[simiones]

This has largely been solved by computation, for me and many others.

In this interpretation, the brain is a computing machine that decodes signals from the outside world into various internal forms, akin to, say, the in-memory representation of a data structure representing an image being observed by an image sensor. Subjective feelings are then the result of a certain part of the brain analyzing other parts of the brain.

All of the various quibbles about "qualia" and "p-zombies" and such seem to just be conceptions that beg the question. Sure, we can imagine or conceive of a being which reacts to stimuli and reasons without having internal feelings, but there is no reason to actually assert that such a being is actually possible. It is very possible that feelings/"qualia" are a necessary component/by-product of a computing system capable of general intelligence and self-reflection.

In the Mary's Room thought experiment, it's quite possible that if Mary knows everything that there is to know about the physics of light and the neuroscience of color perception, she can literally cause herself to imagine the color red, or ultra-violet, so that she will not be at all surprised when she encounters actual red for the first time.

In the Chinese Room thought experiment, the Room (homunculus + books) quite possibly understands Chinese in the same sense as a Chinese-speaking human does, even if the homunculus inside doesn't.

[plutonorm]

You assume that conscious experience arises "ex nihilo". You are saying that something of a different ontological category "emerges" from the mechanism. I'm afraid the onus is on you to describe the process of formation, vaguely waving your hands in the direction of strong emergence is nothing more than saying "and then there is magic".

You raise the Chinese room thought experiment, but it is orthogonal to the point at hand. I believe the machine in the Chinese room thought experiment is conscious and that says little about where I might imagine consciousness comes from.

[tsimionescu]

There is nothing in need of explanation. Consciousness is what consciousness does.

Just like a computer can sort numbers, a human brain can produce thoughts and speech, and describe itself to itself, which we call consciousness.

A machine that would both (a) have enought information about the working of the world, and (b) have the right algorithms for predicting how to influence human beings and other conscious animals would, I believe, be able to turn this same predictive ability on itself and come up with what we call "conscious experiences".

While I can't claim it's impossible that there is more to it than that (perhaps only beings imbued with transcendent souls by a god can actually have conscious experience - that is not ultimately disprovable, after all), I also don't see any reason to imagine that there MUST be something like "consciousness" that is apart from complex computation.

[plutonorm]

I used to agree. But when we examine the nature of our own experience there is clearly something additional that is not described by matter interacting with itself. The only solution that makes sense to me is that matter has intrinsic consciousness that varies by degree as we span from atom to brain. Otherwise you have to imagine that the feeling that accompanies our day to day experience arises from nothing out of the matter from which we are constructed. That seems more magical than adding consciousness in at the base level as an axiom.

[tsimionescu]

Does one particle have a temperature as well? Does matter have transistor-ness or Linux-ness?

Computations emerge from physical laws. If consciousness is "just" a complex computation, then it can emerge by the exact same process as Linux emerges from electrons and rock.

I will also note that, whatever else it means, consciousness implies some kind of identity - this human vs that human, this rock not that rock. But, this means that there can be no intrinsic physical property related to consciousness at the elementary particle level, as all electrons are perfectly identical, all protons are perfectly identical and so on. If electrons were to have some property of identity, some minimal quantum of consciousness, and so if individual electrons were different from one another, quantum mechanical statistics would look entirely differently and so the world would be entirely different.

Of course, you can still ascribe some non-physical, transcendental concept of consciousness to each electron, a soul of its own, as arbitrarily complex as you want to believe it, and there will never be any way to prove or disprove it's existence.

[plutonorm]

Temperature is an emergent phenomena, it is a value that describes the bulk behaviour of atoms.

But the feeling of something is a different thing entirely, it is an entirely different category of thing, it isn't a number, it isn't a thing. Do what I said in the first instance, pinch yourself. Feel the sensation, appreciate that there is a thing that it is like to experience the sensation. Then try to understand how the experience can arise from the matter. When you argue this point entirely within the confines of the abstract machine of scientific reason then you lose connection with the only piece of information that you can ever be certain of: That things feel like something, qualia is real. All other things that you may think about the world are guesses.

On your second point, I believe that the physical world is entirely an expression of consciousness. So it follows that the study of physics is the study of consciousness from an external viewpoint. The action of consciousness is physics from the external viewpoint and what we feel is what physics feels like from the inside. So if quantum mechanics proves that there is no identity to this electron rather than that electron, then it follows that this electron has the same consciousness as that electron. Because fundamentally matter and consciousness are the same thing.

When you take a strong materialist line you are disagreeing with a great number of highly influential and deep thinkers with academic credentials as long as your arm. You are also arguing against one of the favoured viewpoints of contemporary philosophers.

[tsimionescu]

The position you're describing is either solipsistic (I am the only thing that exists, all else is illusion before me) or it is religious (we are al Brahman, the division of the world into things is Maya, illusion).

I fully agree that there is no way to prove this position is wrong, but I think you also have to accept that you can't prove that materialism is wrong. I would say materialism is more useful than solipsism or transcendentalism, but this is a subjective assessment.

[plutonorm]

You need to read into the topic, your arguments are skimming the surface.

[huetius]

I’ve always found it amusing that in the Chinese Room, we are expected to uphold as reality the perspective of the guy being duped.

[simiones]

Are you referring to the person sending its question to the Chinese Room as "the guy being duped"?

If so, if they pose a question in Chinese and obtain a meaningful answer in Chinese, in what way are they "being duped"? You would only call them "being duped" if you believe that the answer is somehow meaningfully different from what a real Chinese-speaking human would have given, which I and many others do not accept.

[huetius]

He is duped because the system has no understanding, yet he believes it does[0]. A counterfeiter who evades detection is not a mint.

[0] I believe that the original thought experiment was intended to lead to this conclusion, but in popular culture and in the above post, is marshaled towards the opposite end.

[tsimionescu]

The whole point of Turing's original Immitation Game thought experiment, that Searle turned to understanding of Chinese rather than the more abstract notion of "thought", is that there is no reason to distinguish between what a person who answers questions does and what a machine that would give the same answers would do: they are both "thought" by any possible measure, as long as we accept that they produce the exact same outcomes.

Similarly, as long as we accept that that person outside the room can't distinguish by any means of inside the room there is a speaker of Chinese or a speaker of English following the magical Chinese-answering algorithm, then the distinction is, by definition, meaningless. There is no 'duping' because the notion of 'understanfing Chinese' as apart from 'runnkng the algorithm' is meaningless.

[huetius]

I don’t know. To me, to assert that there is no meaningful difference between a thing and what we know to be an artificial imitation of that thing is to assert that there’s no meaningful difference between truth and lies, so long as the lies are convincing enough.

[tsimionescu]

Is there a meaningful difference between a car and a horse as a means of transport? Is a car an artificial imitation of a horse?

The assertion of the Imitation Game is that IF the computer is equivalent to the person in the game, then they are like the car and the horse.

[carapace]

I have this thing: the world looks bluer out of one eye and redder out of the other. Which eye is correct?

[simiones]

Well, what does "correct" mean here? Colors are a construct of the human mind, whichever way you put it.

Now, you could devise some tests where you look at a "white" piece of paper (you conduct a survey of 100 people to establish whether it is pure white or tinted) and you look at it through each eye, and now if one eye sees it as pure white and the other as reddish or blueish, you know that the eye that sees it as pure white is "correct"; possibly one eye sees it as reddish and the other as blueish, and then neither eye is "correct". Of course, this defines "correct" as "in agreement with the eye sight of most other people".

You could also chose to dig deeper, and have many complex tests done to determine if there are differences in the structure of the retinas of the two eyes that could explain the difference (e.g. perhaps one retina has some malformations that probably explain the difference), and then you can decide that the eye that doesn't have the malformation, if any, is "correct". That eye could still be more skewed in your perception according to the first test though, since the brain may have already adjusted.

Alternatively, you could study the neural architecture that is responsible for color perception and suss out the differences between the two images, find out what is the difference between them, and decide which is correct based on that (are they different output images for the same input, and is one receiving any other input that should not be related? are they receiving different inputs? how does your neural architecture differ from that of 100 other people? etc.)

Of course, we entirely lack the ability to do the third test, and mostly lack this ability for the second test as well, so from a purely practical point of view, you would be stuck with the first test to determine this.

The exact same question could be posed of a color-reporting computer system, by the way. Say you have two cameras and an image analyzer that can print out the color of the central pixel in the images from both cameras (in RGB). Pointing the two cameras at the same object, you get a print out that says `LEFT (R250,G255,B255); RIGHT (R255,G255,B250)`. Which of the two is correct?