There are many definitions of qualia, which have changed over time. One of the simpler, broader definitions is: "The 'what it is like' character of mental states. The way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc."Examples of qualia include the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or the perceived redness of an evening sky. I believe that there are two types of qualia. The first type only conveys information. For example a black and white image or the sensation of touch or a pure tone (without harmonics)The second type conveys a pleasant or unpleasant sensation. For example a beautiful color image of a rainbow or the taste of something sweet. The first type gives us information that we can use to make decisions toward achieving our goals (for example to satisfy our curiosity) The second type becomes a goal unto itself. Imagine a computer capable of recognizing shapes and objects and of recognizing actions performed by thoses objects and capable of creating and analyzing complex simulations. Clearly it is aware of and perceiving some sort of sensation which conveys Information to it. But it is just information. Until we figure out how the second type of qualia works our computers will only be able to experience the first type of qualia Yellow = pleasant white Red = pleasant grey Blue = pleasant black Orange = red + yellow Purple = red + blue Green = blue + yellow Salty = information MSG = information Sweet = pleasant Bitter = unpleasant Sour = ? Hot = ? Fat = ? Touch = infinitesimal pressure Pressure = information Pain = unpleasant pressure Pleasure = pleasant pressure Temperature = information (obsolete) Hot = unpleasant temp Warm = pleasant temp Cold = unpleasant temp Tone = information Harmonics = pleasant tone
Your brain is divided into 3 main parts each of which is capable of thinking and acting autonomously: Midbrain (input) decides why to do anything Forebrain (CEO) decides what to do Cerebellum (output) decides how to do it The cerebral cortex (forebrain) is CEO. You are the forebrain. The midbrain and cerebellum are your helpers that take care of routine tasks so you can concentrate on more important things. Most information goes straight from input to output bypassing the forebrain. Much, if not all, of the processing done by the forebrain is inductive in nature. The forebrain is the source of imagination The midbrain is input. The midbrain has thousands of eyes and can raise the alarm when something needs your attention These alarms exert an irresistible all-powerful force upon you. Fortunately for us the midbrain only wants what is best for us and never asks anything for itself. These alarms are capable of supplying us with infinite MentalEnergy and power. Alarm = fear. Anti-alarm = excitement. The cerebellum (hindbrain) is output. The cerebellum has thousands of hands and can juggle thousands of things at once but has no clue "what" it is doing. The cerebellum takes care of simple procedures so the forebrain can concentrate on more important issues. (It also helps the midbrain accomplish its tasks) You point at the target and the cerebellum shoots. (But sometimes it "misses the mark" that you set for it) Each of these 3 parts is likewise divided into an input, output, and CEO each of which is likewise divided into an input, output, and CEO. This continues right down to the level of neurons. As a result your brain is a city full of independent units, organized into a fractal pyramid, that are constantly talking back and forth, buying and selling, living and dying. (See HOW THE MIND WORKS by Steven #Pinker) How the Mind Works The computational theory of mind also rehabilitates once and for all the infamous #homunculus. A standard objection to the idea that thoughts are internal representations (an objection popular among scientists trying to show how tough-minded they are) is that a representation would require a little man in the head to look at it, and the little man would require an even littler man to look at the representations inside him, and so on, ad infinitum. But once more we have the spectacle of the theoretician insisting to the electrical engineer that if the engineer is correct his workstation must contain hordes of little elves. Talk of homunculi is indispensable in computer science. Data structures are read and interpreted and examined and recognized and revised all the time, and the subroutines that do so are unashamedly called “agents,” “demons,” “supervisors,” “monitors,” “interpreters,” and “executives.” Why doesn't all this homunculus talk lead to an infinite regress? Because an internal representation is not a lifelike photograph of the world, and the homunculus that “looks at it” is not a miniaturized copy of the entire system, requiring its entire intelligence. That indeed would have explained nothing. Instead, a representation is a set of symbols corresponding to aspects of the world, and each homunculus is required only to react in a few circumscribed ways to some of the symbols, a feat far simpler than what the system as a whole does. The intelligence of the system emerges from the activities of the not-so-intelligent mechanical demons inside it. The point, first made by Jerry Fodor in 1968, has been succinctly put by Daniel Dennett: Homunculi are bogeymen only if they duplicate entire the talents they are rung in to explain. ... If one can get a team or committee of relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi to produce the intelligent behavior of the whole, this is progress. A flow chart is typically the organizational chart of a committee of homunculi (investigators, librarians, accountants, executives); each box specifies a homunculus by prescribing a function without saying how it is accomplished (one says, in effect: put a little man in there to do the job). If we then look closer at the individual boxes we see that the function of each is accomplished by subdividing it via another flow chart into still smaller, more stupid homunculi. Eventually this nesting of boxes within boxes lands you with homunculi so stupid (all they have to do is remember whether to say yes or no when asked) that they can be, as one says, “replaced by a machine.” One discharges fancy homunculi from one's scheme by organizing armies of idiots to do the work. Modern computers know "how" to do things but don't yet know "what" they are doing. LogicProgramming will eventually change that. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
99.999....% of the universe is non-conscious. Non-consciousness structures, their activities (if any), and mediating agencies like electromagnetism are wallowing in what isn't even the presence of nothingness; because they don't have experiences. Or at least, that anti-panexperientialism stance is usually what's attributed to materialism, physicalism, and probably most commonsense / everyday views. Quarrels over qualia, qualitative affairs, etc, actually tend to distract from a broader and more direct-to-the-point category which they could be subsumed under: Manifestations. There is no point in appending adjectives of the "qual-" word unit to "manifestations" or replacing such with "qual-" terms because there are no manifestations but of that kind (as aforementioned, even an exhibition of nothingness would seem to be imparting a "blank" quality that is apprehended and so even it must be removed from "non-consciousness"). (Information.... ) Because there are a variety of substrates that can hold and transmit patterns, a need often arose for dealing with those "forms" carried by environmental energies and retained by more solid matter structures. Dealing with them in a general way, to avoid the quagmire of specifics. Much as early quantitative endeavors simply stripped away the empirical content of "group of grapes counted X-X-X" and "group of dogs counted X-X-X" and created an abstract concept expressing what those different sets had in common: Three. Quantitative properties which could then be manipulated and explored on their own thenceforth (pure mathematics as opposed to applied) without being tethered to the original affairs of the observed world. As a broad concept abstracted from the specific instances of patterned structure, information offers similar ability to ignore the diverse substrates which physically realize those configurations and deal with them generically in symbolic and measurement fashion (sometimes depending upon how a specific discipline utilizes and defines the idea of "information"). Unfortunately, these abstract systems over the decades seem to have reached the point where they are being reified, treated as if they represent actual microscopic entities or something which physics recognizes as "units or particles of information"; as opposed to the actual agencies / furniture of physics from which the abstract description is extracted or superimposed over for conveniently ignoring the former. In some of the deepest, dank dungeons of theoretical physics information probably is reified as literal elemental entities, but that's in the "one foot in metaphysics" territory shared by superstrings, multiverses, holographic principles, etc. This is why I don't consider "information" approaches as resolving much of anything about the hard problem of consciousness. An invented, abstract system lacks potency for generating anything in and of itself. If figuratively superimposed over neural tissue in the brain, whatever different approach or POV it might provide for conceiving what is "going on there" that could yield private manifestations still does not rob the electrochemical activity (etc) transpiring in the brain from having the ultimate responsibility of causing and explaining the manifestations. It is that physical substrate (from cellular networks all the way down to the weird quantum affairs composing them) which must cough up some primitive precursor recognized by physics which it is manipulating with far greater complexity than anything found outside the skull, to yield the phenomenal showings of experience. Assorted disciplines from philosophy to psychology to neuroscience to computer sciences can posit any manner of "new" attributes for "physical stuff" that result in the manifestations. But in the end it is just blowing snot in the wind if physics is unimpressed by their suggestions and fails to add such "novelties" to its accounts of matter / energy, or just responds: "We don't even know how to test for this speculative #$%^# you're proposing." Declaring that the manifested noise and odor and visual circus of a busy city section just falls out of intricate dynamic relationships of neural tissue is empty gibberish if the relationships possess nothing beforehand for explaining that otherwise magical conjuring act. All this accomplishes is finding more neural correlates for consciousness -- a double aspect situation of "it looks like this when observed / measured in public but it looks completely different privately to itself". How does that happen, and how is either of the appearances possible to begin with in the context of the ontological dogmas that restrain conventional views of matter? Some philosophers and scientists: "We don't know and surprisingly few of are curious enough to even care; we just want to waffle or bait and switch or dodge the whole issue and hide under the bed when it rears its head. In fact, a few of us are pretend p-zombies who escape this by acting like we don't have a clue as to what other people are talking about; we're just organized collections of mechanistic interactions reacting to our environments in the dark."
CC, Are you saying that the 'I' does not exist except as an illusion and that a number of conceivable illusions are produced by it such as eternal life as opposed to the reality of death that awaits all of us (unless we upload ourselves into a machine)?
"I" or "self", which wasn't really addressed due to what's elaborated on in the next paragraphs.... can be conceived as an illusion or a "useful story" via various venues, including those of science. But it's what people continue to do in everyday life that exposes their still conditioned beliefs of old (like "self"), as opposed to the innovative novelties they pursue and say for explanatory purposes. The latter enabling some degree of human dominance over the Earth. We grab whatever formal "knowledge" works for the moment or is an appropriate tool / perspective for getting something done in a particular situation, then return to abiding in the cultural templates of our ancestors. Even a robot or AI type of philosophical zombie could have a story of "self" falling out of acquired memories of past actions and encounters with its environment; and from any native survival agendas that were installed to protect itself from damage. It could demonstrate possessing such via communicative and behavioral responses witnessed by human observers. Despite "personally" lacking evidence of itself and its environment as the manifestations of consciousness. Which is to say, the phenomenal showings / experience feature of our non-zombie type of consciousness is not dependent upon a sense of self contributing to it. The latter undoubtably enriches the significance of what's being presented in terms of perception, sensation, and thought. But experience (in respect to how science is restricted to explaining things) must be yielded by physical agencies (circularly some of its own contents, IOW), their properties and the processes that exploit them in the brain. Rather than a complex "attitude" (story of self) being the cause, which is merely (in methodological naturalism context) another useful pattern riding on the biological "hardware". While qualia, experience, etc are traditionally referenced as private or subjective (thus the knee-jerk attachments to "self"), in a general context the manifestations are also inter-subjective since other humans (and presumably brained animals) produce them as well. Each person has their own individual empirical and intellectual evidence of themselves and the world existing (their own discrete instances of that). But such is grounded in the [general] visual, aural, olfactory, body-sensation presentations which are common to all fully functional people. Qualia don't belong exclusively to a "me", but to a distributed system of mind whose objective regularities outrun the narrow wishes and needs of the individual. To clarify: The only "objective" dimension we actually have access to is the inter-subjectivity of comparing our experiences and further testing those. The completely mind-independent version of "objective" is a practical fiction. Since by the very definition of lacking the intellectual and empirical evidence which minds generate, there would accordingly be nothing exhibited for verification purposes outside of the skull meat's functioning. The verifications of an experiential observer / thinker are obliterated by returning to the non-conscious pool from which it arose [when it dies or has temporary cessation of consciousness]. There's not even an apprehension of blankness, which as mentioned earlier, likewise must be eliminated from our conception of a "non-apprehending" and "non-exhibiting" existence or universe. (The latter being part of what philosophical materialism / physicalism usually signify in the context of their mainstream varieties,).
