Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Some level of intelligence is a prerequisite for experience of qualia.

A rock for example is below that threshold. The question then becomes what exactly is the minim level of perception we are willing to accept. Individual cells respond to their environment indirectly, that’s enough to qualify IMO but I accept people would disagree.

Which just illiterates people don’t generally use philosophical definitions directly. What they mean by qualia isn’t subjective conscious experience, it’s something else which they can’t actually describe that just so happens to conform exactly to their preconceived notions.

View on HN

The ideas is if you had some, theoretical, mechanical computer built of stone (something trivially producible), if we believe that any artificial intelligences can be sentient, then it would be trivial to extend this to create a sentient, but essentially just a complex stone object.

A single stone is different than a system consisting of large numbers of stones in some non random configuration.

It’s like the flaw in that “Chinese room” thought experiment. The person following instructions isn’t the room any more than the walls are. All that thought experiment demonstrates is a CPU has a more limited perspective than the computer it’s part of.

I mean, showing that difference is extremely hard philosophically.

How so?

A specific rock inherently is whatever that rock is. That same rock can represent all finite messages at the same time in relation to it’s position along arbitrarily defined number lines. Nothing inherent to the rock changed as that meaning is external to it.

Consciousness is an actual thing. It's not an idea. The idea that somehow a collection of stone objects springs forth a consciousness when arranged in one pattern versus another... is certainly an odd concept.

Why would you assume consciousness is a thing rather than a property of a system?

Temperature for example isn’t a substance. I am not saying consciousness couldn’t be a thing, but it just seems to be an assumption without justification.

As to arrangements of stuff being important, arrangement of individual pieces can make the difference between a watch and a pile of pieces or a person and a dead body. Many emergent properties depend on the specific arrangements of components.

>Why would you assume consciousness is a thing rather than a property of a system?

If consciousness were simply the property of a system, then I'd assume it is effectively an illusion. I'm not sure, and I'm not saying this it would be de facto wrong, I'm just saying it's absurd for me to conceive of it this way, because if it is the case that it's a byproduct of a system, then there is effectively no self. It may be the case that that is true, bit it's useless to conceive of it.

Is math an illusion? Math is a property of systems, as is our and our calculators ability to do it. I would argue that makes it more real.

When you see an object in reality, you're really making a series of assumptions. What you see is reflected light, and you construct a highly innacurate but useful model of what that light logically implies. Something that is external can only be perceived epistemically, as a sufficiently good guess. There's no evidence we're not in a simulation, so it's a toss-up as to whether anything physical exists at all.

Contrast the concept of self awareness. 'I think, therefore I am' is not a guess. It is a certainty, regardless of the broader context, that somewhere, something is a host to my experiences and thoughts.

Tangent: You can extend that a little bit by reasoning that you exist, therefore the things you interact with must exist as something. That doesn't get you past the possibility of the matrix, but it does escape total nihilism.

As I said in my first post “What they mean by qualia isn’t subjective conscious experience, it’s something else which they can’t actually describe that just so happens to conform exactly to their preconceived notions.”

> Some level of intelligence is a prerequisite for experience of qualia.

How do you know that? It’s entirely possible that a rock has all sorts going on that we just can’t detect.

Which sounds facetious, but given that we can’t even detect consciousness in humans, it seems difficult to rule it out entirely.

I wouldn’t say it’s a requirement for qualia, but rather for experience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com