saturn comments on Book Review: The Root of Thought - Less Wrong

47 Post author: Yvain 22 July 2010 08:58AM

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Comment author: prase 23 July 2010 08:47:40AM 6 points [-]

it would be really, really strange if something so basic to us turned out to be dependent on complicated configurations of neurons and glial cells, as naive physicalists suggest.

What else can it depend on? Your original claim was that it has to do something with quantum superpositions, so can you tell, how these superpositions are going to explain qualia any better? Seems like you demand the explanation be black box without internal structure; this is contrary to what actual explanations are.

this configuration which happens to be near-optimal for X arose by sheer luck

The "naive physicalists" don't maintain anything like that. Evolution isn't sheer luck.

Comment author: bogus comment score below threshold [+] (5 children)

Comment author: prase 23 July 2010 10:55:29AM * 1 point [-]

I'm not trying to explain why qualia occur, just seeking a sensible physical description of them.

I use description and explanation as synonyms most of the time. Black box description is not much of a description, it's rather lack of one. What information is contained in "qualia work like a black box", or in a little more fancy language, "qualia work due to still unknown physical mechanism"? These are not description of qualia; the only non-vacuous interpretation of such sentences is "the contemporary physics is not going to explain qualia", which may be true, but still is a statement about our current knowledge, not about qualia.

But why would evolution care about qualia?

Well, you are probably right in that, even if we are getting dangerously close to the philosophical zombies' realm.

Comment author: bogus 23 July 2010 11:23:29AM 0 points [-]

What information is contained in "qualia work like a black box", or in a little more fancy language, "qualia work due to still unknown physical mechanism"?

Very little, but this is not a real description of qualia, just a sketch proposal which demonstrates a promising avenue of research. A complete description would state what physical system in the brain is responsible for maintaining complex, "black box" quantum states, and perhaps how that physical system interacts with known neural correlates of subjective experiences. Unfortunately, we're nowhere near that level yet.

even if we are getting dangerously close to the philosophical zombies' realm.

Dangerously close? Do you fear that P-zombies will infect you with an epiphenomenal virus and cause you to lose your subjective experience?

Comment author: prase 23 July 2010 11:44:21AM * 2 points [-]

[J]ust a sketch proposal which demonstrates a promising avenue of research. A complete description would state what physical system in the brain is responsible for maintaining complex, "black box" quantum states [...]

What makes this avenue different from investigation of neuron configurations? New physical laws were never discovered after rejecting the old ones, saying that they couldn't possibly work. All discoveries of new physics happened after conducting research using the old paradigm and realising anomalies. I mean, if there is something strangely quantum going on in the brains, we will not miss it even if we use the conventional approach.

Or said differently, I still have no idea what light quantumness can bring into the question.

Do you fear that P-zombies will infect you with an epiphenomenal virus and cause you to lose your subjective experience?

I fear talking about things that aren't connected to observable facts. I fear that I might say a lot of grammatically correct sentences with no actual meaning.

Comment author: bogus 23 July 2010 12:27:53PM * 0 points [-]

What makes this avenue different from investigation of neuron configurations?

Not much. It's still neuroscience, but it takes reports of subjective experience a bit more seriously, and tries to explain them by using existing physics, rather than treating them as meaningless or as magical and unexplainable.

I fear talking about thing that aren't connected to observable facts. I fear that I might say a lot of grammatically correct sentences with no actual meaning.

Look, it's not that complicated. I'm not the only person who talks about the Cartesian theater and claims that we can somehow feel brain algorithms from the inside. If subjective experience is not an observable fact to you, then your psychology is radically different from that of many other people.

Comment author: prase 23 July 2010 12:45:00PM 1 point [-]

I should have written objective observable facts or something like that. I can observe that I am not a P-zombie, however the beauty of the whole P-zombie business is that such observation is, sort of, insufficient. I would need to observe whether you are a P-zombie, and that I can't.

It is perhaps more economical and Occam-razorish for me to expect that other people are no P-zombies either, but even if they were zombies, I would have no way to realise that, and this renders the zombie question quite uninteresting.

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