FAWS comments on The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem - Less Wrong

2 Post author: metaphysicist 16 September 2012 07:15PM

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Comment author: ArisKatsaris 14 September 2012 05:37:29PM *  3 points [-]

"From the inside, the program experiences no mechanisms of reduction of these atomic qualia"

Materialism predicts that algorithms have an "inside"?

As a further note, I'll have to say that if all the blue and if the red in my visual experience were switched around, my hunch tells me that I'd be experiencing something different; not just in the sense of different memory associations but that the visual experience itself would be different. It would not just be that "red" is associated with hot, and that "blue" is associated with cold... The qualia of the visual experience itself would be different.

Comment author: FAWS 17 September 2012 04:21:40PM 1 point [-]

That thought experiment doesn't make much sense. If the experiences were somehow switched, but everything else kept the same (i .e all your memories and associations of red are still connected to each other and everything else in the same way) you wouldn't notice the difference; everything would still match your memories exactly. If there even is such a thing as raw qualia there is no reason to suppose they are stable from one moment to the other; as long as the correct network of associations is triggered there is no evolutionary advantage either way.