Farren

JESSE

Yes, but assuming identical physical systems are possible, does the question "do two identical systems have identical qualia" have an single true answer? If your answer is yes, it seems you must go beyond physical laws to some sort of psychophysical laws


Why? In terms of the scheme I've laid out, all you've said is " two identical systems have identical properties and behaviour".
Que?

Or are you referring to the old "teleportation" problem of "What if I produced an exact replica of you elsewhere in the universe? Would it be you?"

If so, the answer is obviously no, since you are you. But given precisely the same environment, it would have precisely the same experience. There's no deep difficulty with this.

Farren

In fact, the experience I'm talking about is the sum of the infinite number of infinitesmal experiences of a field or wave function - or the sum of the discrete experiences of a digital system, if the universe turns out that way.

Either way, as indicated in the article I referenced, such a "dream" fall could be mapped to a brain state that correlates to a state induced by real falling. Experience in the sense referred to by qualia is not the senses or the deception thereof. Those are the mappable mechanisms, not source of the hard problem for which the utility of the extra term is claimed.

i.e. The sense of falling is an action, and you are dreaming the sense of falling - not experiencing a dream of a sense of falling.

Unfortunately in the context you use it, you're taking one meaning of experience (sense) and substituting it for another meaning (qualia).

I specifically provided an example with a visible action in the real world (actually falling), to make the illustration clear. But moving it back into your skull doesn't change a thing. There is still action by the brain that can be mapped to the qualia, and the term is still excess.

Jesse

Farren:
If so, the answer is obviously no, since you are you. But given precisely the same environment, it would have precisely the same experience. There's no deep difficulty with this.

But how do you know that a physically identical duplicate of me would have identical qualia, while two identical A.I. programs running on physically different computers would have different qualia? It seems to me you need a set of psychophysical laws to decide what aspects of a system's externally measurable aspects must be identical in order for the qualia to be identical.

Farren

Jesse I know what you're getting at cos I've been around and around in my head with this one as well.

There is an unspoken a priori assumption that you're making though, and I tried to raise it earlier.

If they are running on two different systems of hardware they are obviously only the same at the functional level (i.e. emergent behaviour).

The software might produce the same results on the screen and accept the same inputs, but the hardware is different.

Functional behaviour is not what qualia describes. Qualia is the supposed experience of running that software. The mind boggles.

This is a bait and switch: emergent functional behaviour is not qualia. Identical functional behaviour does not philosphically affect the question of qualia

Jesse

Farren, I'm not taking any definite position on whether functionalism is true or false here. I'm just making the point that to take any definite position on what sense two physical systems must be "identical" in order for them to have identical qualia, one is necessarily making assumptions about psychophysical laws, assumptions which are probably impossible to test empirically since there's no way to examine someone else's qualia. And just verbally identifying "actions" with qualia is not specific enough to determine what assumptions you're making about psychophysical laws, either.

Farren

But Jesse, my point was that the term "qualia", like the term "soul", doesn't actually describe anything seperately from being/doing. In every context in which it is used being/doing occurs. So the term is excessive and unnecessary.

Obviously from this position there's no need to argue whether qualia emerges from function or even consider it. The two systems are (being) in a different state and doing different things, whatever the emergent behaviour.

In order for me to consider it necessary to even consider the possibility of qualia emerging from function, you'd have to demonstrate to me how qualia is, in fact different from being/doing.

To recast the rhetoric I offered Dominus Paradoxum earlier: When I compute a sum, why do I flunge computing a sum? Does the flunge of computing a sum emerge at a functional level?

Jesse

Farren:
But Jesse, my point was that the term "qualia", like the term "soul", doesn't actually describe anything seperately from being/doing. In every context in which it is used being/doing occurs. So the term is excessive and unnecessary.

But being/doing are not discrete the way experiences/qualia seem to be. Everything physical process on earth is ultimately interacting with every other one, and yet my experience at this moment seems distinct from your experience, or from my experience 5 seconds ago. As long as you have a notion of discrete experiences, you have to choose what aspect of the physical world you want to identify with a particular experience. For example, can we take any volume of space and say that the physical state of that region at a particular moment defines a particular experience? Or should we be looking at processes over time? Sets of events with causal relationships between them, perhaps? What is the exact meaning of the "being/doing" which you wish to identify with qualia here?

If you don't believe in distinct experiences, then your earlier statement that a physically identical version of me would have identical experiences doesn't really make sense. Even if you had a region as large as the solar system that was identical to our solar system (right down to the photons and other influences that appear to come from outside the region), it might still be that the surroundings of that region were not actually identical to our solar system's surroundings, so if you're not willing to divide up the physical world into discrete chunks of some kind (like a chunk including my brain but nothing outside it) and say there is a one-to-one relationship between these "chunks" and distinct experiences/qualia, then there's no meaningful sense in which you can talk about distinct parts of the universe having "identical qualia", nor is there a sense in which you can talk about distinct parts of the univers having "different qualia"--if qualia are just another word for physical processes, since "physical processes" have no objective boundaries and bleed into one another, you'll have to say qualia do too. Questions like "what is it like to be a bat" can no longer be asked from this perspective, since there'd be no such thing as a bat-experience distinct from the experience I'm having right now.

Farren

Originally posted by Jesse

But being/doing are not discrete the way experiences/qualia seem to be. Everything physical process on earth is ultimately interacting with every other one, and yet my experience at this moment seems distinct from your experience, or from my experience 5 seconds ago.


Your physical state (what you were being/doing) was different 5 seconds ago. No need for a seperate term here.


As long as you have a notion of discrete experiences, you have to choose what aspect of the physical world you want to identify with a particular experience. For example, can we take any volume of space and say that the physical state of that region at a particular moment defines a particular experience?

Or should we be looking at processes over time? Sets of events with causal relationships between them, perhaps? What is the exact meaning of the "being/doing" which you wish to identify with qualia here?

If you don't believe in distinct experiences, then your earlier statement that a physically identical version of me would have identical experiences doesn't really make sense. Even if you had a region as large as the solar system that was identical to our solar system (right down to the photons and other influences that appear to come from outside the region), it might still be that the surroundings of that region were not actually identical to our solar system's surroundings, so if you're not willing to divide up the physical world into discrete chunks of some kind (like a chunk including my brain but nothing outside it) and say there is a one-to-one relationship between these "chunks" and distinct experiences/qualia, then there's no meaningful sense in which you can talk about distinct parts of the universe having "identical qualia", nor is there a sense in which you can talk about distinct parts of the univers having "different qualia"--if qualia are just another word for physical processes, since "physical processes" have no objective boundaries and bleed into one another, you'll have to say qualia do too. Questions like "what is it like to be a bat" can no longer be asked from this perspective, since there'd be no such thing as a bat-experience distinct from the experience I'm having right now.

Physical processes bleed into each other. Exactly. Why assume they don't?

What I started out with is that you have an a priori assumption that "Jesse" experiences something but "Jesse and the room Jesse is in as a single entity" does not.

But if you assume that "Jesse and the room" experiences something, and "Jesse and the house" experiences something and "Jesse and the entire country" experiences something, the problem falls away entirely.

In the reverse direction, "Jesse's lungs" experience something, and "The alveoli of Jesses Lungs" experience something.

From this assumption, it naturally follows that the experience of "Jesse's lungs" is not the experience of "Jesse". Neither is the experience of "Jesse and the room". So these are closed to "Jesse".

This has more logical economy than assuming a special state for Jesse.

As soon as you do this, qualia dissolves into the being/doing state of an arbitrary section of a wave function. It has far more logical economy than assuming some special quality for a particular level of material organisation and Occam's razor demands that I assume the more economic explanation until the less economical one is shown to have any utility whatsoever.

In your statement about context:


it might still be that the surroundings of that region were not actually identical to our solar system's surroundings,


You must consider that the way in which anything is "experienced" is by interacting with it. So if you have an identical system in a different environment, the way it will "experience" that environment is to interact with it, which would instantaneuosly make its state non-identical to something in a different environment.

This is why I said earlier:


But given precisely the same environment, it would have precisely the same experience.


Failing that, it would not.

Furthermore, the experience of which I speak can always be shown to consist of a physical interaction (photons hitting rods and cones. Neurons exchanging neurotransmitters), hence any sentence structured

I experienced x

can be restructured

I x'd

I can see possible objections arising out of the semantic possibilities of English, like the fact that you can't transform

I experienced red

to

I redded

But that is an English structural problem rather than a problem with the underlying reasoning, because the transform

I experienced seeing red

to

I saw red

is possible, where the latter case is a demonstrable action.

Jesse

Farren:
Physical processes bleed into each other. Exactly. Why assume they don't?

What I started out with is that you have an a priori assumption that "Jesse" experiences something but "Jesse and the room Jesse is in as a single entity" does not.

But if you assume that "Jesse and the room" experiences something, and "Jesse and the house" experiences something and "Jesse and the entire country" experiences something, the problem falls away entirely.

In the reverse direction, "Jesse's lungs" experience something, and "The alveoli of Jesses Lungs" experience something.

From this assumption, it naturally follows that the experience of "Jesse's lungs" is not the experience of "Jesse". Neither is the experience of "Jesse and the room". So these are closed to "Jesse".

This has more logical economy than assuming a special state for Jesse.

As soon as you do this, qualia dissolves into the being/doing state of an arbitrary section of a wave function. It has far more logical economy than assuming some special quality for a particular level of material organisation and Occam's razor demands that I assume the more economic explanation until the less economical one is shown to have any utility whatsoever.

You're totally misunderstanding my point here. Since I think some sort of panpsychism is the most plausible solution to the qualia problem, I completely agree that "Jesse + room", properly defined, would have a different experience from "Jesse", just as my right brain alone (or any other random subsection of my brain) might be having a different experience from my whole brain. But "properly defined" is the key--my point was that words like "Jesse", "Jesse+room" are all too vague, they don't uniquely decide whether a particular particle/event/whatever is being included as part of the "system" you're talking about or not. And if you want a way of slicing up the universe more precisely and saying that for each possible slice, that slice represents a particular distinct experience, you need psychophysical laws which are more precise than just verbally equating vaguely-defined names for physical entities like "Jesse" with a particular distinct experience. This is even more obvious if you want to talk about the idea that two slices of the universe can have identical qualia--you need a particular set of criteria for what sense these two slices must be isomorphic (for example, I take it you wouldn't say they need to involve the same region of space).

There are multiple possible ways one could imagine slicing up the universe. One could take a region of space with very precisely-defined boundaries (right down to the planck length), and say that the quantum state of everything within that region at a particular instant in time corresponds to a particular set of qualia, and that all possible slices of space represent all the distinct experiences in the universe. Then if two regions in different parts of the universe have precisely the same quantum state, they could have identical qualia. But another alternative would be to take regions of spacetime instead of just spatial slices. Another alternative would be to forget about space and just look at sets of "events" (which may have a precise definition if space and time turn out to be discrete in quantum gravity), possibly with the requirement that all the events in the set are causally connected to all the others in the set. Each such set would correspond to a particular experience, and perhaps "identical qualia" would be described in terms of something like topologically identical sets of interconnected events (like two connect-the-dots patterns where it's possible to match up their vertices and edges). In this case two physically distinct computers running the same program might indeed contain two identical causal patterns and thus give rise to identical experiences, even though they would also contain many other causal patterns which were not identical. Again, it all depends on how you slice up the physical world, and taking any definite stand on the "right" way to slice it up involves making some postulates about psychophysical laws, postulates which it seems unlikely could ever be tested empirically.

Farren

Originally posted by Jesse
If I say, "this applies to a piece of string of any length", then I have properly defined what is included in the "system" if this definition yields the properties required for the propositions applied to it to be sensible.

In other words I might claim that given a piece of string of any length, one can assume that it is not water, and that it has mass, for instance.

For the purposes of my propositions, my definition serves. Perhaps not for yours. But I submit that your proposition assumes at least one thing: that there is a quality (qualia) to be discussed, that can be shown to be distinct from doing/being. This assumption hasn't been demonstrated.

I make no such assumption, and my definition (being/doing) can be applied to a piece of string of any length.

Furthermore, I haven't simply sucked the definition out of my thumb. I've rendered it down from the the logical form of every statement about qualia I can remember reading or hearing.

What you've failed to provide, is a non-tautological definition of qualia that would break the propositions and offer utility for the term. Instead, your statements assume the term to have utility and comment on how we should deal with it.

Let me rephrase your own words, with substitution only for the terms "experience" and "qualia" (emphasised):

Can you see it?

Ok. You might feel this is like taking the sentence

All alsations are dogs

and substituting

All dogs are dogs

to show the term "alsation" is excess.

But a number of statements can be constructed where this consistent substitution cannot be done, demonstrating that the term provides a useful concept:

All Alsations are medium to large dogs bred over the last 700-odd years from a particular species of wolf in the Alsace-Lorraine region.

yields

All dogs are medium to large dogs bred over the last 700-odd years from a particular species of wolf in the Alsace-Lorraine region.

Wrong.

No such utility can be demonstrated for qualia