WrongBot comments on Rationality quotes: August 2010 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Cyan 03 August 2010 12:16AM

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Comment author: WrongBot 03 August 2010 04:23:16AM 1 point [-]

I am familiar with the term, but I don't seem to have any. And no one's been able to tell me what they do, so I like to ask when they come up so that maybe someday I'll find out.

Comment author: orthonormal 03 August 2010 04:35:34PM *  6 points [-]

I don't believe in qualia as a real entity, but when people talk about them they're referring to a genuine phenomenon which you also experience: that your conscious understanding of the experience of perception is only the merest shadow of the perception itself. Seeing red doesn't mean seeing something with a little XML "red" tag attached, but something much more complicated that happens beyond your conscious introspection. You can imagine the state of having switched that "red" experience with the "green" experience, in all your memories as well as in current perception, and still instantly knowing that the switch had occurred. This phenomenon is not an illusion, just a blind spot of conscious knowledge which happens to confuse the hell out of naive philosophers.

Comment author: WrongBot 03 August 2010 06:56:07PM 1 point [-]

[Y]our conscious understanding of the experience of perception is only the merest shadow of the perception itself.

Of course. If I had perfect knowledge of my brain's functioning, now that would be a very strange thing indeed.

You can imagine the state of having switched that "red" experience with the "green" experience, in all your memories as well as in current perception, and still instantly knowing that the switch had occurred.

No, I can't. If all my memories had been altered to agree with my newly-altered perception system, what difference would I detect? How would I detect it? Different from what?

Comment author: orthonormal 03 August 2010 07:11:52PM *  5 points [-]

The hypothetical situation I mean is one where your current retina is reprogrammed to switch red and green stimuli, and your memories are edited so that you don't figure it out from inconsistencies, but everything else is left the same.

The fact that there's subconscious cognitive content to red vs. green can be deduced from things like instinctive reactions† to the sight of blood: the brain doesn't check the color against the memory of other blood, it reacts faster than that to to perception. The emotional valence of colors would seem off somehow after a switch, because those don't appear to operate fully through memory, either. Snap judgments of peoples' attractiveness would backfire as your subconscious applied the rule "green tint means sickly" to someone with a healthy complexion.

I don't think you'd be able to consciously articulate what exactly seemed "red" about that green grass, but parts of your mind would be telling you that something's gone wrong, because they're hooked up not just to labels "red" and "green" but to full systems of processing that would be running on suddenly different stimuli.

†Similarly, chimps raised by humans in captivity will still freak out when exposed to a fake snake, because certain patterns have been encoded deep within. There's no reason for such patterns to be raised to the level of conscious knowledge.

Comment author: WrongBot 03 August 2010 07:22:16PM 5 points [-]

Ahhh, so you'd only be reprogramming part of my brain. Well, of course I'd run into problems then. All that means is that there are more parts of my brain than those I have conscious access to, which seems pretty obvious to me even before I start to think about what I know of neurology.

I think we agree with each other.

Comment author: ChristianKl 03 August 2010 09:45:15PM 0 points [-]

I wouldn't be sure, the vision system has an amazing ability to adept to rewiring. Monkeys were able to see another color through gene therapy that their species hadn't seen before.

Comment author: orthonormal 03 August 2010 10:03:41PM 1 point [-]
  1. Indeed there's rewiring over time, but it wouldn't be instant and it wouldn't be total, so the point stands.

  2. That's a really interesting experiment-- can you find me a link?

Comment author: ChristianKl 04 August 2010 09:58:36AM 2 points [-]
Comment author: orthonormal 04 August 2010 11:42:37PM 0 points [-]

Thanks!

Comment author: SilasBarta 03 August 2010 04:56:54PM 1 point [-]

Thank you, well said! I've seen people go so far in dissolving qualia that they think they have to deny their own conscious experience, or think the confusion is extinguished as soon as you have the terminology nailed down.

Comment author: billswift 03 August 2010 09:45:52PM *  0 points [-]

Most philosophical definitions are pretty weird. On the rare occasions I use "qualia", it means the inside view of your sense perceptions. What things look/sound/feel like to the person doing the sensing.