hairyfigment comments on Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project - Less Wrong

29 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 December 2012 12:26AM

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Comment author: hairyfigment 05 January 2013 12:21:35AM -1 points [-]

Do you think you can reduce qualia?

Well, would that mean writing a series like this?

My intuition certainly says that Martha has a feeling of ineffable learning. Do you at least agree that this proves the unreliability of our intuitions here?

Comment author: aaronsw 05 January 2013 09:45:02PM -1 points [-]

Who said anything about our intuitions (except you, of course)?

Comment author: hairyfigment 06 January 2013 05:26:14AM 0 points [-]

You keep making statements like,

the neuron firing pattern is presumably the cause of the quale, it's certainly not the quale itself.

And you seem to consider this self-evident. Well, it seemed self-evident to me that Martha's physical reaction would 'be' a quale. So where do we go from there?

(Suppose your neurons reacted all the time the way they do now when you see orange light, except that they couldn't connect it to anything else - no similarities, no differences, no links of any kind. Would you see anything?)

Comment author: aaronsw 06 January 2013 07:34:20PM 1 point [-]

I guess you need to do some more thinking to straighten out your views on qualia.

Comment author: Exiles 12 January 2013 10:12:13AM *  2 points [-]

Goodnight, Aaron Swartz.

Comment author: MugaSofer 06 January 2013 10:39:26PM *  0 points [-]

Or you do. You claim the truth of your claims is self-evident, yet it is not evident to, say, hairyfigment, or Eliezer, or me for that matter.

If I may ask, have you always held this belief, or do you recall being persuaded of it at some point? If so, what convinced you?

Comment author: hairyfigment 06 January 2013 11:13:28PM *  -1 points [-]

Let's back up for a second:

  • You've heard of functionalism, right? You've browsed the SEP entry?
  • Have you also read the mini-sequence I linked? In the grandparent I said "physical reaction" instead of "functional", which seems like a mistake on my part, but I assumed you had some vague idea of where I'm coming from.
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