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Comment by Chathamization | Hacker News Reader

> Subjective awareness exists. "Qualia" is a name for the content of awareness.

Well, as I said in an earlier post, I'm talking about the existence of qualia "beyond being a vague description for emergent properties arising from our cells." People have a sense of self, sure, and people experience things. But usually the people who bring up "qualia" seem to think that our sense of self can't be explained as simply being neuronal activity.

For instance, "redness" doesn't seem to be mysterious at all to me. Our brains fire in a certain way when presented with certain stimuli. As for why they fire in that particular way, it's complicated because the brain is complicated (and each persons brain is unique). But it's a complicated physical system (and one that we're gaining a better understanding of each day).

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So why is red red and green green? Why isn't red green and green blue?

Light of a certain frequency, neurons, "and then a miracle occurs", and "I" experience red...

With all due respect you're eliding that bit in the middle.

> "and then a miracle occurs"

In my understanding, this "miracle" is human general intelligence. I think that any dynamic pattern-matching and model-building entity will experience a certain degree of "consciousness". Conscious experience is the entity's internal modeling of its own sensory input [1]. And likewise, conscious thought is the entity's modeling of its own internal state and processes (including the modeling process itself).

[1] This includes things like seeing my friend walk down the street. This sensory input is incredibly more difficult to model than in an alternative scenario where I'm looking at a red apple resting on a table.

A little known result from Cybernetics is that any self-regulating system must contain a model of itself to function.

When people first witnessed the steam governor [1] it was common to say that it seemed alive.

What you and the other guy are basically saying is that if we pile up a bunch of cybernetic devices together you eventually pass a threshold where subjectivity (aka consciousness) begins.

Now, I don't agree nor do I disagree.

My point is that we are far from having a scientific theory that says how this happens. It's no good to wave ones hands and say, "Complexity!" or "Model-building." I want to know why red looks red as opposed to some other sensation?

We can't even describe sensory inputs! We can only correlate our experience with the reports of experiences of others. Maybe you see "green" and I see "blue" when we both look at a "red" object. How can we "do science" to/on subjectivity?

Really, I'm just glad that people (in the West) are finally taking this seriously.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor\

Edit: my original point was just that "qualia" (which I use as a name for the content of awareness) exist. I don't know what it would mean to deny the existence of the contents of awareness, since we quite literally only know anything by way of those contents.

> What you and the other guy are basically saying is that if we pile up a bunch of cybernetic devices together you eventually pass a threshold where subjectivity (aka consciousness) begins.

The gist of this seems about right, although the configuration of the components is likely to be just as important as the raw quantity.

I would also argue that there is a spectrum of gradient of consciousness (or awareness, sentience, etc), likely without a clear starting threshold. As an analogy, perhaps it is similar to how the boundary edge of a cloud in the sky is impossible to define, but there isn't much disagreement about which parts of the cloud are bulky.

> my original point was just that "qualia" (which I use as a name for the content of awareness) exist

For you, qualia is synonymous with awareness? I've generally heard it described as the ephemeral aspects of subjective experience.

I'm fairly skeptical of the way many people talk about "subjective experience", as there often seems to be a large amount of unspoken assumptions involved. The biggest one being that there is an irreducible, singular entity or "subject" having the experience.

I find awareness to be a concept with less assumptions -- to me, it doesn't imply a "subject" to the same degree. Thus I'm more comfortable with your definition of qualia, although I wonder if others share it.

> I'm fairly skeptical of the way many people talk about "subjective experience", as there often seems to be a large amount of unspoken assumptions involved. The biggest one being that there is an irreducible, singular entity or "subject" having the experience.

If we recast the subject as primary vs secondary qualities, where primary qualities are non-observer dependant properties like number, shape, extension and secondary are observer-dependant properties like color, sound, taste, then it's easier to understand the issue.

Science provides an account of the world that is colorless, soundless, soundless, tasteless But we experience the world as having colors, sounds, tastes, so where do those come from?

> But we experience the world as having colors, sounds, tastes, so where do those come from?

I argued a few comments above that those experiences are the product of the powerful modeling apparatus of the human brain, the same thing that likely enables our broad intelligence, turning inward on itself.

Those experiences are the manifestation of the system modeling itself: its sensory inputs, internal states and processes, and, in a recursive fashion, some of the modeling processes themselves. The richness of these experiences gives us a clue at how sophisticated the modeling ability of the brain actually is.

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