= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Zed comments on Repairing Yudkowsky's anti-zombie argument - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (72)
That's a Yudkowskian concept that might be applied for example to the question "why do I have free-will?" - instead we can ask "why do I think I have free will?".
But if both parties to a debate were to accept that we do in fact have free will, and proceed to argue from that, then I would not be at fault for assuming the existence of free will (standing in for qualia) as a real thing - and proceeding to discuss unique problems surrounding the concept of free will.
If the existence of qualia were not a shared premise in the Yudkowsky-Chalmers debate, then it would be an entirely different debate about eliminative materialism.
Since we almost all agree that qualia are real, we can have arguments about the nature of qualia. It is then legitimate to use the fact that although we agree upon the existence of qualia, we can't define qualia, as an argument for the special irreducible status of qualia.
If we could define qualia reductively, that would disprove my point. But I believe that even if you were to use the technique of "righting a wrong question", it still wouldn't enable you to achieve this. This is strange, because the technique does indeed help in defining other confusing concepts. In other words, it would delight me if you managed to use this technique to demonstrate that qualia are reducible, but I don't expect you to be able to do so and that is part of my argument.
There are, as I see it, three solutions to the apparent problem of defining qualia:
I lean towards 3 instead of 1, and reject 2 as ludicrous. You seem to prefer either 1 or 2.
Just to clarify, does "irreducible" in (3) also mean that qualia are therefore extra-physical?
I assume that we are all in agreement that rocks do not have qualia and that dead things do not have qualia and that living things may or may not have qualia? Humans: yes. Single cell prokaryotes: nope.
So doesn't that leave us with two options:
1) Evolution went from single cell prokaryotes to Homo Sapiens and somewhere during this period the universe went "plop" and irreducible qualia started appearing in some moderately advanced species.
2) Qualia are real and reducible in terms of quarks like everything else in the brain. As evolution produced better brains at some point it created a brain with a minor sense of qualia. Time passed. Brains got better and more introspective. In other words: qualia evolved (or "emerged") like our sense of smell, our eyesight and so forth.
Not unless we are arguing over definitions. Tabooing the phrase "extra-physical", what Eliezer and Chalmers were arguing (or trying to argue) about is whether a superintelligent observer, with full knowledge of the physical state of a brain, would have the same level of certainty about the qualia that the brain experiences as it does about the physical configuration of the brain.
Actually, if they had phrased the debate in those terms it would have turned out better. I don't think that what they were arguing about was clearly defined by either party, which is why it has been necessary (in my humble opinion) for me to "repair" Eliezer's contribution.
So anyway, no it does not mean the same thing. I argue that qualia are not "extra-physical", because the observer does in fact have the same level of knowledge about the qualia as it does about the physical Universe. However, this only proves that qualia supervene upon physical brain states and does not demonstrate that qualia can ever be explained in terms of quarks (rather than "psycho-physical bridging laws" or some such idea).
It might be tempting to refer to (a degree of) belief in irreducibility of qualia as "non-physical", but for the purposes of this discussion it would confound things.
I don't think that there's a good reason why you didn't describe qualia as "plopping" into existence in scenario 2 as well, or else in neither scenario. Since (with extreme likelihood) qualia supervene upon brain states whether they are irreducible or reducible, the existence of suitable brain states (whatever that condition may be) seems likely to be a continuous rather than discrete quality. "Dimmer" qualia giving way to "brighter" qualia, as it were, as more complex lifeforms evolve.
Note the similarity to Eliezer's post on the many worlds hypothesis here.
Thanks for the clarifications.
Honestly, I don't have a clear picture of what exactly you're saying ("qualia supervene upon physical brain states"?) and we would probably have to taboo half the dictionary to make any progress. I get the sense you're on some level confused or uncomfortable with the idea of pure reductionism. The only thing I can say is that what you write about this topic has a lot of surface level similarities with the things people write when they're confused.