Someone like Daniel Dennett would argue that meta-cognition and consciousness are pretty much the same thing.
Meta-cognition or any other natural process might be "the same thing" as conciousness; but is nontheless a physical thing that somehow has qualia. Where that equivalence comes from is an interesting question that Dennet & co. seem determined to dodge.
Qualia are a great shorthand but they aren't even shown to exist in any real capacity other than the euphemistic way they are defined.
The fact that qualia lead to incoherent rubbish like p-zombies should be enough to place the concept solidly in the same place as most of Deepak Chopra's ramblings.
But in a discussion with poeple who have it least heard the term, saying "qualia" is a lot clearer than stumbling about with terms like "subjective reality", "bare expereince" and whatever.
But those who determined to dodge Chalmers' hard problem can always choose to say "bare expereince, I don't know what you mean!" It's still a just a dodge.
"Experience or qualia is what the process of simulation of reality feels like. Or to put it in another way: Conciousness is the process of simulating reality."
So I'd agree: If you reach a certain complexity in your inner model, qualia will "magically" emerge.
Another interesting point the article makes is the relation to the theory of mind. I wonder if you could even say, that we first had an inner model for the complex inner model of others and then, by applying that inner model on ourselves developed what we call conscioussness. You could probably assume that many animals are not able to take this final step and that this is what separates our consciousness from those of animals.
>> So I'd agree: If you reach a certain complexity in your inner model, qualia will "magically" emerge.
It's the only logical hypothesis we can have at the moment, but it doesn't mean it's the only solution. There could be properties of matter that maybe need to be simulated at a lower level that have to be present that we're not aware of.
If the brain simulates reality, why does our experience seem so 'atomic'? Like that simulation is so small in scale that our brain can basically simulate any visual field, hear any sound, feel any combination of textures on the skin and so on. There doesn't seem to be any abstraction in the simulation itself, but rather it is created by the nerves and retina on point of 'capture' in the sensory apparatus and then the brain is able to project it to the mind.
In other words it seems like each individual neuron / nerve is 'conscious' and then any arbitrary combination of activations in those neurons can create the subjective simulation of reality. I'm not sure if that's true from a scientific perspective or what the implications are if it's true, but this bottom-up simulation is far more powerful than a top-down one where details would be lost, and simulations usually start top-down, especially since the universe came first, and then our brain came later. It's basically inconceivable to us how a signaling system is conscious versus how it is not conscious but still receives signals, like a CCD chip in a camera can have a high resolution and show an accurate image of reality.
Do you mean very detailed? Have you read about the Fovea, and saccades and so on? You might be surprised to learn that the part of our retinas that can discern detail is very small - if you hold your thumb up at arms length the detailed part of your retina is about twice the width of your thumbnail. Everything else is lower resolution. And your eye jumps around in saccades - but you don't notice the constant movement.
But it doesn't seem like that does it? Essentially what we have here is an abstraction that we are completely unaware of most of the time.
So I put it to you that our consciousness does contain abstraction, but that abstraction is not obvious to us. Because what do we have to compare against?
Of course it seems super detailed to us.
Not necessarily, although I could argue you need detailed sensory organs to have a complex mental model but that's beside the point. What I meant by atomic was approximately what I said above - that it feels like individual nerves are conscious, like a mental field, and then you can fill that field with any arbitrary activation patterns and it will register in conscious experience. A lot of it won't activate _other_ things like emotions, memories, words and associations, but those aren't necessary for it be in conscious experience still.
I'm just struggling a bit with a 'computational' model of consciousness where there is this big abstraction process in the brain, while at the same time seeming so closely connected to the world and vast in possibilities. The way it seems to me is, the brain doesn't get sensory input of a chair, and then it has a preconceived notion of the chair in the brain, and then the brain projects the chair onto consciousness, but rather, the brain can see everything, and then with a more connected neural network, we can attach the 'chair stimuli' to other neural pathways, giving the chair a deeper meaning.
I know that after we have learned the meaning of some object in the world, _then_ the brain can have an automatic response to it, and that would be an abstraction that works in the higher areas of the brain, but we could still see the thing consciously before we were scared of it.
In that scenario consciousness comes first, and then meaning is built outward by connecting neural pathways together into networks of meaning, which is how I feel the world is anyway. In that scenario you'd need some kind of module that gives consciousness to all experience, and then abstraction is built in the neocortex or something after that.
Also to address your question - you are right, we can't compare this to anything, so we are stuck in our own conceptions, so maybe this is all moot ;
It doesn't, you p-zombie ;-)!
Seriously, though: my conscious experience of the world (what I'm subjectively aware of) is continuous (in the sense of modeling the world as continuous in time and space dimensions), but it's updated by messages from my sensory cortices at discrete intervals. So it's a continuous model updated at discrete intervals, which sounds screwy and is because it amounts to the brain "retconning" my experience of reality fast enough that I don't catch it in the act, because the best abstraction over my sensory data is that the world is actually continuous at human-scale.
Which probably sounds incredibly confusing and would be a 4-page paper if I had to actually make it convincing. Goddamnit not again.
I don't care for the word simulate because it implies our minds attempt to faithfully model the physical world (which isn't to say we don't in some cases). I think if you're going to make this argument, it might be better to call it the process of inference (using a particular and individual model) about the physical world.
I can imagine that the nature of conciousness might mean they're not possible, but that doesn't make the concept incoherent.
There's no difference between behaving identically and behaving identically and experiencing it. Because if you ask a p-zombie to describe what it experiences (what you feel, etc..) and they tell you that they experience nothing, then there's indeed a difference, so their behavior is not identical, if they lie, then we can spot that with an fMRI, or eventually they somehow have extra information (so they are magical zombies, so eveything is possible).
Because you experience it? If you do..
The difference between the idea of qualia and the other properties that we granted special status to and then later refuted, is that in the latter cases we were trying to explain something external that we thought we were observing, whereas with subjective experience we are discussing a phenomenon that we (or at least some of us) directly, infallibly observe. It is not possible for me to be mistaken about whether there is something it is like to be me; it is not possible for me to be mistaken about whether what I experience is what I experience. It is possible for me to be mistaken about whether there is something it is like to be you, because I cannot directly observe your internal experience.
There's no distinction. When I see what looks like a broken pencil sitting in a glass of water, I am observing exactly what I describe. The reason the pencil looks broken is not because I should grant water some magical powers to break and reconstitute pencils, but turned out to be refracted light.
Analogously, I can observe that I do have subjective experience, but why should I assume that the reason I have subjective experience is different than all other observables? Why would it be some irreducible, unobservable quality?
You seem to be claiming that the existence of subjective experience is reason enough alone, and I don't see how that follows.
I understood this to mean that you were doubting whether subjective experience actually exists, and I responded by arguing that it is not possible to doubt that your own subjective experience exists since you (I, at least) experience it directly, which is different than the class of now-refuted inferences that you were comparing it to in. I was not making any argument about where it comes from or what causes it.
And so it is with consciousness. We certainly have consciousness, but to then immediately assign consciousness special ontological status distinct from matter, ie. dualism at worst or panpsychism at best, is a huge leap that requires justification.
I don't know whether physicalism is true. It certainly seems like the best overall account of the universe that we currently have, but if there is a chink in physicalism's armor, consciousness might be it. Might. But, you're right, there's a huge leap between "might" and "is".
We're not talking about the reason, we're talking about the experience itself. Maybe that experience occurs as the result of physical processes, but it's still a separate thing.
Arguing that qualia don't exist because you can't observe them externally is like a blind person arguing that I can't possibly see a broken pencil because they can feel the pencil is solid.
To say something doesn't really exist is to say that it doesn't have metaphysical status on par with matter. If you say that consciousness really, fundamentally exists, then you're saying that it has the same status in reality as the fundamental particles of physics. We should expect to find some consciousness field and particles upon which it acts; or you would have to posit something like panpsychism which suggests that consciousness is an intrinsic property of all matter.
Consciousness not really existing implies that it's an illusion, in the same way that cars, and jobs and countries are an illusion. Certainly they "exist" in some colloquial sense, but they don't exist in a fundamental metaphysical sense.
This is what makes me wonder whether some of us are, in fact, p-zombies: only a blind person, someone who doesn't have visual experiences, could argue that visual experience doesn't exist, and similarly it seems that only someone who doesn't have subjective experience could argue that it doesn't exist. And there do appear to be people arguing that subjective experience doesn't exist. Either I'm misunderstanding them, I'm failing to see the third way, or some of us are indeed p-zombies.
The young man happens to be mute. If he could speak, he would tell you he did it on purpose, and was glad he killed your child. But he's mute. You will never know he meant to do it.
Does his (unobservable) intent make any difference to you?
Here's a tricky one: did I ate spaghetti three years ago? You don't know and very probably you'll never know, but it's an empirical question nonetheless, and who knows, maybe tomorrow you'll think of a way to actually find out, or you'll stumble on some evidence you didn't know was there.
Only in so far as one's intent describes one's view of others. Malicious intent of the sort you describe entails danger towards others, which is observable.
The concept is used as an argument against physicalism, because it might be logically possible (concievable).
Maybe I'm just testifying about how closed my mind is, but to me the answer is a simple no, they are not [not even coherent], end of debate, go think about ethics, at least that seems hard.
Dualists are so full of abstract possibilities since Descartes that they are somehow overlooking the difference between imagination-fueled word-soup of consciousness and real problems of consciousness.
Qualia is the noise in our cognition when our brain tries to make sense of the noise in our feelings when we try to consider what's this feeling consicous thing.
It's real, and it's nothing, and it's pretty personal, because some people don't really care about it, others build entire philo departments on it :)
I don't see it as an argument against anything, it's just an interesting philosophical hypothetical made plausible by our inability to observe conciousness.
I could certainly see an argument that they're not that interesting on a more practical level (since by definition, we can never apply any conclusions made about them) but I don't understand the suggestion that they're logically incoherent.
Either couciousness is the result of physical processes or it is the result of magic. If it is the result of physical processes there is no hard problem. If it is a result of magic then just come out and say you believe I magic.
I'm not sure if a less true statement has ever been uttered. My guess is no.
Given that peopel can experience phantom 'qualia' when their brains have direct electrical stimulation there is no evidence that counciousness comes from magic and every evidence that it comes from the staggering complexity of the brain.
Yes, based on the rest of science, that seems likely. My point is that I have no idea how that can possibly work, on a fundamental level. I have no idea what kind of physical system could exist inside the brain to cause my conscious experience to occur.
The only way I can conceive of a system to explain it is adding a new rule that says "When X pattern occurs, it experiences conciousness".
Why is it the result of magic? Because you can't understand it?
Consciousness is not a physical thing. If you insist on calling everything outside of physics magic, I'm fine with that, it's just terminology.
Citation needed. You can't prove that, and the only honest answer right now is "we don't know how it works, though we have some clues."
By the way, this is not an opinion or just an idea that I like, after a lot of thinking I see it as the only worldview that makes sense, i.e. it can be "proven" (in a very loose sense of that word).