[raducu]

1) The issue of what perceptions "actually" are will be impossible to answer because qualia are ireductible.

Let me explain: you feel pain in your foot.

As a scientist I cut your foot and you no longer feel pain in your foot.

Or I cut the pain nerves, or the spinal cord, or give you pain medicine.

Or I find a brain receptor and a chemical responsible for pain.

Or in the future, we find a couple of brain networks that when hacked turn of or exacerbate this and that sensation. We find the exact neuron microstructure that is actually a quantum computer and a certain process/instruction set can precisely manipulate sensations. We find the exact process that is responsible for the "self" sensation.

I know that would still not satisfy my question of "what are sensations?".

"Yeah, this and that neural network, but WHO is actually feeling that sensation?".

It would be a little bit like trying to "see" in 4D space -- impossible actually.

2) Why are sensations really needed?

If we get to that advanced level as to technically answer the first question, even without a gut feeling understanding, I think we could actually understand the answer to this question.

The answer might be -- "because AI can happily process numbers, but the biological quantum neural nets cannot, and they need this "sensation" representation to actually work in the most efficient way possible.

By "quantum" I mean some missing stuff we don't know yet, I'm not saying the brain is a "quantum computer".

[mannykannot]

> But WHO is actually feeling that sensation?

This reminds me of a story from Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls. An early multiuser computer system did fine with a small number of users, but choked when one more was added, above a certain threshold. "No problem", said some wag "just find where that threshold is stored and increase it." The joke, of course, is that the number didn't exist as an explicitly-realized value; it emerged as a phenomenon out of how the system as a whole ran.

When you are in pain, your conscious mind - an emergent phenomenon from the physical processes of your body (primarily the brain), or so I suspect - observes itself. There is nothing mysterious in systems observing themselves; that's what a computer doing when it raises and responds to a segfault, for example.

[raducu]

I'm not saying it is incorrect, but the emergent theory of self-awareness is a bit hand-wavy.

Surely a primitive man could say an airplane flying is an emergent property of the airpland, like Aristotle said about many things?

I was just questioning the level of satisfaction we would get as science would reach the best explanation of what sensations are.

I think right now we are nowhere near that scientific knowledge.

[mannykannot]

Considerable vagueness is to be expected in any field so far from an explanation, and the situation is even worse in the dualist camp: to the best of my knowledge, they have never been able to offer one definite, affirmative claim about how the alleged non-physical aspects of the mind work. All they do is weave tendentious arguments against there ever being a physical explanation of the mind.

Emergent phenomena are pervasive in complex systems, and this stands as an effective response to naive dualist misconceptions such as that materialism requires that a quale must be identical with a single physical thing.

Even in airplanes, behavioral traits such as stability emerge from the interaction of several physical features.