Comment by marcAKAmarc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcAKAmarc | Hacker News Reader

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>"There's no qualities in the universe, just quantities and we arbitrarily assign labels (qualities) to them."

I understand your standpoint. I feel pretty frustrated with these questions too - especially when people throw large assumptions around like panpsychism. However, I gotta disagree with the idea notion that no qualities exist in the universe. Afterall, isn't every single thing a part of the universe, including thoughts, feelings, and experience?

Here is a thought experiement:

Think about experiencing pain and what it feels like to you. Really try to simulate it in your thoughts. Probably sucks. Now think about happiness and what that feels like to you. Probably doesn't suck as much. Without watching a scan of your brain, and without collecting any sort of scientific data about your nervous system, you were most likely able to discern the difference between those two feelings just now. You didn't do this by any type of measurement of quantity, just by quality of experience (qualia).

So I would argue that either quality definitely exists, or everyone reading this just experienced something that is extra-universal, which in my opinion is just as fantastic and assumptive as panpsychism.

Also, I am not a theoretical physicist nor do I have half of a firm understanding of even classical physics, but apparently there has been advances in theoretical physics to include consciousness into the same theory as quantum and classical physics. Might be interesting for some readers to check out - The Causal Theory of Views: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338544509_The_Causa...

> Afterall, isn't every single thing a part of the universe, including thoughts, feelings, and experience?

They are, but they aren't fundamental. They are just our interpretation of the state of the universe (which is quantitative).

> without watching a scan of your brain, and without collecting any sort of scientific data about your nervous system, you were most likely able to discern the difference between those two feelings just now. You didn't do this by any type of measurement of quantity, just by quality of experience (qualia).

I did it by measuring quantities in my brain - voltage was over a threshold on neurons whose firing I interpret as pleasant or unpleasant. My brain is constructed in a way that automatically does this because it's useful for evolutionary purposes.

Is "NullPointerException" a thing that exists just because java programs can throw it? Or is it just an interpretation of particular voltages on particular transistors that is shared between many computer systems because it's useful.

> apparently there has been advances in theoretical physics to include consciousness into the same theory as quantum and classical physics

A paper cited 0 times, read 2 times, citing 5 other papers by the same author. I would wait with calling it advancement in physics just yet :)

All good points.

> "They are, but they aren't fundamental. They are just our interpretation of the state of the universe (which is quantitative)."

I see the logic here, but I think I can poke a hole in it with this line of logic:

1.)Everything I experience has both a quantitative reality (state of the universe) and a qualitative reality (interpretation of the state of the universe).

2.)I can't observe a quantitative reality without qualitative reality.

3.)I can't say for sure that quantitative reality gives rise to qualitative reality, because I've never observed a quantitative reality without the qualitative component.

I think you are right that, in the context of classical physics, qualitative experiences are not fundamental. But I also don't think classical physics has a place in the discussion about subjective reality.

>Is "NullPointerException" a thing that exists just because java programs can throw it?

Very interesting comparison of exceptions to qualia, and really illustrates the "chicken or egg" side of the discussion quite well.

To respond to your question, No. In a literal sense it exists to tell the programmer (or in the worst case, a normal computer user) that something in the program went wrong, which is the whole thing actually.

To continue with the discussion from a programming standpoint... Exception messages are our stand in for some type of qualia, and "NullPointerException" is an example of a quantitative representation of a specific quality, and Java as the biological brain and the gateway to the outside world. The consciousness in this metaphor is the programmer (or user) that reads the exceptions as output on the screen, and quality is experienced when the programmer feels (or interprets) the words on the screen that say "NullPointerException".

I could try to posit a few things here that support the existence of consciousness -

1.) the mere existence of error messages or output in general (qualia) supports the case of the existence of users (or consciousness within yourself).

2.) If I can successfully trigger multiple errors, process them, and discern one error message from another, then I am most certainly using a computer (and obtain consciousness).

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