Comment by canadiantim

Comment by canadiantim 2 days ago

The important point, I believe, is here:

> what is consciousness? Why is my world made of qualia like the colour red or the smell of coffee? Are these fundamental building blocks of reality, or can I break them down into something more basic? If so, that suggests qualia are like an abstraction layer in a computer.

He then proceeds to assume one answer to the important question of: is qualia fundamentally irreducible or can it be broken down further? The rest of the paper seems to start from the assumption that qualia is not fundamentally irreducible but instead can be broken down further. I see no evidence in the paper for that. The definition of qualia is that it is fundamentally irreducible. What is red made of? It’s made of red, a quality, hence qualia.

So this is only building conscious machines if we assume that consciousness isn’t a real thing but only an abstraction. While it is a fun and maybe helpful exercise for insights into system dynamics, it doesn’t engage with consciousness as a real phenomena.

jasonjmcghee 2 days ago

The smell of coffee is a combination of a bunch of different molecules that coffee releases into the air that when together we associate as "the smell of coffee".

I'm not even sure if we know why things smell the way they do - I think molecular structure and what they're made of both matter - like taste, though again not sure if we know why things taste the way they do / end up generating the signals in our brain that they do.

Similarly "red" is a pretty large bucket / abstraction / classification of a pretty wide range of visible light, and skips over all the other qualities that describe how light might interact with materials.

I feel like both are clearly not fundamental building blocks of anything, just classifications of physical phenomena.

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jasperry 2 days ago

The smell of coffee is not the molecules in the air; the molecules in the air cause you to smell something, but the smelling itself is a subjective experience. The same for the signals in our brain; that's an objective explanation of the cause of our experience, but the subjective experience in itself doesn't seem to be able to be broken down into other things. It's prior to all other things we can know.

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- jasonjmcghee 2 days ago
  
  That's a fair argument. Subjective experience doesn't require knowledge of how anything works- you can experience the stimuli without any understanding
  
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canadiantim 2 days ago

You’re right that the experience of the smell of coffee is associated with a bunch of different molecules entering our nose and stimulating receptors there. These receptors then cause an electrochemical cascade of salts into the brain producing neural patterns which are associated with the experience of the smell of coffee. But this is all just association. The conscious experience of the smell of coffee, or red for that matter, is different than the associated electrochemical cascades in the brain. They’re very highly correlated but very importantly: these electrochemical cascades are just associated with qualia but are not qualia themselves. Only qualia is qualia, only red is red, though red, the smell of coffee, etc are very tightly correlated with brain processes. That’s the distinction between consciousness and the brain.

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ziofill 2 days ago

The smell of coffee (and your other examples) are not a property of the molecules themselves. It is the interpretation of such molecules given by our brain and the “coffee-ness” is a quality made up by the brain.

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argentinian 2 days ago

Yes, in our experience we associate perceptions and also concepts to other concepts and words. But that doesn't explain 'qualia', the fact of having a conscious experience. The AIs also associate and classify. Associating does not explain qualia. Why would? The association happens, but we have 'an experience' of it happening.

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