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Comment by hliyan | Hacker News Reader

We had a debate at office about this. We had a lot of trouble untangling perception (or awareness) from qualia (which is basically a thing as experienced by a person). For example, a cat may be aware of its reflection in the mirror, and may eventually map points on the mirror to points on its own body, but is there something inside the cats brain that is doing the observing? Or is it just a computing device that operates on a continuous input-processing-output loop that learns from previous loops?

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> is there something inside the cats brain that is doing the observing? Or is it just a computing device that operates on a continuous input-processing-output loop that learns from previous loops?

The big question is, is there a difference? We haven't really established whether a sufficiently complex input-processing-output algorithm could also be a self-aware thing inside the cat's brain doing the observing. To posit that both things are separate mechanisms is a dangerous assumption, I think, when we don't really know what that "thing inside the cat's brain that observes" is.

Interesting. Would you say there is a "thing inside the brain that observes" in the case of humans, or more specifically, in your case personally? Much of my argument rests on the flimsy pillar that I personally perceive myself as an observer in a way that is different from inanimate objects.

Perhaps the only difference is in the level of complexity?

We can only speculate, but in my mind, to "be" the one that observes does not preclude from there being something in my brain that observes, which in turn, unconsciously, becomes part of what I call my identity and self. At the end of the day, to the best of our knowledge, living beings are made of the same atoms and chemical reactions as inanimate objects. So, yes, I would speculate that it's all a question of complexity.

I think the riddle is in the language.

When someone talks of oceans they don't question if it is just a bunch of quarks. The information processing system is intelligible to us because we live in a universe of consequence. Perception, awareness, and qualia seem to be all possible from neural activity.

> We had a debate at office about this. We had a lot of trouble untangling perception (or awareness) from qualia (which is basically a thing as experienced by a person).

This is the essence of the hard problem of consciousness: do qualia actually exist such that they are different than the perceptions that lead to them? Dennett thinks not, and that like all of our mental faculties, "qualia" are simply another cognitive trick to help us shift or maintain focus on important stimuli (or serve some other functional purpose).

An analogy I like to use is that qualia would be similar to how single-CPU computers can give the illusion of parallelism by rapid context switching.

> Is there something inside the cats brain that is doing the observing?

That would be the homunculus fallacy, the idea that an agent must have an agent within itself to account for its agency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument

I don't think this is what he meant. Asking whether there is an observer in the cat is asking whether there is any mental life in the cat, i.e. whether there is anything it is like to be the cat. This is different from the homunculus fallacy that posits an inner observer to explain how mental representations of sensory information are consumed (e.g. the cartesian theater).

When I pet my cat and it begins to purr and stretch out its paws, I know there is qualia involved.

But a cat's brain is scarcely larger than a walnut.

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