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teageegeepea comments on Would Your Real Preferences Please Stand Up? - Less Wrong
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Your entire argument for preferring conscious over unconscious minds is this last quick throw away sentence? That's it? Come on, why can't unconscious minds be rational, informed by morality, or qualia-laden? And why are those the features that matter? Are you really implying this is so completely obvious that this one quick sentence is all that needs to be said? Declaring conscious goals to be the goals of the "person", versus unconscious goals as goals of the genome, just presupposes your answer.
There's a series of posts on the foolishness of "qualia" here. I agree with it and share the low-regard for philosophy also found there (relevant for this post, that would also be low relative to cynical economics). I also think what pjeby said above makes sense. The common thread being to find little significant in what we call "consciousness", preventing it from holding privileged status.
"He sharply stubbed his toe on a large rock and proclaimed, 'Thus, I refute this!'"
That traditional anecdote (and its modified forms) only illustrate how little the pro-qualia advocates understand the arguments against the idea.
Dismissing 'qualia' does not, as many people frequently imply, require dismissing the idea that sensory stimuli can be distinguish and grouped into categories. That would be utterly absurd - it would render the senses useless and such a system would never have evolved.
All that's needed to is reject the idea that there are some mysterious properties to sensation which somehow violate basic logic and the principles of information theory.
My understanding of qualia is that mysterious is not a definitional property, i.e. "Qualia can be explained in a reductionist sense" is not a self-contradictory statement. The existence of qualia simply means that sense-experience is a meaningful event, not that it is a supernatural one.
My view is that Mary's Room is fundamentally mistaken; what red looks like is a fact about Mary's brain, not about light of a certain wavelength. Mary can know everything there is to know about that wavelength of light without knowing the experience of a certain combination of neurons firing. Since we don't actually live in Mary's brain, we can't understand the qualia of "Mary's brain being stimulated by red light", but this is a limitation on our brains, not a "mystery." Perhaps a conscious being could exist that could construct others' brains and experience their qualia; we just don't know. But still, the fact that qualia are a potentially non-replicable hardware feature does not make them somehow supernatural.
I take a different but compatible objection to Mary's Room - that is, as Mary is said to know everything there is to know about the color red, she therefore knows exactly what it would be like to experience it, and so is not surprised.
Blatant strawman.