
about in this form. All the behavior we pass from person to person whether
it's language behavior or other types of physical behavior (holding a door
open for someone), are all memes. All our shared knowledge and culture are
our memes.

As long as you realize everything is just behavior, then there are no
problems. It's only when you starting playing with language and creating
things that don't exist that any of this becomes hard.

You do not loose the idea of subjective experience when you define
everything in terms of physical behavior of the body and the brain. You do
not define it away. It's there, and it's simple to understand what it is
as I tried to explain above.

All this only becomes hard, when you make the assumption that only humans
are conscious - that this subjective experience is something only a human
(or only a limited set of life forms) can have.

If you throw that idea out, and just accept the idea that all mater has a
level of consciousness, then everything is easily explained, and there are
no problems.

Our level of consciousness results in the fact that the brain is a very
complex reaction learning machine which is able to sense and react to its
own behavior - both externally, and internally.

A rocks ability to consciously react is limited to just sitting there and
being "hard" - i.e. if you push it, it pushes back. It's conscious, it's
just not intelligent enough to talk about it with us.

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

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