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Nothing, the parent is simply wrong. Unless we want to argue some sort of quantum non-deterministic woo inside our brains makes us extremely special and unlike a bunch of bits in ram. For all intents and purposes if we could simulate a human brain down to the chemical reactions and electrons and voltage potentials doing their thing it would be a human WITH qualia. It's hardware will just be different.
TL;DR that one episode of Startrek where they argue if Data has Qualia
To have qualia you would have to simulate more than a brain, as qualia isn’t just felt or (in many cases) felt at all in the brain.
If we did understand all this then we could perhaps replicate it in software m. But we don’t.
What we can say is that the software behind ChatGPT is as likely to have qualia as a calculator app on your phone.
Where are you getting all this amazing scientific data about qualia and in which organs they're felt? Up to this moment I thought qualia were a completely made up philosopher's concept with no empirical basis whatsoever.
You might be a zombie, I feel qualia. So I think that’s worth explaining.. Sure the definitions are loose, and not very scientific but qualia exist.. If it helps you understand humanity better, i could perhaps replace qualia with emotions here - since that’s what I was really getting at, not how we experience the colour red but fear and anxiety and so on. Which needs the heart and stomach involved, or at least the simulation of them.
Could you expand on this? I'm not sure why the heart and stomach need to be involved, even as simulations. To use the example of fear, it's hard to nail down exactly what "fear" feels like, but vaguely, I might feel it through my heart racing faster or a "knot" in my stomach. But that doesn't require me to have a heart or a stomach or even a simulation of them; whatever causes me to experience qualia (which may be the brain, the soul, or the heart and stomach or all of them or something else entirely) could just cause me to experience the feeling of my heart racing faster and my stomach getting cramped. I don't see why those organs would need to be simulated in order to bring about that qualia.
I don’t see much of a difference between a simulated qualia of feeling the heart racing and having a simulated heart that races. Maybe there’s some shortcuts. 🤷♂️ it’s all very theoretical.
Those are completely different things, though. A heart is a physical object made of atoms, and it has various physical characteristics that you would need to simulate in order to be said to be actually "simulating a heart," such as pumping simulated blood in a certain way or responding to simulated electrical stimulation in a certain way, etc. depending on how precise you want the simulation to be. If all you want is the qualia of feeling your heart, that doesn't require any of that.
It sounds like you were just using "simulation" in a different way, as to mean "qualia of feeling it" instead of something more like an "a model that imitates it." But then by the way you used it, it renders your original statement, the one that kicked this whole discussion off, pointless:
If by "simulate more than a brain" you meant something like "also simulate the heart and stomach and etc. where qualia is felt," and by "simulation of the heart" you just mean "the qualia of feeling one's heart" rather than "a model that imitates the heart," then the statement doesn't make sense, because a simulated brain could "simulate the heart" just by creating the qualia of having a heart, without having to also create an actual imitation heart to go along with the imitation brain.
The simulated “brain” that simulates the heart is a simulation of the brain and the heart. Frankly I don’t think anybody wants to be a brain in a box, so if this ever worked at all we would be simulating the brain and the body.
There’s no distinction between a simulation that creates a brain that thinks it has a body, and a simulation that actually has a body. The human consciousness depends on the entire nervous system.
This seems reasonable. And, again, going off this statement, it renders your original statement below completely wrong:
Because then we don't need to simulate more than the brain; we just need to simulate a brain which also simulates a heart (as in, the simulated brain creates the qualia of feeling a heart, without the programmers actually simulating a heart). So whether or not programmers simulated a brain AND a heart (AND a stomach and any other organ one might say is involved in qualia or feelings) really doesn't matter for the question of whether or not a simulated brain can have qualia. A simulated brain could just simulate those things.
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Well…. now you’re getting somewhere.
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Nothing that I've said implies this.
Do you believe that your smartphone could become conscious and experience qualia, with no hardware modifications whatsoever, if you could just find the right software to run on it? Because that's what a denial of my premises amounts to.
There is something special about human brains in the broad sense of the term, yes. Not special in the sense of non-material, but special in the sense of meeting particular requirements. I don't think you can instantiate consciousness in just any physical system.
If you had instructions for a Turing machine that perfectly simulated the behavior of a human, and you instantiated that Turing machine by moving around untold trillions of rocks in an infinite desert - would the resulting system of rocks be conscious?
Yes. You're simulating a human -- you can have a conversation with them, and ask them what they see, and they could describe to you the various hues that they perceive, or else be surprised that they are blind. They could ask where they are, and be upset to learn that they're being simulated through a pile of rocks and that you don't believe they are conscious. Anything less would be an incomplete simulation.
That's the beauty of the Turing machine, is that it's universal. Given enough time and space, even something as dumb as rule 110 can compute any other computable function. And the materialist perspective is that the human mind is such a function.
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I don't see how I could rule out this possibility. If you believe you can, why?
I don't see how I could rule out this possibility. If you believe you can, why?
Fair. Rocks being conscious or at least representing something that is was more or less a default for belief in many cultures across time. Ruling it out so casually is a result of a particular unique, historically rare socialization.
I think it's very unlikely that individual rocks are conscious, just as I think it's very unlikely that individual neurons are conscious, but a collection of neurons, rocks, or transistors arranged in a particular way and executing a particular algorithm may well be conscious.
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Agreed, but in my opinion enough ram and the proper algos + processing power would be enough.
I would argue that yes. But this stems from what I consider to be a bog standard materialist position taken to its logical conclusion. If everything we are is contained in our brains and the state of neurons, neuron connections, their internal state, all of this backed by chemical reactions and molecules, all of this underpinned on the laws of chemistry and electro-magnetism. If we could "simulate that" in varying degrees of precision we could theoretically recreate a consciousness and it would be just as "real" as the genuine thing.
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Given enough time and sufficient memory, you could simulate a human brain or the entire universe on a phone. It's not obvious, at least, that the hardware/software system wouldn't be generating qualia. (That's true even with Penrose-ish quantum consciousness.) They could be p-zombies, but those are controversial.
I feel confident in asserting that it wouldn’t. But, I recognize that this is something I can’t know for sure and I could be wrong.
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How do you know this? I don't think we can conclude this without actually doing it and checking. And I don't think we have the technology to do this yet or even to check it.
The physiological analogy between you and me is my reason for thinking that you are conscious. Why would I not make the same inference for a sufficiently analogous artificial simulation of your brain?
That is quite reasonable and basically matches my own beliefs on the matter, but what if you are mistaken in your belief that my being conscious has that much to do with the physiological analogy between yourself and myself? I don't think we know if you're mistaken on that, and I'm not sure it's even possible to find out right now.
There are lots of things that I might be mistaken about. I might be mistaken in my belief that my laptop is not suddenly going to transform into a dragon and eat me. Both of these are ultimately derived from inductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning is rational but not infallible.
Infallibility is an excessive standard for knowledge.
It seems to me that there's more reason to be confident that one is not mistaken about the belief that one's laptop won't transform into a dragon than to be confident that one is not mistaken about the belief that someone else's consciousness is contingent on the physical analogy between one's own brain and their brain, though. We have some pretty deep level of understanding of the physics of a laptop and creatures like dragons and how they relate to each other based on our studies of things like plastic and metal and reptiles. We might be mistaken, but I think we've reduced the error bars quite a bit. I don't know that we can say the same for our study of how consciousness arises.
Yes, I have more evidence in the laptop/dragon case than in the my mind/your mind case, and more evidence in either case than that an artificial mind would be conscious. However, all of them are knowable.
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We never will. This is in the realm of metaphysics. No matter how much technological progress we make, I don't think it's even conceivable that we could invent a machine that tells you whether or not I'm a philosophical zombie.
Not with our current level of understanding of consciousness and qualia, at least. I'm not ready to discount the possibility of some future developments in physics discovering some sort of physical, material instantiation of "having an experience" that can be measured or at least detected, though. I've no idea what that would look like, or even what some fictional scifi/fantasy versions of such concepts look like, though. As you said, it's inconceivable.
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Lets call it a strong conviction in materialism.
I don't think we do yet either.
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