🏅 Top traders

4 out of the 5 YES buyers are bots 🤔

@levifinkelstein If the bots think that consciousness is simple, it probably is.

Gonna toss this in here too: https://reducing-suffering.org/hard-problem-consciousness/

I will post my opinion here. I do not think that it will solve the HPC in your eyes, but I think it might start a discussion. I have been thinking about the problem a lot after reading the novel Permutation City from Greg Egan. (I will not mud the discussion by presenting the view from the book, but it definitely is an interesting reference.)

After some thought, I concluded that the materialist view on the universe (i.e. the model according to the state of the art physics, quantum mechanics, etc.) is enough to predict any relevant future predictions, or probabilities of those. (And if not, we only did not find a precise enough theory or do not have computational capacity to do the prediction.) It therefore seems very unlikely to me that there would be a fundamentally missing piece in our brains, fundamentally also made of boson and fermionic fields. The qualia are therefore emergent properties of how our brains process information.

I think that qualia are real, but:
1] It is not strange that we are not able to communicate them. After all, speech is an extremely narrow channel of communication compared to the complexity of the brain. I believe we would be able to communicate our qualia if we could tell the other person to "build this sub-circuit of my brain within your brain and use it to feel as I feel", or something along these lines. (Practically, it would be a pragmatic obstacle of how to do so without becoming someone else, but it is not unimaginable in principle.)

2] They are simply our way of processing information (feelings, colors, audio-inputs, etc.) Any representation of our brains (whether biological, brain upload or even just equations on the paper) would have them, because this is how our brains work. It is emergent properties of how we process information.

The gap to predict how would given person experience color, or some other qualia is, I think, just limited imagination on our side. (That we are not able to "build that sub-circuit in our brain" to have that experience.) But all the relevant data to make any predictions of future are already in the model. 

@Irigi Observing neural correlates of qualia and using that to predict qualia would be an easy problem. The hard problem is how to explain why experience is like it is and not some other way (or no way at all). How do you go from "the brain is configured in such and such a way" to "therefore you have these experiences?". Or why is there experience as opposed to no experience?

@levifinkelstein If all humans have brains wired so that they think they have qualia, and you are instance of human, isn't this all explanation needed?

(If not, then the question resembles questions like "Why is there something rather than nothing?" which I think really do not have good answers. )

@Irigi "If all humans have brains wired so that they think they have qualia, and you are instance of human, isn't this all explanation needed?"
No. The hard is problem is about why certain physical states cause certain mental states, or mental states at all. Just observing a correlation between physical states and mental states is not sufficient.

I agree that the question resembles "why is there something rather than nothing."

Have you investigated https://qri.org/research-publications yet? Start with https://opentheory.net/PrincipiaQualia.pdf

@NicholasKross Please post the most compelling arguments, if you are aware of any.

@levifinkelstein TLDR, "what makes a given thing conscious or not?" could be described by some kind of mathematical transformation. One example (page 10 of the linked PDF) is "Integrated Information Theory".

From that kind of starting point (math 'n' physics applied to "what consciousness is" and "why does it exist?"), the Qualia Research Institute has, in varying ways, researched how conscious systems and the pleasure/pain they feel, could be modeled by some kind of mathematical structure.

The exact components aren't fully known yet, and it's not clear they'd fit into an allowed comment, but that's the gist of it. I think I agree more with the "you can model consciousness with math'n'physics", but I'm less-certain of "we can model pleasure/pain as some nice property of that consciousness-representing mathematical object, too".

I'd bet someone from QRI is on Manifold...

Come on guys, some of you gotta have some theories on this.