Comment on The "Scary problem of Qualia"

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 22:30:34 GMT

I think the latter part about existence and magical reality juice is a misinterpretation of the OP.

Agreed

By "come into existence", my second-take (i.e. charitable reading because default reading makes me confused) says he's probably referring to the specific moment/state of: "This entity (mind) is aware", i.e. experiences its first qualia.

Actually I didn't really think about that part, but you sir did. I think that this is an entirely different issue and I think this is one way to answer it:

When does the experience of consciousness occur? Is a little misleading question. Instead it should be termed "Which location in spacetime does this arrangement of physics correspond to?" because if you record an experience in some form I wouldn't really say this particular experienience happening at any given time, but it's structure has a causal relationship with other physical structures. If A is the state of a mind and B is a outside physical event, and A and B interact in someway, for an example if a person sees a flower and therefore the state of A changes accordingly, the changes in the internal structure due to the interaction correspond to the event.

In the post the creation process of the conscious experience was left out, in other words the correspondent was also left out, and if there isn't one - then this experience isn't linkable with any specific moment - except if we consider an agent simulating this experience in order to record it then that would be the correspondent for the internal structure of data.

It's a really interesting question though and I'm really not sure if this answer is sufficient.

Ps. Meanwhile the moment when the drawn line came into existence is a different question from the timing of the "experience". Normally though these two things are not distinct I suppose?

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