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Comment by gaganyaan | Hacker News Reader

Qualia is a silly god of the gaps style argument. There's no difference between "seeing red" and "having your neurons tickled so that you think you're seeing red".

People really don't understand consciousness, but it's actually quite simple when you realize that the question isn't "is this conscious?", it's "what is this conscious of?". A rock is not conscious of anything, because it has no state that represents anything. A sunflower is conscious of the sun's position, because it has state that represents that. A cat is conscious of much more, such as "this mouse is food". An LLM is conscious of much more, but less than a human.

The LLM is a model that is conscious of many things, as experienced through the medium of human text.

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The fact that we can tell even from an EEG (a grossly inaccurate measurement of brain activity) whether a person is conscious or unconscious, indicates there's a physical reality to it, which might be able to be understood by science some day.

I think Qualia is a wave phenomena, and all wave phenomena simultaneously can be described as "existing" and "not existing" as follows:

Think of a football stadium "wave". It has a beginning, ending, location, velocity, etc., all being scientifically measurable observables. Yet I ask you "Does the wave exist, or is it merely people in various states of arm positions?" There is no right or wrong answer. This is the nature of waves.

So if you want to argue consciousness "does not exist" I say fine, that is a valid "perspective", just like the denial of the existence of any other wave phenomena is a valid perspective. However keep in mind also that the entire universe is also made of waves.

Brain waves existing or even being crucial to consciousness in humans doesn't really say anything in itself.

Like for all anyone knows, they're simply present to trigger (and keep triggered) "consciousness computations".

If qualia itself is the actual waves themselves, then that [arguably] disproves the "Substrate Independence" view, which is that consciousness is a set of computations. You can build logic gates out of dominoes or even physical abacuses, but if qualia is made of waves no amount of "simulating it" via calculations is going to truly conjure it into existence.

Sure, waves exist, whatever. Not to be rude, but so what? This kind of comes across as "quantum waves therefore the Universe Is Love" or something. What about the waves matters here?

I'm not arguing that consciousness doesn't exist, I'm saying that it's not a binary thing, and trying to provide a useful, falsifiable definition of it that provides a way to actually communicate about it instead of talking past each other.

I partially answered this on the other post. Some people think Qualia is emergent purely from computation. Some people (like me) think there's a different and very specific and very unique thing going on inside brains that is responsible for Qualia, and I think to understand it scientifically it's going to be a "Wave Theory".

I'm not even pushing the panpsychism view that "Everything has Consciousness, because all atoms have EM fields" at all, but when you get right down to it, EM fields are more "real" than a computation is. A computation is purely theoretical. We can build computer logic circuits out of water pipes or dominoes. So it's just obvious to me Qualia is not built on computations.

Believing Qualia is made of computations is more of a naieve "Universe is Love" type position than believing that Qualia is built of something REAL like EM fields. Calculations are not even real. For example the number 0100101110110 in a computer is purely a "label" for something real. Numbers in computers are just labels. EM waves are the actual thing, and actually real. The Map is not the Territory. Computers are Maps. Qualia is a Territory.

Well we're not going to convince each other of fundamentally different worldviews over the internet. Until proven otherwise, I think qualia is just a trick smart people play on themselves to convince themselves humans are special because it makes them feel better, and indelibly tied to the concept of a soul and like woo. I'm willing to be proven wrong, and that's what science is for. Hopefully we'll see answers in our lifetimes.

I think it takes more "faith" (belief without evidence) to deny the existence of Qualia as being real, than it does to accept that it's real. Of course even the word "real" is problematic because of the simple analogy: "Are Football Stadium waves real, or is it nothing but people's arms moving." Anything that's purely a dynamical set of state changes can be legitimately argued to "not exist".

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