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Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

> For the philosopher, it was something else entirely (if I remembered, I might be able to guess who it was).

"Qualia" perhaps, which is a sleight-of-hand which amounts to shoving the complexity around on the plate: Consciousness depends on qualia. What's qualia? Exactly.

I think consciousness is a continuum, and humans slide up and down that continuum all the time, from deep sleep to nearly-autonomic behaviors like doing purely rote tasks to, at the other end, being very aware of everything because you just heard a rattlesnake rattle and need to know where it is right now.

Is AI conscious? I think it fits somewhere at the lower end of the spectrum. Is a flatworm conscious?

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Qualia means the experience of a particular sensation, like colors, sounds, pains. It's not a sleight-of-hand. We do have those experiences. The difficulty is that they are subjective.

My problem is that qualia leads into the idea of philosophical zombies, or people who act like they're alive and think they're alive but don't have qualia. The trick is to either prove they don't exist, or prove you're not one of them, while also not granting qualia to, I don't know, flatworms or search engines. Which is the same thing as proving things about consciousness.

The P-zombie thing is a nonsense, since it posits an unconscious entity that acts and reacts exactly as a conscious entity would - which would include answering any questions you asked about their experience in exactly the same way. That means that their "synthetic" qualia are indistinguishable from "real" qualia, the insistence of philosophers with preferences notwithstanding. It's just good old Cartesian duality with a new wig.

> which would include answering any questions you asked about their experience in exactly the same way

That's pretty much the entire definition, yeah.

> means that their "synthetic" qualia are indistinguishable from "real" qualia

And that's the purpose of the definition. It's just our good-old chinese room in a new wig.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

So if your definition of qualia involves an unfalsifiable claim, or other things that we have no mechanism for proving to be true or not true, then it taints all the arguments that spring from your first.

> It's just our good-old chinese room in a new wig.

Semantics and consciousness are distinct arguments. So one's position on whether manipulating symbols can achieve meaning is separate from whether consciousness has an objective explanation, or at least one humans are capable of providing. Searle might think the two are related, but Chalmers likely disagrees, and there's likely people who disagree with the hard problem, while finding the Chinese room convincing. Or so my exposure to these sorts of topics would indicate.

In any case, a position on one does not commit one to a position on the other. It's dismissive to make that sort of claim, and fails to understand the nuances of philosophical argument.

Technically, the P-zombie thing is a thought experiment designed to demonstrate that Cartesian duality is silly, whatever wig it's wearing.

It's not necessarily the same thing as proving things about consciousness. The two could be orthogonal.

If qualia arise only in particular configurations of physical substrate, then it might be possible for flatworms to have qualia but not search engines. This doesn't mean the flatworm has a concept of self, a concept of time, or even low-level cognition. "Nobody home", so to speak. But the basic qualia of light/dark/hot/cold might still be present.

I think that what people like to call consciousness might be just attention + self-awareness

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