No, I mean to argue that the existence of Newton's equations is completely uncorrelated with whether Newton experienced any qualia
You misunderstood my argument. I wasn't talking about qualia when I talked about Newton, I was talking about gravity, another phenomenon. Newton was affected by gravity -- this was highly correlated with the fact he talked about gravity. We talk about qualia -- this is therefore evidence in favour of us being affected by qualia.
How do they determine that humans "actually experience" qualia, rather than humans simulating the results of experience of qualia as a result of evolution?
What would be the evolutionary benefit of simulating the results of experience of qualia, in a world where nobody experiences qualia for real? That's like an alien parrot simulating the voice of a human in a planet where there exist no humans. Highly unlikely to be stumbled upon coincidentally by evolution.
The Occam's Razor result that "they act in a manner consistent with having qualia, therefore they probably experience qualia, therefore they are probably conscious" is immediately displaced by the Occam's Razor result that "they act in a manner consistent with being conscious, therefore they probably are conscious". The qualia aren't necessary, and therefore drop out of the axiomization of a theory of consciousness.
What do you mean by "conscious"? Self-aware? Not sleeping or knocked out? These seem different and more complex constructs than qualia, who have the benefit of current seeming irreducability at some level (I might be able to reduce individidual color qualia to separate qualia of red/green/blue and brightness, but not further).
What makes qualia problematic - the only thing that makes it problematic - is that it's tied up with the notion of subjectivity.
Subjective facts are not 'objective'. Any attempt to define qualia objectively, as something a scientist could detect by careful study of your behaviour and/or neurophysiology, will give you a property X such that Chalmers' hard question remains "and why does having property X feel like this from the inside?"
I think it's helpful to consider the analogy (perhaps it's more than an analogy) between subjectivity and indexica...
This post is a followup to "We are not living in a simulation" and intended to help me (and you) better understand the claims of those who took a computationalist position in that thread. The questions below are aimed at you if you think the following statement both a) makes sense, and b) is true:
"Consciousness is really just computation"
I've made it no secret that I think this statement is hogwash, but I've done my best to make these questions as non-leading as possible: you should be able to answer them without having to dismantle them first. Of course, I could be wrong, and "the question is confused" is always a valid answer. So is "I don't know".
a) Something that an abstract machine does, as in "No oracle Turing machine can compute a decision to its own halting problem"?
b) Something that a concrete machine does, as in "My calculator computed 2+2"?
c) Or, is this distinction nonsensical or irrelevant?
ETA: By the way, I probably won't engage right away with individual commenters on this thread except to answer requests for clarification. In a few days I'll write another post analyzing the points that are brought up.