[A_D_E_P_T]

The kneejerk response would be: Are you not conscious at this present moment? If we were to modulate your spatiotemporal senses with drugs or a lobotomy, do you doubt that you would be very differently conscious, or perhaps entirely unconscious?

I mean, there is a credible first-person answer to that question of yours, which each man can answer for himself.

But considered more seriously, the "hard problem" is an artifact of treating experience as a separate thing that needs to be generated. If you accept that self-modeling systems bounded in space and time exist, you've already accepted that experience exists -- because experience is what such a system is, from the inside. There's no second step where experience gets added. The question "why is there experience?" is exactly akin to "Why is there an interior to four walls and a roof?" The interior isn't a separate thing; it's necessarily constitutive.

[goatlover]

> because experience is what such a system is, from the inside.

There being an inside to self-modelling systems bound in space and time is the hard problem.

> The question "why is there experience?" is exactly akin to "Why is there an interior to four walls and a roof?" The interior isn't a separate thing; it's necessarily constitutive.

That's given from three dimensions of space. This is not the case with subjective experience. Functional and physical terms don't have an inside where experience lives. It's what makes the p-zombie argument potent.

Let's put this another way. Functional terms are abstracted from experience to model the world. See Nagel's What It's Like to Be Bat paper on science being a view from nowhere, which is really about the fundamental objective/subjective split. Or Locke's primary and secondary qualities.

You can't get experience out of abstract terms. Experience doesn't live inside abstract concepts. We can model the world with them, but experience was left out at the start.

[qsera]

>You can't get experience out of abstract terms.

Would you agree that you are conscious at this point?

Would you agree that there are some set of physical laws, an initial state, and a set of random events to the universe that we inhabit?

Would you agree if we simulate this initial state on a computer, and step through it using the set of physical laws, and the random events, we will see the eventual emergence "you", who we know is conscious?

So are you saying that the entity inside the simulation is a zombie who is not actually conscious?

[goatlover]

> Would you agree that you are conscious at this point?

Of course, I'm having a conscious experience replying four days late.

> Would you agree that there are some set of physical laws, an initial state, and a set of random events to the universe that we inhabit?

We inhabit a universe modelled by laws physicists have arrived at to describe observed behavior. That's as far as I'm willing to go ontologically.

> Would you agree if we simulate this initial state on a computer, and step through it using the set of physical laws, and the random events, we will see the eventual emergence "you", who we know is conscious?

No, I don't think computation is conscious. It's abstract symbol processing.

> So are you saying that the entity inside the simulation is a zombie who is not actually conscious?

Yes, it wouldn't be me. I don't think simulating the world is the same thing as the world itself, despite all the science fiction stories to the contrary.

[diacritical]

I'm not a dualist or anything. I'm in the "it's weird and I have no idea what the answer is" camp. And yes, I've read Dennett. I'm trying to understand your views. Lots of questions follow, but don't feel like I'm barraging you unnecessarily. Just trying to figure out your view with what seem to me like interesting questions that I myself can't really answer.

I'm using "consciousness", "subjective experiences", "senses" and "qualia" as synonyms here, but if you see a difference, please mention it. Obviously "consciousness" has many definitions that have nothing to do with the "hard problem of consciousness", so I'm using it in this sense here. I'll use "qualia" as it's the word that relates most to the hard problem of consciousness. You can substitute it with "sense"/"senses" if you like.

1. Do you view qualia as an emergent property? Of what exactly? What is a self-modeling system? Is a human one? Where would the boundaries be; would they even be defined? The human body or the brain only or the nervous system? Or whatever neurons activate when a certain thing happens, like seeing blue or feeling pain? What about animals - pigs, dogs, rats, snails, ants, bacteria? What about AI, current and theoretical?

2. Could there be a set of minimal self-modelling systems in some abstract space that are the boundary of what has qualia and what doesn't? Like, these 1000000 neurons arranged like that qualify, but if you take 1 out, they don't? Or is it a fuzzy boundary somehow?

3. What kind of statements could be made about the qualia of yourself and of others? Not sure what kind of answer I'm looking for, but how objective or truthful would those statements be? Maybe "qualia is nothing really, we only have the set of equations that govern physics and everything else is an abstraction"? Like an apple isn't anything really, it's just a badly defined set of atoms and energy. There is no "apple" or "chair". Or is it something else?

4. What are your views on meta-ethics and ethics in general? Should we care about it at all?