[taneq]

I can't help feeling we're begging the question a bit with qualia. Yes, I have experiences. Yes, there's "something it feels like" for me to see red, or stub my toe, or whatever. But there's no reason to believe that that feeling is in any way portable to anywhere outside my own head. I don't see why "I perceive a thing and I perceive myself perceiving the thing" is so universally accepted to be something special or surprising.

As best I understand it, our "consciousness" that "feels" things is basically an overblown condition monitoring system bolted onto the top of a highly effective correlation/prediction engine attached to a whole lot of sensory nerves. Sure, a signal goes from the senses into the middle bit and the result feeds into the consciousness bit which cross-checks everything including its own responses, but that's a control system, not a 'soul'. Or conversely, you could say the spectrum of "error term is saturated negative" through to "error term is saturated positive" is a range of qualia "felt" by a PID loop.

[Lewton]

> I can't help feeling we're begging the question a bit with qualia

Exactly, it's kind of like how the debate about "free will" is being handled, either you use a definition of free will that makes it trivially true, but useless, or you use a definition of free will that requires you to literally believe in magic