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WrongBot comments on Book Review: The Root of Thought - Less Wrong
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You're making this more mysterious than it needs to be. No matter what our experiences felt like, we'd still call them qualia. No matter how we used our senses to acquire information about the world, we'd still call that process experience.
Are you claiming that any sufficiently complex agent will report a mysterious feeling of consciousness? That can't be right.
I wouldn't feel comfortable making that claim until I'd tested it on a couple of non-human agents, and in any case I wouldn't call it mysterious.
Really all I have is the suspicion that consciousness is much more normal than people tend to think. The only thing I'm confident of is that explaining consciousness won't require magic or special exceptions to the laws of physics.
What sort of answer, do you think, will people accept as explanation of consciousness? I ask that because I suspect that however deep understanding of thought will not destroy all the feeling of mystery. Even after we become able to model human brains on computers and after we discover which parts of brain are responsible for each exact feeling, I can't imagine how this knowledge stops people wonder about qualia, zombies and Chinese rooms.
I imagine Lord Kelvin felt similarly when he thought of the elan vital. It didn't work for that, and it didn't work for a very good reason: your ignorance of the realm of possibilities is not good evidence. An inability to come up with alternatives may be better support for a claim than showing that you have not yet been compelled to admit defeat, but it's still nearly worthless.
I didn't mean my question as a Kelvinian declaration that we will never understand. I was only curious whether WrongBot has some more specific idea what sort of answer can destroy the feeling of confusion when thinking about qualia. I am even not sure whether there is a question to be answered.
Right. I apologize, I didn't read your comment very clearly. The Kelvin case offers some hope, though - after all, the New Age life-is-energy meme is a lot weaker than elan vital was.
I haven't yet encountered a sufficiently precise definition of qualia (or consciousness, for that matter) to be able to say what exactly the confusion is, much less where it's coming from or how it can be destroyed. The hard problem of consciousness is a wrong question, and I suspect that for any given untangling of it, the answer will be trivial.