Comment by vertexFarm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vertexFarm | Hacker News Reader

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You can't claim that CPUs or humans have or do not have consciousness. You can only prove that you yourself have consciousness--every other instance of consciousness is essentially an unfalsifiable assumption on your part. This might seem pedantic but if you want to be scientific it's absolutely crucial to ruthlessly separate conjecture from evidence.

It may seem solipsist, but if you want to make a rigorous reproducible experiment with empirical observations, we have just as much reason to assume a CPU has some form of animal sentience as we do with an insect or a bird which reacts in simple ways to external stimuli. As of yet there's no compelling reason to believe this is either correct or incorrect.

Occam's razor doesn't even work very well here. Does it require fewer assumptions to say that a machine that reacts to external stimuli is less conscious than an equivalent animal, or does it require fewer assumptions to say that this behavior indicates consciousness regardless of the media it operates on?

We have no idea if something is really different. We only have assumptions.

I disagree. The fact that humans other than myself came up with the idea of qualia is solid proof that they experience it.

Warning: solipsism ahead!

Are you sure? Perhaps you came up with the idea of qualia?

“What if the whole world is just inside your mind?” is logically possible but essentially useless to consider. It can explain literally anything, which means it explains nothing.

I think Qualia is a similar concept, inherently unquantifiable and useless when it comes to making actionable predictions.

Qualia is essentially what it feels like to experience data. When we see 700nm light, we experience red. When a computer sees 700nm light through a CCD or CMOS, it experiences #FF0000. Does this mean it has qualia? How do we make this distinction? Just from how convincing it sounds when they put it to words?

If it's merely self-reporting, does that mean people weren't conscious until vocabulary for qualia existed? Because that was about 200,000 years for anatomically modern humans. How about animals? They can't report qualia. We essentially are no closer to explaining or defining consciousness at all thanks to qualia.

If I may hazard a baseless conjecture, I'd bet qualia is an illusion. It's still only data. Just like when a thermistor measures some temperature, it's not really communicating the essence of Kelvin to a microprocessor. It's not communicating the frequency of the movement of molecules which is temperature. It's reporting a difference in voltage, which is read by an ADC, which gets assigned a hexadecimal value, which gets interpreted by all kinds of software in all sorts of ways. This sounds suspiciously like qualia, but of course we can't prove or disprove it any more than we can prove or disprove if other consciousness exists besides our own.

Qualia is just data wearing intangible, spiritual clothes. This is just like the classic stoned college freshmen discussion of whether the colors I see are the colors you see, or if the way you perceive red is my green, or whatever. It produced nothing useful then and it produces nothing useful now. All impossible to prove either way, just like solipsism.

Self-reporting demonstrates that qualia is real, but a lack doesn't demonstrate its absence. People may not have had qualia back then, we don't know. I am confident that at least some people have it now, and it makes more sense that everyone (with a reasonably functioning brain, at least) does than that it's somehow piecemeal.

I don't think the notion that qualia is an illusion makes any sense. If it's an illusion, that means that we somehow have the perception of it without it actually happening. But that very perception is qualia. It's like saying that we don't really perceive red, it's just an illusion, we just think we perceive it. But the thinking is the act.

It's different from your stoned college discussion because we know that something is going on. I have the sensation of being me, in a way that known physics can't even address. I'm fairly certain other people have this as well, based on how they talk and behave. I can't quantify it and I can't even really describe it, but it's clearly real. In fact, my own sensation of being me is the thing I know with the most certainty. Everything else could potentially be faked, but not this.

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