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Comment by monocasa | Hacker News Reader

Sure they can, self driving cars do it with a half dozen or more visual fields combining to a single model of the world around them.

Also, your visual system is fairly discrete, between the receptive fields of individual retinal cells, to the granularity of the optic nerves, to how the bottom end of the visual cortex samples all of that.

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Self-driving cars don't experience visual qualia. A model is not the same as an actual experience. There's no binding-problem to solve with self-driving cars because there's no attempts to make them conscious. It's a completely different thing.

> Self-driving cars don't experience visual qualia

Prove that. Or alternatively prove that you or I do.

I'll also note that you didn't address the citations for the inherent discreteness of our visual systems.

There's no reason to believe qualia arise in a given discrete computation. Why would they? In what steps in the algorithm do qualia arise and why, what characteristics do they have, what causal roles do they play, etc.

It's completely self-evident we experience qualia. It's what our experiences are made of. There wouldn't be anything to experience or discuss if we didn't. The brain is not a deliberate, man-made object like a computer is, hence why it can possess these properties with us being unaware of how (they were selected for via evolution), but the computer cannot.

> There's no reason to believe qualia arise in a given discrete computation.

There's no reason to believe that they don't either.

> It's completely self-evident we experience qualia.

Not to me. Prove it.

The input system is discrete but the end-result, our conscious experience of our world-simulations (made up of visual qualia) are not discrete. They are unified.

An example of how this could be implemented (not saying this is the case, just one of several possibilities):

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

But that whole argument comes from the a priori idea that you can't build a singular model of the world from discrete inputs. There's no evidence or even logical chain for that conclusion.

And even the quantum world is discrete. That's why it's called a 'quantum'. There are fixed size quantities moving through the field.

No, it's not. The argument rests on the fact that it can't be solely discrete across the entire system. The discrete information needs to "come-together" in a non-discrete way, e.g. something like quantum coherence. This is the binding-problem in a nutshell.

All quanta arise from the wave-equations and can be modeled with continuous mathematics.

> The argument rests on the fact that it can't be solely discrete across the entire system. The discrete information needs to "come-together" in a non-discrete way, e.g. something like quantum coherence.

That's just conjecture though. There's no real evidence that a system of discrete components can't work together to create a single unified system. Stating that they can't with no evidence is an a priori conclusion.

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