shminux 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: pjeby 26 December 2012 12:20:35AM 0 points [-]

Searle's view is:

  1. qualia exists (because: we experience it)
  2. the brain causes qualia (because: if you cut off any other part of someone they still seem to have qualia)
  3. if you simulate a brain with a Turing machine, it won't have qualia (because: qualia is clearly a basic fact of physics and there's no way just using physics to tell whether something is a Turing-machine-simulating-a-brain or not)

Which part does LW disagree with and why?

The whole thing: it's the Chinese Room all over again, a intuition pump that begs the very question it's purportedly answering. (Beginning an argument for the existence of qualia with a bare assertion that they exist is a little more obvious than the way that the word "understanding" is fudged in the Chinese Room argument, but basically it's the same.)

I suppose you could say that there's a grudging partial agreement with your point number two: that "the brain causes qualia". The rest of what you listed, however, is drivel, as is easy to see if you substitute some other term besides "qualia", e.g.:

  1. Free will exists (because: we experience it)
  2. The brain causes free will (because if you cut off any part, etc.)
  3. If you simulate a brain with a Turing machine, it won't have free will because clearly it's a basic fact of physics and there's no way to tell just using physics whether something is a machine simulating a brain or not.

It doesn't matter what term you plug into this in place of "qualia" or "free will", it could be "love" or "charity" or "interest in death metal", and it's still not saying anything more profound than, "I don't think machines are as good as real people, so there!"

Or more precisely: "When I think of people with X it makes me feel something special that I don't feel when I think of machines with X, therefore there must be some special quality that separates people from machines, making machine X 'just a simulation'." This is the root of all these Searle-ian arguments, and they are trivially dissolved by understanding that the special feeling people get when they think of X is also a property of how brains work.

Specifically, the thing that drives these arguments is our inbuilt machinery that classifies things as mind-having or not-mind-having, for purposes of prediction-making. But the feeling that we get that a thing is mind-having or not-mind-having is based on what was useful evolutionarily, not on what the actual truth is. Searlian (Surly?) arguments are thus in exactly the same camp as any other faith-based argument: elevating one's feelings to Truth, irrespective of the evidence against them.

Comment author: aaronsw 04 January 2013 09:51:39PM *  0 points [-]

Beginning an argument for the existence of qualia with a bare assertion that they exist

Huh? This isn't an argument for the existence of qualia -- it's an attempt to figure out whether you believe in qualia or not. So I take it you disagree with step one, that qualia exists? Do you think you are a philosophical zombie?

I do think essentially the same argument goes through for free will, so I don't find your reductio at all convincing. There's no reason, however, to believe that "love" or "charity" is a basic fact of physics, since it's fairly obvious how to reduce these. Do you think you can reduce qualia?

I don't understand why you think this is a claim about my feelings.

Comment author: shminux 05 January 2013 12:38:05AM *  2 points [-]

Suppose that neuroscientists some day show that the quale of seeing red matches a certain brain structure or a neuron firing pattern or a neuro-chemical process in all humans. Would you then say that the quale of red has been reduced?

Comment author: aaronsw 05 January 2013 09:45:19PM 2 points [-]

Of course not!

Comment author: shminux 05 January 2013 10:16:42PM 0 points [-]

and why not?

Comment author: aaronsw 05 January 2013 10:23:39PM 1 point [-]

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

Comment author: shminux 05 January 2013 10:35:42PM 1 point [-]

I don't understand what else is there.

Comment author: aaronsw 05 January 2013 11:28:17PM 6 points [-]

Imagine a flashlight with a red piece of cellophane over it pointed at a wall. Scientists some day discover that the red dot on the wall is caused by the flashlight -- it appears each and every time the flashlight fires and only when the flashlight is firing. However, the red dot on the wall is certainly not the same as the flashlight: one is a flashlight and one is a red dot.

The red dot, on the other hand, could be reduced to some sort of interaction between certain frequencies of light-waves and wall-atoms and so on. But it will certainly not get reduced to flashlights.

By the same token, you are not going to reduce the-subjective-experience-of-seeing-red to neurons; subjective experiences aren't made out of neurons any more than red dots are made of flashlights.

Comment author: shminux 06 January 2013 01:04:44AM 0 points [-]

By the same token, you are not going to reduce the-subjective-experience-of-seeing-red to neurons; subjective experiences aren't made out of neurons any more than red dots are made of flashlights.

Ok, that's where we disagree. To me the subjective experience is the process in my brain and nothing else.

Comment author: Peterdjones 05 January 2013 11:32:13PM *  0 points [-]

There's no arguemnt there. Your point about qualia is illustrated by your point about flashlights, but not entailed by it.

Comment author: MugaSofer 10 January 2013 12:58:36PM -2 points [-]

By the same token, you are not going to reduce the-subjective-experience-of-seeing-red to neurons; subjective experiences aren't made out of neurons any more than red dots are made of flashlights.

How do you know this?

Comment author: Peterdjones 05 January 2013 10:32:49PM 0 points [-]

There's no certainty either way.

Comment author: Peterdjones 05 January 2013 10:36:35PM *  -2 points [-]

Reduction is an explanatory process: a mere observed correlation does not qualify.