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turchin comments on Zombies Redacted - Less Wrong
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I know people who claim that they don't have qualia. I doubt that it is true, but based on their words they should be considered zombies. ))
I would like to suggest zombies of second kind. This is a person with inverted spectrum. It even could be my copy, which speaks all the same philosophical nonsense as me, but any time I see green, he sees red, but names it green. Is he possible? I could imagine such atom-exact copy of me, but with inverted spectrum. And if such second type zombies are possible, it is argument for epiphenomenalism. Now I will explain why.
Phenomenological judgments (PJ) about own consciousness, that is the ability to say something about your own consciousness, will be the same in me and my zombie of the second type.
But there are two types of PJ: quantitative (like "I have consciousness") and qualitative which describes exactly what type of qualia I experience now.
The qualitative type of PJ is impossible. I can't transfer my knowing about "green" in the words.
It means that the fact of existence of phenomenological judgments doesn't help in case of second type zombies.
So, after some upgrade, zombie argument still works as an argument for epiphenomenalism.
I would also recommend the following article with introduce "PJ" term and many problems about it (but I do not agree with it completely) "Experimental Methods for Unraveling the Mind-body Problem: The Phenomenal Judgment Approach" Victor Argonov http://philpapers.org/rec/ARGMAA-2
I don't believe that I experience qualia. But I recall that in my childhood, I was really fascinated by the question "is my blue your blue?" Apparently this is a really common thing.
But I think it can be resolved by imagining our brains work sort of like artificial neural networks. In a neural network, we can train it to recognize objects from raw pixel data. There is nothing special about red or blue, they are just different numbers. And there is nothing magic going on in the NN, it's just a bunch of multiplications and additions.
But what happens is, those weights change to recognize features useful in identifying objects. It will build a complicated internal model of the world of objects. This model will associate "blue" with objects that are commonly blue, like water and bleggs.
From inside the neural network, blue doesn't feel like it's just a number in it's input, or that it's thoughts are just a bunch of multiplications and additions. Blue would feel like, well, an indescribable phenomenon. Where it lights up it's "blue" neurons, and everything associated with them. It could list those associations, or maybe recall memories of blue things it has seen in the past. But it wouldn't be able to articulate what blue "feels" like.
People raised in a similar environment should learn similar associations. But different cultures could have entirely different associations, and so really do have different blues than you. Notably many cultures don't even have a word for blue, and lump it together with green.
Wait, what?
Meaning you have no experiences, or your experiences have no particular character or flavour?
Which experiences would you expect to be easier to describe..novel ones, or familiar ones?
I don't see any difference between me and other people who claim to have consciousness, but I have never understood what they mean by consciousness or qualia to an extent that lets me conclude that I have them. So I am sometimes fond of asserting that I have neither, mostly to get an interesting response.
Maybe your are phlizombie))
I think we should add new type p-zombies: epistemic p-zombies: The ones, who claim that they don't have qualia, and we don't know why they claim it.
You are not only one who claimed absence of qualia. I think there are 3 possible solutions.
a) You are p-zombie
b) You don't know where to look
с) You are troll. "So I am sometimes fond of asserting that I have neither, mostly to get an interesting response."
Or more likely :
d) the term "qualia" isn't very properly defined, and what turchin means with "qualia" isn't exactly what VAuroch means with "qualia" - basically an illusion of transparecny/distance of inference issue.
No one defines qualia clearly. If they did, I'd have a conclusion one way or the other.
Do you have a clear definition of clear definition? Or of anything, for that matter?
In this case, "description of how my experience will be different in the future if I have or do not have qualia" covers it. There are probably cases where that's too simplistic.
That's easy to describe. If I have any experience in the future, I have qualia. If I have no experience in the future, I have no qualia. That's the difference.
Taboo "qualia", "experience", "consciousness", "awareness", and any synonyms. Now try to provide a clear definition.
Please stop commenting. Now try to present your argument.
But more importantly, VAuroch defined clear definition as describing how experience would be different. Experience cannot be tabooed if that is what clear definition means.
How are qualia different from experiences? If experiences are no different, why use 'qualia' rather than 'experiences'?
Qualia means the specific way that you experience something. And if you don't experience something in any way at all, then you don't experience it. So if there are no qualia, there are no experiences. But they don't mean the same thing, since qualia means "the ways things are experienced", not "experiences."
I can't.
As a reductionist and materialist, it doesn't make sense - the feeling of "red" and "green" is a consequence of the way your brain is wired and structured, an atom-exact copy would have the same feelings.
But letting aside the reductionist/materialist view (which after all is part of the debate), it still wouldn't make sense. The special quality that "red" has in my consciousness, the emotions it call upon, the analogies it triggers, has consequences on how I would invoke the "red" color in poetry, or use the "red" color in a drawing. And on how I would feel about a poetry or drawing using "red".
If seeing #ff0000 triggers exactly all the same emotions, feelings, analogies in the consciousness of your clone, then he's getting the same experience than you do, and he's seeing "red", not "green".
Is "it" zombies, or epiphenomenalism?
The hypothesis I was answering to, the "person with inverted spectrum".
Such an entity is possible, but would not be an atom-exact copy of you.
We don't know how qualia are encoded in the brain. And how to distinguish a person and his copy with inverted spectrum.
I didn't say I knew which parts of the brain would differ, but to conclude therefore that it wouldn't is to confuse the map with the territory.
We can't conclude that they would not differ. We could postulate it and then ask: could we measure if equal copies have equal qualia. And we can't measure it. And here we return to "hard question": we don't know if different qualia imply different atom's combinations.
Either (1) your saying "this looks red to me" versus "this looks green to me" is completely unaffected by the red/green qualia you are experiencing;
or (2) your brain works by magic instead of (or as well as) physics;
or (3) different qualia imply different physical states.
For me #1 is kinda-imaginable but would take away all actual reasons for believing in qualia; #2 is kinda-imaginable but the evidence against seems extremely strong; which leaves #3 a clear enough winner that saying "we don't know" about it is in the same sort of territory as "we don't know whether there are ghosts" or "we don't know whether the world has been secretly taken over by alien lizardmen".
[EDITED to add: Of course my argument here is basically Eliezer's argument in the OP. Perhaps turchin has a compelling refutation of that argument, but I haven't seen it yet.]
My point was to show that using possibility of phenomenological judgments as an argument against epiphenomenalism is not working as intended.
Because more subtle form of epiphenomenalism is still possible. It is conceivable, but I don't know if it is true.
But your appeal to "alien lizardmen" as an argument against "don't know" is unfair as we have large prior knowledge against lizardmen, but we don't have any priors of experiences of other people.
No one in all history was able to feel the feeling of other being (maybe one-cranial siam twins will be able), so we have no any prior knowledge about if this qualia all similar or all disimilar in different beings.
Your (1) point also could be true in my opinion, or, more exact, we don't have instruments to show that it is true.
Imagine, that I met exact my copy and could ask him any questions, and want to know if he has inverted spectrum... More here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/
The alien lizardmen aren't intended as an argument against "don't know", just as an example of something else about which in some sense we "don't know" but where there's not much scope for doubt.
So, anyway, you're proposing that perhaps turchinA and turchinB have different qualia but the same behaviour because the connection between qualia and behaviour is wired differently; so for turchinA seeing red things produces red qualia which provoke saying "red", while for turchinB seeing red things produces green qualia which provoke saying "green".
So, what is the actual difference between turchinA's red qualia and turchinB's so-called green qualia? They produce the exact same behaviour. In particular, turchinB's so-called green qualia lead turchinB to say things like "that looks red to me". And they are provoked by the exact same stimuli that give turchinA red qualia. So, er, what reason is there for calling them green qualia?
I don't know about you, but my red qualia call up all kinds of specific associations. Blood, stop-signs, lipstick, sunsets. And these are, or at least are indirectly observable via, external questioning. "What does this colour make you think of?", etc. And red, in particular, produces lower-level effects that also feed into the experience of seeing red -- IIRC, people looking at bright red things have elevated pulse rate, for instance. So turchinB's so-called green qualia have to produce these same results. Similarly, my green qualia call up associations -- grass, sickness, emeralds, etc. -- and turchinB's so-called green qualia had better not remind turchinB of those things, at least not in any way that spills over into turchinB's actions, responses to questions, etc.
Do you find it reasonable to say that these qualia of turchinB's -- evoked by seeing blood and tomatoes and the like, calling up memories of blood and tomatoes and the like, increasing arousal in the autonomic nervous system, etc., etc., etc. -- can be subjectively identical to turchinA's green qualia (calling up memories of grass, not increasing autonomic nervous system arousal, etc.)? Because I don't. What would that even mean?
I see it simple: Turchin A sees red object - feels red qualia - associates it with blood - calls it "red". TurchinB - sees red object - feels green qualia - associates it with blood - calls it "red".
So all associations and behavior are the same, only the qualia is different. From objective point of view there is no difference. From my-subjective point of view there is a difference.
To my mind the following
is incoherent. The associations are part of how seeing something red or green feels. So if turchinB sees something and associates it with blood, then turchinB's subjective experience is not the same as that of turchinA seeing something green.
Now, it looks as if you've retreated a bit from the full "inverted spectrum" scenario and are maybe now just saying that maybe turchinA and turchinB experience different qualia on seeing red, even though their behaviour is the same. That's not so obviously incoherent. Or is it?
Any way of probing turchinB's experience of seeing a tomato has to produce exactly the same result as for turchinA. Any question I might ask turchinB about that experience will produce the same answer. If I hook turchinB up to a polygraph machine while asking the questions, the readings will be the same as turchinA's. If I present turchinB with the tomato and then ask other questions in the hope that the answers will be subtly biased by whatever not-so-conscious influences the tomato may have had -- same results, again.
So whatever differences there are between turchinA's subjective experiences and turchinB's, they have to be absolutely undetectable by turchins A and B: any attempt at describing those experiences will produce the exact same effects; any effect of the experience on their mood will have no detectable consequences; and so on and so forth.
The situation still seems to me the way I described it before. If turchinA's and turchinB's brains run on physics rather than magic, and if their physical states are the same, then everything we can see of their subjective states by asking them questions, or attaching electrodes to them, or having sex with them, or showing them kitten pictures and seeing whether they smile, or any other kind of observation we can make, matches exactly; which means that any differences in their qualia are so subtle that they have no causal influence on turchinA's and turchinB's behaviour, mood, unconscious physiological reactions, etc.
I see no reason to believe in such subtle differences of qualia; I see no reason to think that asking about them is even meaningful; and they seem to me a violation of Ockham's razor. What am I missing? Why should we take this idea more seriously than lizardmen in the White House?
If the copies are different, the question is not interesting. If the copies aren't different, what causes you to label what he sees as red? It can't be the wavelength of the light that actually goes in his eye, because his identical brain would treat red's wavelength as red.
I do not think we need to go as far as i-zombies. We can take two people, show them the same object under arbitrarily close conditions, and get the answer of 'green' out of both of them while one does not experience green on account of being color-blind.
What do you infer from being able to do this?
(Surely not that qualia are nonphysical, which is the moral Chalmers draws from thinking about p-zombies; colour-blindness involves identifiable physical differences.)
This gives us these options under the Chalmers scheme:
Same input -> same output & same qualia
Same input -> same output & different qualia
Same input -> same output & no qualia
I infer the ineffable green-ness of green is not even wrong. We have no grounds for thinking there is such a thing.