Re: Qualia Question

"JGCASEY" <jgkjcasey@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> "JGCASEY" <jgkjca...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > Trying to classify everything as a behavior
> > > doesn't seem to resolve the fundamental
> > > issue. To say one behavior is "seeing depth"
> > > and another behavior is "seeing red" doesn't
> > >in itself explain the subjective nature of
> > > the experience.
>
> [...]
>
> Curt Welch wrote:
> > The subjective nature of the experience of seeing
> > green and seeing red and seeing yellow and not
> > seeing blue for this device is simply the behavior
> > of the device. It produces a different behavior
> > for each unique subjective experience it can sense.
> > It produces no behavior change for the things it
> > can not see.
>
> But I see no reason for such a machine to have a
> "subjective experience". That is the crux of the
> issue. There is no reason for a machine to claim
> it has qualia, which to me is the same thing as
> it claiming to be "alive" or "conscious" as qualia
> is simply the "conscious experience" of something
> be it a color, smell, or any other "feeling".

But the point here is that we have no data to support that belief. All we
have to support that idea is human arrogance. We have no way of knowing
what the subjective experience of anything else in the universe is like.

> From what you have written at various times I get
> the impression you expect an intelligent system
> will behave as if it had "qualia" but in fact would
> be all "behavior".

Yes, that's what I suspect will happen.

I can work on AI purely from the perspective of trying to duplicate human
behavior without having to deal with all this, but looking at the data I
have available to me, that's what I suspect will happen.

If my AI (when "educated" with the same ideas that humans are taught)
doesn't talk about qualia in the same ways humans talk about it, then I've
not duplicated all of human behavior.

> But speech is a "behavior" thus
> claims of qualia are "behaviors". What causes such
> claims (behaviors)? Even illusions have to have a
> cause.

Who said qualia was an illusion? Not I. (well I might have in the past,
but I see it differently now).

I think the confusion about qualia is caused by the mind/body illusion.
But I think qualia are real.

There's a common belief that the physical world is a different existence
domain from the mental world - that things which exist in our thoughts, are
not physical. This belief leads to the idea that there must be something
non-physical which causes our thoughts - so we gave it a name - the mind.
I believe that is just an illusion and that the mind and the brain are one
and the same. We just couldn't see a correlation between the sensory data
from what we call the physical world, and our thoughts, so that made the
data look like they existed in two unrelated domains. But in fact, it's
only because the activity of the brain is hidden inside our head, that
keeps us from sensing its activity with our normal "physical" senses. That
is the illusion that causes all the confusion.

If you start with that illusion as your basis of understanding thoughts,
and then turn your attention to sensory experience, what happens? In my
thoughts, I can see red. But if I think my thoughts exist in a domain
separate from the physical world, then my sense of "red" must be
non-physical. That's where all the trouble starts. Because we started
with the belief that thoughts are not physical, it led us to the belief
that our subjective experience of red must be non-physical. So if we have
a non-physical experience of "red", how do we explain it by talking about
the physical actions of our brain? If our thoughts about "red" exist in a
domain that is separate from the physical domain, how does a red object in
the physical domain, create this sensation of red in our mental domain? If
we call the property of light which makes it "red", the "red quality" of
light, what do we call it in the mental domain? Gee, lets make up more
words to keep this mind/brain split alive, lets call it "qualia".

The reason people believe the word qualia means something special is
because they take as fact, the idea that thoughts are not physical. The
idea that qualia exist, and are something different from the normal
properties of light, only makes sense if you fall for the first illusion.

But what is the real source of this hard problem?

The real source is believing that thoughts are not physical, yet somehow,
physical things like our eyes, and central nervous system, have a magical
(but unexplained) power to make things happen in our thoughts (see red).

It's only a hard problem because we were tricked by the illusion of the
mind/body split. If you go back, and start over, and assume that our
thoughts are just the physical actions of our brain, then the hard problem
becomes trivial to understand.

Qualia don't go away in this view of reality, but they simply stop being a
hard problem. Qualia in this view are simply the private internal signals
created in our brain in response to the stimulus in question. The neurons
that fire when I see something red, are my red Qualia.

If you then ask, but why does red look like it does? Or, why does vision
seem so "different" to us than sound, or than pain? The answer is that
this is what it feels like to be a network of neurons connected in the way
they are connected in our brains. Most of what we feel when we sense
something, is not just the raw data itself, but all the associations we
have learned about in our life time.

For example, if look a something written in Arabic, all I "see" are strange
wiggly lines. But if I look at something written in English, I see much
more. I see the meaning of the words at the same time. If the word is
"dog", then all sorts of dog ideas flood my brain in response to that word
- like the look of a dog, and the feel of touching a dog, and smell of a
dog. That just means that more neurons get activated when I look at
English words because those patterns of lines that make up the words are
associated with many other past sensory events in my life.

I believe a good bit of what we "see" when we see red, or blue, or green,
is actually the result of a life time of associations between those colors,
and all our past sensory experience where we saw the same color. The real
sensation of "red" we have in our thoughts are all those past associations.
When I see red, past associations of blood for example are probably being
activated without me even realizing it. When I see green, I have
associations with grass maybe. This is what makes red so different to us
from green. It's not just one neuron saying "I see green", it's probably
many neurons saying also with meanings like "this is like grass", and "this
is like money", and "this is like a forest". So the subconscious "feeling"
of seeing green is actually much more complex and has much more depth, than
a single little signal saying, "it's green".

Now, as I was also writing in the message to Lester, I have no proof that
this unified view of thoughts and the physical world is correct. Our
thoughts could be something more complex than the actions of our brain.
The brain might be some type of tool which shapes our mind out of some
magic "force" of the universe which our study of physics has not yet
uncovered. So everything could be far more complex than this simplified
"everything is physical" concept. The brain might be some type of complex
quantum effect transceiver for example which harness some type of odd
powers behind quantum effects in order to form a mind. So our real mind
might actually exist in a very different domain.

But, I don't buy any of that because the simple answer - that human
behavior is simply created by the physical properties of the brain just as
robot behavior is created by the physical properties of the matter it is
made out of - answers all the questions. The mind/brain illusion explains
why humans tend to believe there are two domains instead of one and the
illusion is easily explained in simply physical terms (i.e., the brain
makes no noise or cause lights to blink when it is working).

Why it "feels" like it does to be human is answered by simply saying -
well, that's how it feels - just accept it! What did you expect it to feel
like? We have no way of knowing how else it should have felt like, so we
have no way of knowing if this is not something that can be produced by the
physical action of a brain.

So, until there is some evidence to prove this position can't be right,
I'll continue to believe it is, and look for a physical machine design that
will produce all human-like behavior.

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

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