Hacker News Reader

Comment by n4r9 | Hacker News Reader

For me, it's the other way around. I don't feel like there's anything special about "what it's like" to experience a certain mental state that cannot be explained physically/algorithmically. It feels like the concept of qualia is a last-ditch attempt by humans to make themselves feel special.

View on HN

The hard problem of consciousness is hard for a reason. There's no obvious way to link the experience all of us (solipsism aside) are having at each and every moment with the mechanism that generates it. It's a category error to confuse the two, misidentifying the map and the territory. Stating as above, that qualia can be reduced to an illusion of qualia merely restates the problem in an effort to elide it. 'I'm imagining that I have a feeling' isn't qualitatively different to 'I'm feeling the feeling'. Given that it's fairly trivial to link affect and self awareness to concrete adaptive advantages, and that each can be diminished through neurological damage - we know that phenomenology is both useful and organic. What we don't understand is precisely how it comes into being and 'where' it resides - besides using words like 'emergent' in nonspecific and hand wavy ways.

> There's no obvious way to link the experience with the mechanism that generates it

I agree that it's not obvious. I suppose where I disagree with anti-physicalists is that I think it can conceivably be resolved by reference to physical facts. I can imagine reading a computer program that simulates the human brain and thinking "ah yes, that captures everything about what I feel". Whereas I don't think the anti-physicalists will ever accept such a possibility.

I am guessing that you think sperm and eggs have no consciousness. But, humans do.

When do you imagine it started? Does your mental model explain this physically/algorithmically? (Honest question, I consider this often and really have no clue)

Asking if a single-celled organism is conscious kind of feels like asking whether quantum theory is statically typed. Like applying a descriptor from one category to objects in another.

it's commonplace to hold the opinion that an individual particle is slightly conscious

This is a thing... but it is certainly not commonplace.

In philosophy of mind it's not something that would raise an eyebrow

Are you referring to pansychism? I don't get the impression that it's very popular these days.

> There are few explicit defenders of panpsychism at the present time. The most prominent are David Griffin, Gregg Rosenberg, David Skrbina and Timothy Sprigge.

https://plato.stanford.edu/ARCHIVES/WIN2009/entries/panpsych...

But that’s my point! When was it conscious? A million cells? A billion?

My hunch is that consciousness will come to be described in terms of information processing systems, rather than the biological substrate on which they run. Systems with certain properties - possibly including a sufficiently complex model of the environment, model of the self, and a continuously updating internal narrative - may be said to possess a level of consciousness. I'm not a biologist and I appreciate that the above is somewhat vague, but I wouldn't say that sperm or egg cells have the above.

It's the problem of heaps[0] and I think you'll find Michael Levin's fascinating perspective[1] on this topic to be very interesting

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

[1] https://youtu.be/e5GDnD_WA2Q?si=QQfWr3HsHQarhk-H

Nowadays it seems rather easy to have a computer that talks as if it were conscious. Do you think it really does perceive itself the same way we do? I woke up a human today, but someone else woke up an algorithm?

If not, what’s missing?

According to the theory, an attention model. Here's artificial consciousness in three steps:

1. Have a robot build perception models of its environment and itself

2. Have the robot allocate computational resources and sensory bandwidth to the models using attention

3. Have the robot control attention using model predictive control

Because the attention model is less detailed than its actual attention, by virtue of being a model, it doesn't represent the mechanisms of attention or modeling accurately. Instead, it uses non-physical concepts such as "mental possession" to model itself or other agents paying attention to things, or "qualia" to denote the recursion that occurs when percepts we attend to are summarized by the attention model (which in turn can be attended to, and so on).

I don't think there's anything in principle preventing computers from becoming conscious, if that's what you're asking. I'm not convinced LLMs are there yet, although sometimes they do sound like it.

> It feels like the concept of qualia is a last-ditch attempt by humans to make themselves feel special.

I don't think so, I think fundamentally it's just a concept used to express a more generalized form of perception (i.e. not divided into discrete senses, either internal or external). I'm happy to leave it at that, but YMMV.

The problem is the idea that no amount of physical information can capture or encode qualia. I think this puts qualia into a different category than other kinds of perception.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com