John Page

I happen to like qualia, although I'm not sure whether I'm justified or not. Here's why:

1. Sense data arrives at the "surface of the mind", if you will.
2. There are certain measurable "raw" or "natural" qualities inherent in that data such as redness, hardness etc. I agree that in these examples there is no need for qualia - why substitute for the real thing?
3. As we understand our environment we ascribe some very esoteric qualities to certain aspects of it. For example, "The politics of the middle east are very complicated." The words "politics" and "complicated" are not natural sense data in the same way as the example in #2.
4. In making statements like "There are some politics involved" or "This is a complicated issue" it seems that we have invented compound non-material qualities in order to describe reality.

Thus, while I don't admit qualia as being a mysterious set of additional qualities of reality I think they can be useful in a mind/brain duality debate. In my mind , qualia are highly abstract qualities of reality that we have learned to share and understand intersubjectively. Nevertheless, I believe their existence is dependent on the phenomenal operation of the brain and qualia can be used in developing an ontology for how we know things are "complicated" and "political" etc.

Comments? Cheers, John

MyKell

If the conditions required for consciousness to emerge are pinned down in the not-so-far future. Do you think that we will be able to build machines that are conscious?
I think Edelman has made some progress in his Darwin VII machines... here is an abstract from one of his papers:

Machine psychology: autonomous behavior, perceptual categorization and conditioning in a brain-based device.
Krichmar JL, Edelman GM.

W.M. Keck Laboratory, The Neurosciences Institute, 10640 John Jay Hopkins Drive, San Diego, CA 92121, USA. krichmar@nsi.edu

In studying brain activity during the behavior of living animals, it is not possible simultaneously to analyze all levels of control from molecular events to motor responses. To provide insights into how levels of control interact, we have carried out synthetic neural modeling using a brain-based real-world device. We describe here the design and performance of such a device, designated Darwin VII, which is guided by computer-simulated analogues of cortical and subcortical structures. All levels of Darwin VII's neural architecture can be examined simultaneously as the device behaves in a real environment. Analysis of its neural activity during perceptual categorization and conditioned behavior suggests neural mechanisms for invariant object recognition, experience-dependent perceptual categorization, first-order and second-order conditioning, and the effects of different learning rates on responses to appetitive and aversive events. While individual Darwin VII exemplars developed similar categorical responses that depended on exploration of the environment and sensorimotor adaptation, each showed highly individual patterns of changes in synaptic strengths. By allowing exhaustive analysis and manipulation of neuroanatomy and large-scale neural dynamics, such brain-based devices provide valuable heuristics for understanding cortical interactions. These devices also provide the groundwork for the development of intelligent machines that follow neurobiological rather than computational principles in their construction.

crocodile deathroll

LOL Yes you were right the grammer was wrong
IMO consciousness is an emergent property of genetic promoting! (oh dammit! I meant promting) like the basic scaffolding of the brain was genetically determined, and individualized consciousness emerged later.

I post that in a hell of a rush.

Frotiw

This is highly problematic. How will you expect conditions for consciosness to be pinned down. Under what conditions would describe a "sysem" that being organic or inorganic as being consciosness? To mark my point is Commander Data(Star Trek) consciosness? Would could that be proved? He act like humans that are conscios but this does not prove him consciosness. It's not terribly hard to manufacture a machine that can respond to inviromental inputs. You could e.g. make a machine that screams whenever someone "hurts" it, that is e.g. kick it. What will happend are some electrical/mechanical actions. When we get kicked(hurt) some bioelectrical action happens in the physical brain but besides the electrical action we also feel pain. You cannot establish that the machine also will have this feeling when a similar electric/mechanical actions happens here. The feeling is part of what we call consciosness. Oh this does not mean I am a dualist however it just means I upholde a critical view on the possibility of explaining consciousness in a traditionel natualistic framework. The current researchers of consciousness on the naturalistic side(neurocognitives) seems to be attempting to explain 1st person as 3rd person. Subjectivity as objectivitity. This is obviosly not possible. The elimination of either sides are equally problematic though we do want to explain this and get wiser. In short this problem carries the classical properties of a philosophical problem.

crocodile deathroll

Who was it that said "I will believe that a computer is conscious if it runs off with my wife"?

I just found it, it was the psychologist Stuart Sutherland quoted here by Susan Greenfield in this interview

MyKell

If there is no metaphysical soul, and consciousness is explained by physical processes (regardless if the explanation came from cognitive sciences, molecular neurosicence, quantum mechanics, or all combined) then I would suppose that we can simulate those conditions on a highly sophisticated computer. As shown in Edelman's article I cited, the use of selectional rules in building machines gets them closer to perform "brain-like behaviour" like perceptual categorization. He did that, just by using a value system, which on a much more sophistacated level corresponds to what makes up our emotions. I see endless possibilities of simulations as our knowledge in the science of consciousness expands.
Marvin Minsky once wrote a beautiful article about that. "Will robots inherit the earth?"
Regarding Frotiw's notion about how could we know that Data in startrek and thus a machine is conscious, I have a question.
How could you know that anybody is conscious? or is feeling what you feel when they're hurt? Consciousness, by definition, is a private experience.

Neilium

To dunk into Wittgenstein, you can't verify the existence of anyone else's pain, let alone a machine's. They can look hurt, the x-ray could be gruesome, an EEG can indicate that neurons are firing off like mad in the "I'm in pain" part of the brain, they can tell you they're in pain, but it remains unverifiable that they are "feeling" pain.

Couldn't that pain be a part of our "programming"? Is our feeling of pain really any different than your machine's programmed response to scream when kicked?

There are people who don't feel pain. (in light of the above, I should say they claim not to feel pain, and they certainly carry on like they can't feel pain. I doubt we can verify the non-existence of pain in others, either.) It's rare, but it happens, and without the disincentive of headaches, sores and the blinding agony of broken bones, people who have this neurological anomaly often die young. They are perhaps victims of flawed programming.

To sum up, I don't think that's a good test for consiousness, in that the measure is solely what we consider consiousness to be. If a machine as advanced as ST TNG's Data is ever built, to dismiss it as not concious because it doesn't feel pain the way you or I do, or it doesn't see blue the same way we do would be tantamount to calling someone illiterate because they can't speak your language.

That's all I got for now.

-Neil

MyKell

Neil, thanks for the analogy! My point exactly

John Page

But we might verify the conditions for pain to be felt. If people don't feel pain due to some abnormality then, experientially, the pain is not there and not all the conditions have been met (or they're lieing).

Cheers, John

crocodile deathroll

I wonder if the conscious computer started to get bored would you observe it playing Solitare?