I see physics as a collection of patterns in the experienced world. It's a very, very powerful and intense collection of patterns. But nevertheless, it's not totally comprehensive, in the sense that there are some patterns in the experienced world that are not part of physics, but are rather "complementary" to physics (in the Niels Bohr sense of complementarity). Qualia, perhaps, are in this set of patterns that are complementary to the patterns comprising physics.
Bohr's needlessly complex metaphysics of the quantum-classical split became unnecessary once I understood the Everett-Wheeler-DeWitt many-worlds interpretation, in which there is not and never was a "classical" universe, and measuring instruments are a continuous part of the wavefunction. There is no "observation", only the appearance of observation from inside the continuous part of the wavefunction that happens to be yourself. The wavefunction does not collapse; you split along with the wavefunction, and each of you thinks the wavefunction has collapsed. The illusion of complementarity; the illusion of solipsism; underneath all of it is one continuous equation that does not treat observation as a special case.
If one understood qualia one would have no need to invoke complementarity for them.
Now, physics sees my "experienced world" as the product of some physical system (my brain, etc.) From this point of view, the qualia that are patterns in my experienced world are patterns generated by a physical system (my brain, etc.)
Physics and experience are thus two perspectives, each of which claims to contain and generate the other!
In my own work on AGI, I have drawn on both of these perspectives: both the mechanistic, scientific perspective AND the subjective, experiential perspective. In theory one could create a digital mind based purely the mechanistic, scientific perspective, but given the currently somewhat primitive state of mind science, obtaining some guidance from the experiential side (via drawing analogies between subjective human experience and the likely subjective experience of an AI) has seemed prudent.
If one hasn't understood the subjective in terms of physics, then one will need to go on thinking about cognition in terms of phenomena that one finds to be "subjective" as well as "objective". However, in my experience, learning how to create chunks of cognition requires crossing the gap between the subjective and the objective with respect to that problem. While you may be able to make incremental progress in understanding cognition by using a dual perspective to work on subproblems, I would predict that any part of your wanted AI design that you do not yet know how to describe in purely physical terms, will fail to work. That's part of what makes AI hard.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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