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selylindi comments on The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem - Less Wrong
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No need for uploading, electrodes in the brain do the trick.
...that really should have occurred to me first.
Yes, my experience of redness can come not only from light, but also from dreams, hallucinations, sensory illusions, and direct neural stimulation. But I think the entanglement with light has to be present first and the others depend on it in order for the qualia to be there.
Take, for example, the occasional case of cochlear implants for people born deaf. When the implant is turned on, they immediately have a sensation, but that sensation only gradually becomes "sound" qualia to them over roughly a year of living with that new sensory input. They don't experience the sound qualia in dreams, hallucinations, or sensory illusions (and presumably also would not have experienced it in direct neural stimulation) until after their brain is adapted to interpreting and using sound.
Or take the case of tongue-vision systems for people born blind. It likewise starts out as an uninformative mess of a signal to the user, but gradually turns into a subjective experience of sight as the user learns to make sense of the signal. They recognize the experience from how other people have spoken of it, but they never knew the experience previously from dreams, hallucinations, or sensory illusions (and presumably also would not have experienced it in direct neural stimulation).
In short, I think the long-term potentiation of the neural pathways is a very significant kind of causal entanglement that is not present in the program under discussion.
What if you're a brain in a vat, and you've grown up plugged into a high-resolution World of Warcraft? If qualia are wholly inside the skull, their qualitative character can't depend on facts outside the skull.
Well you need some input to the brain, even if it's in a vat. Something has to either stimulate the retina or stimulate the relevant neurons further down the line. At least during some learning phase.
Or I guess you could assemble a brain-in-a-vat with memories built-in (e.g. the memory of seeing red). Thus the brain will have the architecture (and therefore the ability) to imagine red.