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Comment by saulpw | Hacker News Reader

You're being quite dismissive of a very real question. Where does our subjective experience come from? If there was an AGI with human-level intelligence, would it have its own subjective experience? How could we possibly know (either way)?

For that matter, does a brain have a subjective experience, or is it just the substrate on which a mind runs?

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Sometimes questions need to be dismissed, including very real questions that many people in good faith spend their lives thinking about and discussing. Sometimes the "answer" to a question is the dismissal of the question, or more accurately, the solution to the problem the question refers to involves an explanation that the question was ill-formed or nonsensical.

I won't say I'm at that point with the question of qualia, but I share the other commenter's reflexive eye-rolling when I hear it invoked. Perhaps the question doesn't deserve to be dismissed, but I'd certainly like to see some new clarity about what the question is really asking, what problems would be solved by finding an answer to the question, or heck, even a remotely plausible description of what form a valid answer might take.

Well, on the other hand I also roll my eyes pretty hard whenever I see a post that pretends that subjective experience is some esoteric concept.

The question is simply "Will robots feel just like you do, or will they merely be pretending?" - it's something any child could understand. Answers could be something like "No, because they lack X", "Yes, but only those that have X" or "Yes, everything does (panpsychism)".

Do you care about potential AI suffering? If you care about animal suffering, the answer to the question would have pretty obvious and major ethical implications.

Now, I'm not convinced that humans can ever determine an answer, so I can understand thinking it's just navel gazing, but I imagine the same applies to knowing what happened before the big bang. I think it's quite evident that this doesn't mean either question is malformed.

Of course children can understand (and be fascinated with) questions like “can a robot feel sadness the same way I do?” or “can my classmate feel sadness the same way I do?” Children can also understand (and be fascinated with) questions like “do dogs go to heaven?”

But what is the epistemological status of these questions? That’s what I’m concerned with, not whether children can understand and be fascinated with these questions.

Then I don't understand why you're acting like it's some vague, malformed question. The things you asked for, what the question is really asking, what problems would be solved and plausible answers are all blindingly clear.

Unless you're religious, the epistemic status of "do dogs go to heaven?" is obviously "no" (or "we have no way of knowing"). If you think the answer to "can robots experience qualia?" is equally trivial, then just say so, instead of going on some spiel about how actually the question is unclear and nonsensical when it pretty obviously isn't.

I can't be sure that other people feel in the same way that I do. I assume they do because they act like it and so I go along with it.

If I can't be 100% sure that people feel in the same way that I do, then asking that same question for robots is totally pointless.

I'm pretty sure your rationale is more complex than that, you probably also account for things like "how similar are they to me?". After all, you wouldn't believe a video game character if they told you they were conscious, right?

>If I can't be 100% sure that people feel in the same way that I do, then asking that same question for robots is totally pointless.

I don't see how that at all follows.

There's no asking, let alone answering this question beyond mere speculations, until we've defined "subjective experience" in objective terms — i.e. positively provable, measurable in some unambiguous way (not merely inferred). That is the hard problem. Solving it might require reframing the problem such that this dichotomy isn't even relevant anymore (like say electromagnetic information isn't "opposed" or "dual" or "exclusive" to a gravitational field but merely concurrent) if we are to unify somehow the general field of "theory of mind".

This issue of "definition" is missing what's at stake. The issue is modelling nature in such a way that plausibly includes subjective experience. And then validating this model. But subjective experience is intrinsically inaccessible to empirical validation. We can test the physical predictions of the model, but how subjective experience fits into the model is an orthogonal question. If we are to answer the question of subjective experience, we need to embrace "speculation" without empirical anchoring to guide our investigations. Shutting down speculation is just to shut down any investigation at all.

It strikes me as odd to start from the position "we declare this thing to undeniably exist" and then spend generations trying to spit out even one sentence describing what evidence or explanation for its existence might even plausibly look like.

…to the point of claiming it "must be present in all things, living or otherwise, even particles, yet perfectly invisible" (panpsychism, iirc?). Because why not generalizing a flawed hypothesis whose observational range is limited to a tiny subset of existence (advanced biological species, as far as we know). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

IMHO it's the old darkness/duality problem all over again — postulating some "essence" (e.g. the spiritual/religious Soul) and basing theory on a mere intuition, instead of invoking a "placeholder" (like "dark matter" isn't necessarily matter but literally "something that behaves as such" whatever it actually is, or like "dark energy" isn't necessarily a fifth interaction but certainly behaves as such or as anti-gravity of sorts; wherein "dark" means "unknown and hidden from direct observation, merely inferred"). Hence my call to not infer the very measurement thereof if we are to call an explanatory hypothesis.

Should we start by stating that "qualia" or "consciousness" or whatever is a placeholder name for "whatever dark (unknown, black-box) mechanism explains the observable phenomenon named as such", then we might have a chance at actually forming a coherent theory thereof. IMHO.

> Should we start by stating that "qualia" or "consciousness" or whatever is a placeholder name for "whatever dark (unknown, black-box) mechanism explains the observable phenomenon named as such", then we might have a chance at actually forming a coherent theory thereof. IMHO.

Perhaps, although in the case of qualia I’m not sure what the phenomenon is that we need a placeholder explanation for. For dark matter we’ve got certain observations of galaxies. For qualia we’ve got, what? A lot of people who feel very strongly that they are unable to deny the existence of something that they cannot describe beyond that claim of undeniable existence? If that’s how astrophysicists explained dark matter I’d be inclined to think that maybe it just doesn’t exist.

Edit: thanks to autocomplete we were briefly embroiled in an argument about the existence of quails.

Can't speak for other humans of course, but I'm more certain my sensory experiences exist than anything else, to the point searching for an evidence base for their existence or concluding they didn't exist unless explained would just be weird. I'm also certain my sensory experiences are not identical to attempts to quantify them or describe them in language or interpretive dance (philosophers struggling to define and articulate things even at high levels of abstraction is weak evidence in favour of qualia, since the defining aspect of qualia is its the portion of human brain state that can't be communicated). The alternative: that its a practical possibility to translate all parts of my sensory experiences into data which can be transmitted and parsed in exactly the same way by other minds feels like the proposition needs some evidence or justification [beyond "Your brain is composed of atoms. Other atoms exist"]

Seems to me that the bafflement I'm experiencing at people doubting human sensory experience is the real bit, and the neural network that might be able to perfectly replicate my bafflement in silicon is the purely hypothetical construct.

> The alternative: that its a practical possibility to translate all parts of my sensory experiences into data which can be transmitted and parsed in exactly the same way by other minds feels like the proposition needs some evidence or justification [beyond "Your brain is composed of atoms. Other atoms exist"]

In theory, if we had high-throughput brain-brain interfaces that could be connected between your thalamus and someone else's, then yes, they could experience the same sensations as you. Of course, besides the challenge of having high-throughput hardware embedded in your brain without killing you, there's also the challenge that brains don't have exact correspondences between every neuron for different people, so any such mapping would be quite complex.

But there is an actual example of a pair of conjoined twins who share the same thalamus and can experience the same sensations as one another: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krista_and_Tatiana_Hogan

> it was confirmed that they share a thalamus which connects their brainstems. Through this shared brain tissue structure and the interconnected neurons, one brain receives signals from the other brain and vice versa. This documentary also reported on experiments that were carried out that confirmed that visual cortex signals based on what one girl saw, were received by both girls' brains. So in effect, one twin could see what the other twin was seeing, making them unique even among craniopagus twins.

Also...

> I'm also certain my sensory experiences are not identical to attempts to quantify them or describe them in language or interpretive dance (philosophers struggling to define and articulate things even at high levels of abstraction is weak evidence in favour of qualia, since the defining aspect of qualia is its the portion of human brain state that can't be communicated).

Language is a very low-fidelity way to express information; we can use abstractions to make up for quite a bit, but it doesn't make sense to think that we're accurately transmitting what's going on in every molecule of our bodies when we say what something feels like to us. And even if we could send an accurate account of all those details, who would have the time to parse through and make sense of it all? And that would be a momentary expression of who we are; it'd be inaccurate in the next moment.

> Language is a very low-fidelity way to express information; we can use abstractions to make up for quite a bit, but it doesn't make sense to think that we're accurately transmitting what's going on in every molecule of our bodies when we say what something feels like to us

That's sort of the point though, it's incredibly low fidelity (so low fidelity that computers we're absolutely sure don't have sensory experiences can appropriately and plausibly describe them) yet just about high fidelity enough for me to be sure that people experiencing synesthesia must be having different experiences than me, and there's no particular reason to believe we are or ever will be on a path to me being able to experience their experience in any meaningful way. Even in the twins' case where the transmission mechanism is literally the same substrate connected to the same physical organs that have developed simultaneously, the reports of them having different personalities and preferences suggests that they have different sensory experiences from [partially] shared inputs.

The thorny question then becomes whether sensory experiences are important to independent goal formation and other stuff often considered part of general intelligence. I don't think we know enough to answer that question, but we certainly don't know enough to dismiss it.

I know it's a bit far fetched but I'd go as far as to say that, by Occam's razor, the conscious experience does not exist. A world where the "conscious experience" does not exist would be indistinguishable from our world; ergo, the "conscious experience" does not exist.

A world where nothing but conscious experience exists and what you think as the world is simulated would be indistinguishable from your experience. Ergo, the “real world” does not exist.

By Occam's razor here, an un-simulated world ("real world") would be a more simple hypothesis because a simulation would require a simulator to be posited.

Probably it is a valid question, but I lost my patience a long long long time ago with the David Chalmers and Thomas Nagels of this world. They love to play a god of the gaps game with consciousness which it is really boring. The same thing some scientists did regarding life in the 19th century , which still some people play btw: the search for the supposed elan-vital. Count me in with Dr I-refute-thus Johnson and the anesthesiologists on the physical-reductionist side.

You can't possibly know. Just as you can't possibly know if anyone else experiences a subjective experience or if you're the only one who does. In practice, it is advisable to act as if agents who behave as if they had a subjective experience really do (people, AGIs, animals, etc.).

The concept of a philosophical zombie is outright incoherent under most formulations. The argument runs "What if everything was exactly like a universe where everyone had a mind except that no one had a mind?"

The answer is that one of these things is true: * P-zombies would write IDENTICAL papers about how they experience qualia but p-zombie land wouldn't * The mind has some effect on the universe you can detect, so P-zombie universe looks quite different

The p-zombie thought experiment pre-supposes or rather, defines, consciousness as being non-physical. If it were physical, the two worlds would obviously be distinguishable. My take-away from it is that the p-zombie world is simply our world. The theory that "a non-physical consciousness exists" can't be tested and is therefore a bad theory.

Why does it matter?

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