Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Jesse · 06-22-2003, 01:55 PM

Farren:
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.

One of the main arguments is that it would be possible to know the complete physical state of a system without knowing "what it is like to be" that system--this was what Nagel was saying in his What is it like to be a bat paper. His paper would not make much sense if you tried substituting a term like "physical state" in every time he talked about "experience" or some other such term. Another is that it seems logically possible for a given process, such as the computations going on in a person's brain, to happen without any accompanying subjective "what it is like to be that process", even if there's some sort of metaphysical law that prevents this from actually being possible in reality. Finally, there is the argument I have been making here, that it seems like there should be a definite truth about whether two identical A.I. simulations give rise to the same qualia, while from your point of view there should be no real truth of the matter, it would just depend on an arbitrary choice about whether to define the words "same qualia" as "identical physical state within a certain volume" or "isomorphic network of causally interconnected events" or some other more precise way of defining the words "same process" (maybe not 'process', but whatever word you'd use to describe the idea of two instances of 'doing/being' which are the 'same'). Anyway, I'm sure you're familiar with many of these types of arguments. I think I was just misunderstanding your position--in terms of the way I understand the word "qualia" you are actually denying the existence of qualia, even if you are not doing so under your own, distinct definition of the word.

Farren · 06-22-2003, 02:49 PM

One of the main arguments is that it would be possible to know the complete physical state of a system without knowing "what it is like to be" that system--this was what Nagel was saying in his What is it like to be a bat paper. His paper would not make much sense if you tried substituting a term like "physical state" in every time he talked about "experience" or some other such term.

I've read it a few times, thx

But... since its been a while I went back and scanned it again. I tried the experiment with substitution and found that it works for 95% of the essay.

And where it doesn't work...

Quote:

It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing

its because he doesn't qualify what difference in quality he's talking about. I mean the whole essay is about why we can't know what its like to be something else, and here he is making assertions about what its like to be the robot!

He simply posits

There exists a quality A
We've got it
Robots don't

No demonstration provided. This sounds like an argument for the soul to me. My arguments attack his premises, not the fallacies he's embroidered out of them.

Another is that it seems logically possible for a given process, such as the computations going on in a person's brain, to happen without any accompanying subjective "what it is like to be that process", even if there's some sort of metaphysical law that prevents this from actually being possible in reality.

Recast, since I'm positing that experiencing is being:

Quote:

Another is that it seems logically possible for a given process, such as the computations going on in a person's brain, to happen without happening, even if there's some sort of metaphysical law that prevents this from actually being possible in reality.

Finally, there is the argument I have been making here, that it seems like there should be a definite truth about whether two identical A.I. simulations give rise to the same qualia, while from your point of view there should be no real truth of the matter, it would just depend on an arbitrary choice about whether to define the words "same qualia" as "identical physical state within a certain volume" or "isomorphic network of causally interconnected events" or some other more precise way of defining the words "same process" (maybe not 'process', but whatever word you'd use to describe the idea of two instances of 'doing/being' which are the 'same').

Perhaps if you expand on the utility of these questions, I might see a use for the concept of qualia. If the issue is simply philosophical consistency - well, that's the entire reason I consider qualia excess...

Anyway, I'm sure you're familiar with many of these types of arguments. I think I was just misunderstanding your position--in terms of the way I understand the word "qualia" you are actually denying the existence of qualia, even if you are not doing so under your own, distinct definition of the word.

That is correct

Farren · 06-22-2003, 03:06 PM

One comment I'd like to make is that I'm not making a radical behaviourist style argument that we don't experience anything.

Rather, I'm saying if you make the simple and economical assumption that subjective experience is the same thing as simply existing, a whole slew of mindbending concepts just collapse into an elegantly simple understanding - and no demonstrably useful information is lost

Jesse · 06-22-2003, 03:36 PM

Farren:
But... since its been a while I went back and scanned it again. I tried the experiment with substitution and found that it works for 95% of the essay.

Could you show me what words you'd substitute in this section, for example?

Quote:

But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism. There may be further implications about the form of the experience; there may even (though I doubt it) be implications about the behavior of the organism. But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism�something it is like for the organism.

Or how about this:

Quote:

This bears directly on the mind-body problem. For if the facts of experience�facts about what it is like for the experiencing organism�are accessible only from one point of view, then it is a mystery how the true character of experiences could be revealed in the physical operation of that organism. The latter is a domain of objective facts par excellence�the kind that can be observed and understood from many points of view and by individuals with differing perceptual systems. There are no comparable imaginative obstacles to the acquisition of knowledge about bat neurophysiology by human scientists, and intelligent bats or Martians might learn more about the human brain than we ever will.

This is not by itself an argument against reduction. A Martian scientist with no understanding of visual perception could understand the rainbow, or lightning, or clouds as physical phenomena, though he would never be able to understand the human concepts of rainbow, lightning, or cloud, or the place these things occupy in our phenomenal world. The objective nature of the things picked out by these concepts could be apprehended by him because, although the concepts themselves are connected with a particular point of view and a particular visual phenomenology, the things apprehended from that point of view are not: they are observable-from the point of view but external to it; hence they can be comprehended from other points of view also, either by the same organisms or by others. Lightning has an objective character that is not exhausted by its visual appearance, and this can be investigated by a Martian without vision. To be precise, it has a more objective character than is revealed in its visual appearance. In speaking of the move from subjective to objective characterization, I wish to remain noncommittal about the existence of an end point, the completely objective intrinsic nature of the thing, which one might or might not be able to reach. It may be more accurate to think of objectivity as a direction in which the understanding can travel. And in understanding a phenomenon like lightning, it is legitimate to go as far away as one can from a strictly human viewpoint.9_

In the case of experience, on the other hand, the connection with a particular point of view seems much closer. It is difficult to understand what could be meant by the objective character of an experience, apart from the particular point of view from which its subject apprehends it. After all, what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat? But if experience does not have, in addition to its subjective character, an objective nature that can be apprehended from many different points of view, then how can it be supposed that a Martian investigating my brain might be observing physical processes which were my mental processes (as he might observe physical processes which were bolts of lightning), only from a different point of view? How, for that matter, could a human physiologist observe them from another point of view?10

Farren:
And where it doesn't work...

Quote:

It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing

its because he doesn't qualify what difference in quality he's talking about. I mean the whole essay is about why we can't know what its like to be something else, and here he is making assertions about what its like to be the robot!

He simply posits

There exists a quality A
We've got it
Robots don't

No demonstration provided. This sounds like an argument for the soul to me. My arguments attack his premises, not the fallacies he's embroidered out of them.

I think if faced with an actual robot Nagel would be agnostic on the question of whether it was conscious or not. When he said "these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing", he was probably just speaking about a hypothetical being with all the same functional states, intentional states, etc. but who had no experience--what other philosophers call a "zombie". In other words, I believe he was just making the argument about the logical possibility of such beings, not saying anything about real robots.

Jesse:
Another is that it seems logically possible for a given process, such as the computations going on in a person's brain, to happen without any accompanying subjective "what it is like to be that process", even if there's some sort of metaphysical law that prevents this from actually being possible in reality.

Farren:
Recast, since I'm positing that experiencing is being:

Quote:

Another is that it seems logically possible for a given process, such as the computations going on in a person's brain, to happen without happening, even if there's some sort of metaphysical law that prevents this from actually being possible in reality.

Of course if you recast it this way my statement is obviously nonsensical--but what does this show? It might just show that your definition of qualia/experience as being/doing fails to capture what others mean by the term, not that their statements are confused or illogical. If you think your definition accurately describes what people "really mean" when they talk about qualia (even if they don't realize that's what they really mean, like substituting the word 'Venus' for 'morning star' in a statement by a person who's familiar with the planet Venus but who doesn't realize the morning star is Venus), then on the contrary, their statements should still make sense when you substitute words describing being/doing in place of words like "qualia".

Jesse:
Finally, there is the argument I have been making here, that it seems like there should be a definite truth about whether two identical A.I. simulations give rise to the same qualia, while from your point of view there should be no real truth of the matter, it would just depend on an arbitrary choice about whether to define the words "same qualia" as "identical physical state within a certain volume" or "isomorphic network of causally interconnected events" or some other more precise way of defining the words "same process" (maybe not 'process', but whatever word you'd use to describe the idea of two instances of 'doing/being' which are the 'same').

Farren:
Perhaps if you expand on the utility of these questions, I might see a use for the concept of qualia. If the issue is simply philosophical consistency - well, that's the entire reason I consider qualia excess...

The "utility"? A question doesn't have to be useful for there to be a single objective truth about its answer. For example, I'm sure we could come up with some abstract question in number theory whose answer would be of no practical interest to us, like whether a particular billion-digit number is prime or not.

That said, these questions about qualia could become important in the real world in the future--say I am an actual intelligent A.I. running on some computer, and I have to decide whether I'm OK with the idea of deleting my program from that computer and transferring it to another. If I think the particulars of my subjective experience--my qualia--depend on the exact physical state of the computer the program is currently running on, I might make a different choice than if I thought they depended only on a particular network of causally connected events which would be present in any computer running the same program.

If you can understand intuitively that from the A.I.'s point of view this would be more than just a question about an arbitrary choice of how to define the word "qualia", then you must either admit that your own definition of qualia is insufficient, or just say the A.I. is confused but that some part of you shares the confusion (in which case it might be useful to try to analyze how this confusion arises, and why it seems to be so common).

Dominus Paradoxum · 06-22-2003, 04:33 PM

Jesse, you might be interested in this book, which is a modern defence of panpsychism.

Jesse · 06-22-2003, 05:43 PM

Thanks Dominus, that looks really interesting...I'll have to find a copy of that somewhere and check it out.

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06-22-2003, 01:55 PM	#31
Jesse Moderator - Science Discussions Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: Providence, RI, USA Posts: 9,908	Farren: 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. One of the main arguments is that it would be possible to know the complete physical state of a system without knowing "what it is like to be" that system--this was what Nagel was saying in his What is it like to be a bat paper. His paper would not make much sense if you tried substituting a term like "physical state" in every time he talked about "experience" or some other such term. Another is that it seems logically possible for a given process, such as the computations going on in a person's brain, to happen without any accompanying subjective "what it is like to be that process", even if there's some sort of metaphysical law that prevents this from actually being possible in reality. Finally, there is the argument I have been making here, that it seems like there should be a definite truth about whether two identical A.I. simulations give rise to the same qualia, while from your point of view there should be no real truth of the matter, it would just depend on an arbitrary choice about whether to define the words "same qualia" as "identical physical state within a certain volume" or "isomorphic network of causally interconnected events" or some other more precise way of defining the words "same process" (maybe not 'process', but whatever word you'd use to describe the idea of two instances of 'doing/being' which are the 'same'). Anyway, I'm sure you're familiar with many of these types of arguments. I think I was just misunderstanding your position--in terms of the way I understand the word "qualia" you are actually denying the existence of qualia, even if you are not doing so under your own, distinct definition of the word.

06-22-2003, 03:06 PM	#33
Farren Veteran Member Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: South Africa Posts: 2,194	One comment I'd like to make is that I'm not making a radical behaviourist style argument that we don't experience anything. Rather, I'm saying if you make the simple and economical assumption that subjective experience is the same thing as simply existing, a whole slew of mindbending concepts just collapse into an elegantly simple understanding - and no demonstrably useful information is lost

06-22-2003, 04:33 PM	#35
Dominus Paradoxum Veteran Member Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: California Posts: 1,000	Jesse, you might be interested in this book, which is a modern defence of panpsychism.

06-22-2003, 05:43 PM	#36
Jesse Moderator - Science Discussions Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: Providence, RI, USA Posts: 9,908	Thanks Dominus, that looks really interesting...I'll have to find a copy of that somewhere and check it out.

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