Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Jesse · 06-20-2003, 04:29 PM

Farren, I agree that some kind of panpsychism seems like the most elegant solution to the problem of qualia, but what would you say to someone who denies that certain types of objects/processes/actions (like random thermal interactions between atoms in a rock) are in any sense conscious, and who sees consciousness as a "fuzzy", observer-dependent quality, like "cuteness"? (Daniel Dennet has made this analogy a few times, in this article for example) To me it seems clear that the fact that I have subjective experiences is an "objective" truth about reality, that even if everyone in the universe agreed that I did not fit their criteria for consciousness I would still really be conscious, whereas I don't believe there's a meaningful sense in which maggots could "really" be cute even if no one thinks they are...but since there are a lot of smart people who disagree, it seems like this isn't something you can take for granted when making the argument for panpsychism.

Also, even if you accept the logic of panpsychism it seems you still need some sort of "psychophysical laws" to deal with questions like, what has to be the same about two systems for them to be having identical experiences? Intuitively I'd favor the "functionalist" view that two identical A.I. programs running on different machines would be having identical experiences (assume the programs are deterministic, and the A.I.s are inhabiting identical simulated worlds with no external inputs), but this alone suggests a certain point of view about how the "psychophysical laws" would work, a point of view different from someone who says two systems have to be physically identical in every respect to have the same experiences (we can run the same computer program on physically different computers, like a Mac vs. an IBM). And the problem of deciding when two systems are instantiating the same abstract algorithm is rather tricky in itself, as you can see from the article Does a Rock Implement Every Finite-State Automaton by David Chalmers.

Farren · 06-20-2003, 05:40 PM

Its a similar problem to the one raised by Thomas Nagel in his essay on "being" a bat, but relatively easy to deal with.

The problem is that the description of the thing is not the thing, so the human description of a class called "human" does not make all human's the same, or all human consciousnesses.

Its exactly the same error as trying to reconcile observed behaviour with qualia. Classes of things simply don't exist in the physical universe. They're utilities of speech to allow a "trimming" of dissimilarities for more concise communication.

The panpsychism (nice term btw) idea is that nothing has the same experience as anything else, although they may share emergent qualities.

Jesse · 06-20-2003, 06:39 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Farren
The panpsychism (nice term btw) idea is that nothing has the same experience as anything else, although they may share emergent qualities.

"Panpsychism" isn't my term, and I don't think all panpsychists would agree that there's no such thing as identical experiences. Again, imagine two identical, deterministic A.I. simulations--it seems to me that if the two act in precisely identical ways, say and do the same things at the same moment, right down to identical behavior of every one of their simulated neurons, then it would be strange to suppose that they are having different experiences. It would be even stranger if you imagine something like two identical people in two regions of space as large as the observable universe with precisely the same physical state, down to the last subatomic particle (if space and time are quantized this should occasionally happen in an infinite universe). If you said the experiences of identical-acting systems were nevertheless somewhat different, wouldn't that imply that there is not a one-to-one relationship between "actions" (or processes, or patterns of cause-and-effect, or whatever term you want to use for the objectively describable aspect of minds) and subjective experiences?

Farren · 06-20-2003, 07:14 PM

Originally posted by Jesse
"Panpsychism" isn't my term, and I don't think all panpsychists would agree that there's no such thing as identical experiences.
Oops, I meant what i was trying to get across. Didn't mean to hijack an entire other philosophy

Again, imagine two identical, deterministic A.I. simulations--it seems to me that if the two act in precisely identical ways, say and do the same things at the same moment, right down to identical behavior of every one of their simulated neurons, then it would be strange to suppose that they are having different experiences. It would be even stranger if you imagine something like two identical people in two regions of space as large as the observable universe with precisely the same physical state, down to the last subatomic particle (if space and time are quantized this should occasionally happen in an infinite universe). If you said the experiences of identical-acting systems were nevertheless somewhat different, wouldn't that imply that there is not a one-to-one relationship between "actions" (or processes, or patterns of cause-and-effect, or whatever term you want to use for the objectively describable aspect of minds) and subjective experiences?

The reason I don't see a problem is that your earlier post assumes that the experience of experiencing happens at a higher, functional level, whereas the point of my earlier posts is that it is simplest to assume it happens at the most infinitesmal level at which any action can take place, which in a wave/field based cosmology has no lower limit. By this infinitesmal scale, a single-molecule component might as well be a galaxy.

Also, by extension since a wave function is continuous, it happens at every infinitesmal gradient of scale from the parts to the thing that acts.

While I don't dispute the utility of meta-explanations like psychology, they aren't required for the purposes of qualia raised in the OP. You certainly don't need a psychology of rocks and rivers.

With regard to reduction to some lowest limit of quantum physics, I must respectfully submit that this is conceived from misunderstandings of quantum physics.

While certain phenomena, such as the energy of a electron, may only change in "digital" quanta, a vast number of other dimensions of the same theory require continuous, non-quantized wave functions and fields.

In fact the quantized jumps in energy of electrons can be be understood as a requirement that the continuous wave function of an electron must remain a standing wave, which can only occur at discrete lengths.

So unfortunately within current theory there is no lower limit or "snap-to" grid for the universe.

Furthermore, the role and description of time in modern cosmology results in any element of the universe being a construct of its entire history. While fine as a thought experiment, you can't actually pluck an electron from any one thing and substitute it with one from another as still have the same thing because of quantum entanglement.

This trick only works when describing macroscopic emergent qualities, and if qualia/experience/action is a universal and infinitesmal quality, it doesn't apply.

Jesse · 06-20-2003, 08:04 PM

Farren:
With regard to reduction to some lowest limit of quantum physics, I must respectfully submit that this is conceived from misunderstandings of quantum physics.

While certain phenomena, such as the energy of a electron, may only change in "digital" quanta, a vast number of other dimensions of the same theory require continuous, non-quantized wave functions and fields.

I realize that this is true of our current models of quantum theory, but there are many clues from quantum gravity that our ultimate theory will turn out to be wholly discrete, such as the Planck scale limit on meaningful measures of distance and time, or the Bekenstein bound on the amount of information that can be contained in a region of space (see this article by Lee Smolin which talks a bit about the Bekenstein bound and discrete theories of quantum gravity). I'm not sure if a majority of theorists suspect quantum gravity will be a discrete theory, but certainly a significant number of prominent ones do. If it was, would this change any aspects of your position on qualia, and in particular on identical subjective experiences?

Farren:
Furthermore, the role and description of time in modern cosmology results in any element of the universe being a construct of its entire history. While fine as a thought experiment, you can't actually pluck an electron from any one thing and substitute it with one from another as still have the same thing because of quantum entanglement.

This trick only works when describing macroscopic emergent qualities, and if qualia/experience/action is a universal and infinitesmal quality, it doesn't apply.

My understanding is that the Bekenstein bound implies that it is possible for two regions of space to be in an identical quantum state. Max Tegmark, a physicist who wrote a recent Scientific American article on parallel universes, also suggests this in this paragraph, where he explains why, if the universe is spatially infinite, there should be a Hubble volume of space identical to our own within 10^10^118 meters away:

Quote:

These are extremely conservative estimates, derived simply by counting all possible quantum states that a Hubble volume can have if it is no hotter than 108 kelvins. One way to do the calculation is to ask how many protons could be packed into a Hubble volume at that temperature. The answer is 10118 protons. Each of those particles may or may not, in fact, be present, which makes for 2 to the 10118 possible arrangements of protons. A box containing that many Hubble volumes exhausts all the possibilities. If you round off the numbers, such a box is about 10 to the 10118 meters across. Beyond that box, universes--including ours--must repeat. Roughly the same number could be derived by using thermodynamic or quantum-gravitational estimates of the total information content of the universe.

I'm pretty sure that last sentence about "using thermodynamic or quantum-gravitational estimates of the total information content of the universe" refers to a calculation based on the Bekenstein bound, which is related to both thermodynamics and quantum gravity.

Dominus Paradoxum · 06-20-2003, 08:15 PM

But I think what you're failing to address is how qualia could just be a certain sort of action or whatever it you call it. You can no more just assume that an experience is "identical" to a certain sort of action than you can just assume that a rock "just is" a that pineapple. Einstein didn't have to contravene any logical laws with his thesis, and I think that's the big difference between you two.

Farren · 06-21-2003, 12:22 PM

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Jesse

I realize that this is true of our current models of quantum theory, but there are many clues from quantum gravity that our ultimate theory will turn out to be wholly discrete, such as the Planck scale limit on meaningful measures of distance and time, or the Bekenstein bound on the amount of information that can be contained in a region of space (see this article by Lee Smolin which talks a bit about the Bekenstein bound and discrete theories of quantum gravity). I'm not sure if a majority of theorists suspect quantum gravity will be a discrete theory, but certainly a significant number of prominent ones do. If it was, would this change any aspects of your position on qualia, and in particular on identical subjective experiences?

I've given this a little thought, and my answer would in fact me no, it wouldn't. The idea I was trying to put across was that any description of qualia, or experience can be a description of action or behaviour.

So theres an excess of unecessary terms. Furthermore, since the problem, as I indicated is that these terms (action/qualia) are actually being set up as a dichotomy, the "problem" lies in the way the issue is couched.

My understanding is that the Bekenstein bound implies that it is possible for two regions of space to be in an identical quantum state. Max Tegmark, a physicist who wrote a recent Scientific American article on parallel universes, also suggests this in this paragraph, where he explains why, if the universe is spatially infinite, there should be a Hubble volume of space identical to our own within 10^10^118 meters away:

I'm pretty sure that last sentence about "using thermodynamic or quantum-gravitational estimates of the total information content of the universe" refers to a calculation based on the Bekenstein bound, which is related to both thermodynamics and quantum gravity.

See above, same reasoning. Identical behaviour would not make qualia any more of a problem.

Once again, I'm not implying the qualia/experience/behaviour of a rock is the same as that of a human, but that's self evident when you collapse the concepts, and hardly a problem at all. Neither is the observation of the action the same - and that's not problematic either, just logical.

On the issue of why the experience of a human is of a particular nature (how it behaves) - if you read the article I referenced, the author indicates that this is not, in fact, the so called "hard problem" of qualia. Only the "why" do you experience the behaviour is, and that's resolved by acknowledging that its just the behaviour itself. i.e. You move because you move. You love because you love.

Farren · 06-21-2003, 12:31 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Dominus Paradoxum
But I think what you're failing to address is how qualia could just be a certain sort of action or whatever it you call it. You can no more just assume that an experience is "identical" to a certain sort of action than you can just assume that a rock "just is" a that pineapple. Einstein didn't have to contravene any logical laws with his thesis, and I think that's the big difference between you two.

Of course there is. I've got a brain the size of Jupiter, only denser

I'm not failing to address it at all. What I perhaps failed to summarise (although I did try to indicate it with the ant farm analogy) is the "action" I'm referring to is both the action of existing and the action of doing. i.e. "Being you falling", not simply "falling". Now since the experience of being you falling is always accompanied by the action of being you falling, logical economy implies that there is no distinction between the two, and one concept is excess.

Otherwise you'd have to qualify the distinction between the foobar of me loving and me loving. Or the smurgle of me falling, which is a troublesome concept indeed.

Dominus Paradoxum · 06-21-2003, 01:23 PM

Quote:

[*Snip*]Now since the experience of being you falling is always accompanied by the action of being you falling,

Not so:

1. You might have the experience of falling without actually falling in a dream. I know I have. And you can't say that that's not really an experience of falling without begging the question at issue. For if that's what you mean, you're only using a play on the words "experience of" and win by tautology. "Experience" does not necessarily mean veridical experience.

2. If you were unconscious (or dead) while your body was actually falling you would not have the experience of falling.

Since the action of falling and the experience of it are dissociable, I conclude that they are in fact distinct

.

Jesse · 06-21-2003, 03:53 PM

Farren:
On the issue of why the experience of a human is of a particular nature (how it behaves) - if you read the article I referenced, the author indicates that this is not, in fact, the so called "hard problem" of qualia. Only the "why" do you experience the behaviour is, and that's resolved by acknowledging that its just the behaviour itself. i.e. You move because you move. You love because you love.

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--you can't just solve the problem by verbally equating behaviors with qualia. And if the answer is no, there is no single answer, than I think your position would be dismissing the position that qualia and consciousness are "objective" in some sense, making it into something more like "cuteness" (most people don't think there's a single objectively true answer to the question of whether two fluffy animals are precisely equal in cuteness).

06-20-2003, 08:15 PM	#16
Dominus Paradoxum Veteran Member Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: California Posts: 1,000	To Farren: But I think what you're failing to address is how qualia could just be a certain sort of action or whatever it you call it. You can no more just assume that an experience is "identical" to a certain sort of action than you can just assume that a rock "just is" a that pineapple. Einstein didn't have to contravene any logical laws with his thesis, and I think that's the big difference between you two.

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06-20-2003, 04:29 PM	#11
Jesse Moderator - Science Discussions Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: Providence, RI, USA Posts: 9,908	Farren, I agree that some kind of panpsychism seems like the most elegant solution to the problem of qualia, but what would you say to someone who denies that certain types of objects/processes/actions (like random thermal interactions between atoms in a rock) are in any sense conscious, and who sees consciousness as a "fuzzy", observer-dependent quality, like "cuteness"? (Daniel Dennet has made this analogy a few times, in this article for example) To me it seems clear that the fact that I have subjective experiences is an "objective" truth about reality, that even if everyone in the universe agreed that I did not fit their criteria for consciousness I would still really be conscious, whereas I don't believe there's a meaningful sense in which maggots could "really" be cute even if no one thinks they are...but since there are a lot of smart people who disagree, it seems like this isn't something you can take for granted when making the argument for panpsychism. Also, even if you accept the logic of panpsychism it seems you still need some sort of "psychophysical laws" to deal with questions like, what has to be the same about two systems for them to be having identical experiences? Intuitively I'd favor the "functionalist" view that two identical A.I. programs running on different machines would be having identical experiences (assume the programs are deterministic, and the A.I.s are inhabiting identical simulated worlds with no external inputs), but this alone suggests a certain point of view about how the "psychophysical laws" would work, a point of view different from someone who says two systems have to be physically identical in every respect to have the same experiences (we can run the same computer program on physically different computers, like a Mac vs. an IBM). And the problem of deciding when two systems are instantiating the same abstract algorithm is rather tricky in itself, as you can see from the article Does a Rock Implement Every Finite-State Automaton by David Chalmers.

06-20-2003, 05:40 PM	#12
Farren Veteran Member Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: South Africa Posts: 2,194	Its a similar problem to the one raised by Thomas Nagel in his essay on "being" a bat, but relatively easy to deal with. The problem is that the description of the thing is not the thing, so the human description of a class called "human" does not make all human's the same, or all human consciousnesses. Its exactly the same error as trying to reconcile observed behaviour with qualia. Classes of things simply don't exist in the physical universe. They're utilities of speech to allow a "trimming" of dissimilarities for more concise communication. The panpsychism (nice term btw) idea is that nothing has the same experience as anything else, although they may share emergent qualities.

06-20-2003, 07:14 PM	#14
Farren Veteran Member Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: South Africa Posts: 2,194	Originally posted by Jesse "Panpsychism" isn't my term, and I don't think all panpsychists would agree that there's no such thing as identical experiences. Oops, I meant what i was trying to get across. Didn't mean to hijack an entire other philosophy Again, imagine two identical, deterministic A.I. simulations--it seems to me that if the two act in precisely identical ways, say and do the same things at the same moment, right down to identical behavior of every one of their simulated neurons, then it would be strange to suppose that they are having different experiences. It would be even stranger if you imagine something like two identical people in two regions of space as large as the observable universe with precisely the same physical state, down to the last subatomic particle (if space and time are quantized this should occasionally happen in an infinite universe). If you said the experiences of identical-acting systems were nevertheless somewhat different, wouldn't that imply that there is not a one-to-one relationship between "actions" (or processes, or patterns of cause-and-effect, or whatever term you want to use for the objectively describable aspect of minds) and subjective experiences? The reason I don't see a problem is that your earlier post assumes that the experience of experiencing happens at a higher, functional level, whereas the point of my earlier posts is that it is simplest to assume it happens at the most infinitesmal level at which any action can take place, which in a wave/field based cosmology has no lower limit. By this infinitesmal scale, a single-molecule component might as well be a galaxy. Also, by extension since a wave function is continuous, it happens at every infinitesmal gradient of scale from the parts to the thing that acts. While I don't dispute the utility of meta-explanations like psychology, they aren't required for the purposes of qualia raised in the OP. You certainly don't need a psychology of rocks and rivers. With regard to reduction to some lowest limit of quantum physics, I must respectfully submit that this is conceived from misunderstandings of quantum physics. While certain phenomena, such as the energy of a electron, may only change in "digital" quanta, a vast number of other dimensions of the same theory require continuous, non-quantized wave functions and fields. In fact the quantized jumps in energy of electrons can be be understood as a requirement that the continuous wave function of an electron must remain a standing wave, which can only occur at discrete lengths. So unfortunately within current theory there is no lower limit or "snap-to" grid for the universe. Furthermore, the role and description of time in modern cosmology results in any element of the universe being a construct of its entire history. While fine as a thought experiment, you can't actually pluck an electron from any one thing and substitute it with one from another as still have the same thing because of quantum entanglement. This trick only works when describing macroscopic emergent qualities, and if qualia/experience/action is a universal and infinitesmal quality, it doesn't apply.

06-21-2003, 12:22 PM	#17
Farren Veteran Member Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: South Africa Posts: 2,194	[QUOTE]Originally posted by Jesse I realize that this is true of our current models of quantum theory, but there are many clues from quantum gravity that our ultimate theory will turn out to be wholly discrete, such as the Planck scale limit on meaningful measures of distance and time, or the Bekenstein bound on the amount of information that can be contained in a region of space (see this article by Lee Smolin which talks a bit about the Bekenstein bound and discrete theories of quantum gravity). I'm not sure if a majority of theorists suspect quantum gravity will be a discrete theory, but certainly a significant number of prominent ones do. If it was, would this change any aspects of your position on qualia, and in particular on identical subjective experiences? I've given this a little thought, and my answer would in fact me no, it wouldn't. The idea I was trying to put across was that any description of qualia, or experience can be a description of action or behaviour. So theres an excess of unecessary terms. Furthermore, since the problem, as I indicated is that these terms (action/qualia) are actually being set up as a dichotomy, the "problem" lies in the way the issue is couched. My understanding is that the Bekenstein bound implies that it is possible for two regions of space to be in an identical quantum state. Max Tegmark, a physicist who wrote a recent Scientific American article on parallel universes, also suggests this in this paragraph, where he explains why, if the universe is spatially infinite, there should be a Hubble volume of space identical to our own within 10^10^118 meters away: I'm pretty sure that last sentence about "using thermodynamic or quantum-gravitational estimates of the total information content of the universe" refers to a calculation based on the Bekenstein bound, which is related to both thermodynamics and quantum gravity. See above, same reasoning. Identical behaviour would not make qualia any more of a problem. Once again, I'm not implying the qualia/experience/behaviour of a rock is the same as that of a human, but that's self evident when you collapse the concepts, and hardly a problem at all. Neither is the observation of the action the same - and that's not problematic either, just logical. On the issue of why the experience of a human is of a particular nature (how it behaves) - if you read the article I referenced, the author indicates that this is not, in fact, the so called "hard problem" of qualia. Only the "why" do you experience the behaviour is, and that's resolved by acknowledging that its just the behaviour itself. i.e. You move because you move. You love because you love.

06-21-2003, 03:53 PM	#20
Jesse Moderator - Science Discussions Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: Providence, RI, USA Posts: 9,908	Farren: On the issue of why the experience of a human is of a particular nature (how it behaves) - if you read the article I referenced, the author indicates that this is not, in fact, the so called "hard problem" of qualia. Only the "why" do you experience the behaviour is, and that's resolved by acknowledging that its just the behaviour itself. i.e. You move because you move. You love because you love. 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--you can't just solve the problem by verbally equating behaviors with qualia. And if the answer is no, there is no single answer, than I think your position would be dismissing the position that qualia and consciousness are "objective" in some sense, making it into something more like "cuteness" (most people don't think there's a single objectively true answer to the question of whether two fluffy animals are precisely equal in cuteness).

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