Re: Qualia Question

"1Z" <peterdjones@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Curt Welch wrote:

> Does physics give us any reason to believe it should feel like anything
> ?

Does it give us any reason to believe it shouldn't?

The answer to both is no. Physics doesn't tell us what it feels like to be
a computer for example, or to be a human. We only happen to know what it
feels like to be a human because we are one. We know nothing about it
feels like to be a dog, or to be a computer.

> So , if you have [s]ome entirely new experiene , it would't seem like
> anything because it would have no associations ?

In my design for a network which has the power to create intelligence,
there is a society of nodes, all acting as independent learning machines,
all constantly routing pulses. Nodes can be recently active, or they can
be in a not recently active state. The state of the entire network of a
combination of the current states of all the nodes.

A "new experience" to this type of network, is a combination of activity
levels it has never experienced before. However, the total experience is
simply a sum of the experience of all the nodes. And all the nodes active
for the "new experience" will have lots of past experience, and past
associations. So, the "new experience" is not new for any of nodes.
What's new, is simply the current combination of active nodes.

So, this type of network can not have an "entirely new experience" except
when it's first turned on. From there on out, everything is just a new
combination of many old experiences. So, all "new" experiences, will
always "feel like" a new combination of past experiences.

Also, my type of network always has associations. It learns and changes by
adjusting the strength of the associations and not be adding or removing
them. So even when you first turn it on, it's got a head full of starting
associations to give it some type of "feeling" (a.k.a. behavior).

It's reasonable to assume the brain works much like this as well. That is,
when we experience something new in life, it's never completely new. Our
eyes are generating signals that are much like all the other vision signals
it's seen in the past. Everything we are seeing share properties with many
things we have seen in the past. It's impossible to actually have a
totally new experience with our old sensory inputs.

To give a human a totally new experience, you have to make neurons fire
which had never fired in the past and to make all old neurons, stop firing.
For a normal human, this is just not possible to do.

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

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