RE: [agi] What are qualia...
Hi Ben, how the subjective experience of qualia is connected to the neural correlates of qualia. but the tricky question is how a physical system (the brain) can generate subjective, phenomenal experiences. Oh dearhaving jumped in I feel like I'm in over my head already! :) What follows is just intuition, with no research or deep reading foundation at all... Let's say I look at something and I see/feel red colour. First my brain lumps lots of different frequencies under a limited pallete of colours that have a network in the brain. So pure frequencies and mixtures of light frequencies are all routed to the same colour network. Also my brain corrects for light intensity and context etc. So many different external light stimuli trigger a certain 'redness' network in the brain. This colour network has evolved since colour vision exisited and also has a particular evolutionary history leading to humans - so chances are most humans know they are seeing the 'same' red because the recognition system has, through evolution, created much the same response structure in most human brains (exceptions for colour blindness phenomena, also cultural and training experience will modify the response). My guess is that the pallete of colours (smells, tastes, tactile, all other sense feelings) we see is a bit like a hard-wired language - especially important in social beings that need to intuitively understand each other (ie. the system evolved a long time before word-based language) and relates to the value of social animals being able to 'mind read' ie. it is valuable for coordination to have a set of similar qualia experiences going in on in many brains so that the animals are working to the same 'story'. Also my guess is that qualia are linked fairly closely to the neural 'attention system' - are qualia apparent to anyone if they are not paying attention to a phenomenon? My intuition is to say they are not. My guess is that when we pay attention to sensory, or other data that our brains connects with a quasi-sensory response, the data is tagged with labels that are used to trigger a suite of qualia responses - deep hard-wired patterns and associations built up through life - linking to memories, emotions etc. My guess is that it is the richness of associations that makes the qualia feel rich. But this would be very demanding of brain processing capacity so I imagine that is why 'qualia triggering' would only be done in relation to things we are paying attention to. Am I right in feeling that many people associate the experience of qualia with the inuitive/folk notion of 'consciousness'? If so, the connection might be the 'attention system' linkage? I don't know whether any of what I've said deals with the 'hard problem' that you felt I had not addresses in my last message. Let me know! :) Cheers, Philip --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: [agi] What are qualia...
Hi, Check out http://eksl-www.cs.umass.edu/~atkin/791T/chalmers.html for a brief summary of what I mean by the hard problem, which IMO you are still not addressing. Also check out http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2004/HardProblem.htm for my own thoughts on the qualia/consciousness problem... -- Ben -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Philip Sutton Sent: Saturday, January 22, 2005 9:39 AM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: RE: [agi] What are qualia... Hi Ben, how the subjective experience of qualia is connected to the neural correlates of qualia. but the tricky question is how a physical system (the brain) can generate subjective, phenomenal experiences. Oh dearhaving jumped in I feel like I'm in over my head already! :) What follows is just intuition, with no research or deep reading foundation at all... Let's say I look at something and I see/feel red colour. First my brain lumps lots of different frequencies under a limited pallete of colours that have a network in the brain. So pure frequencies and mixtures of light frequencies are all routed to the same colour network. Also my brain corrects for light intensity and context etc. So many different external light stimuli trigger a certain 'redness' network in the brain. This colour network has evolved since colour vision exisited and also has a particular evolutionary history leading to humans - so chances are most humans know they are seeing the 'same' red because the recognition system has, through evolution, created much the same response structure in most human brains (exceptions for colour blindness phenomena, also cultural and training experience will modify the response). My guess is that the pallete of colours (smells, tastes, tactile, all other sense feelings) we see is a bit like a hard-wired language - especially important in social beings that need to intuitively understand each other (ie. the system evolved a long time before word-based language) and relates to the value of social animals being able to 'mind read' ie. it is valuable for coordination to have a set of similar qualia experiences going in on in many brains so that the animals are working to the same 'story'. Also my guess is that qualia are linked fairly closely to the neural 'attention system' - are qualia apparent to anyone if they are not paying attention to a phenomenon? My intuition is to say they are not. My guess is that when we pay attention to sensory, or other data that our brains connects with a quasi-sensory response, the data is tagged with labels that are used to trigger a suite of qualia responses - deep hard-wired patterns and associations built up through life - linking to memories, emotions etc. My guess is that it is the richness of associations that makes the qualia feel rich. But this would be very demanding of brain processing capacity so I imagine that is why 'qualia triggering' would only be done in relation to things we are paying attention to. Am I right in feeling that many people associate the experience of qualia with the inuitive/folk notion of 'consciousness'? If so, the connection might be the 'attention system' linkage? I don't know whether any of what I've said deals with the 'hard problem' that you felt I had not addresses in my last message. Let me know! :) Cheers, Philip --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED] --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: [agi] What are qualia...
Hi Ben, I just read Chalmers article and yours. You concluded your article with: In artificial intelligence terms, the present theory suggests that if an AI program is constructed so that its dynamics give rise to a constant stream of patterns that are novel and significant (measured relative to the system itself), then this program will report experiences of awareness and consciousness somewhat similar to those that humans report. This is a useful statement because it testable at some stage when AI exists that can hold complex conversations. By the way, would it be true that a novel and significant pattern is one that by definition trigger the AI's attention system? If so then that is a commmon point in both our speculations. I think I've nearly exhausted the value of my speculations for the moment. My intuition is that qualia are going to be different in intelligences that do *not* have long evolutionary histories of being social, compared to those that do have such histories (a species could be currently non-social, but if it has evolved from antecendents that have gone through a social phase then my guess is that it would experieice qualia more like social species ie. the capacity for experiencing qualia is like to be retained to some degree). My guess is that there will be structured processes discovered in brains that account for the subjective experience of qualia - and that qualia will not be experienced without some appropriate system for qualia generation ie. pattern recognition by an AI will not be enough by itself to give rise to the experience of qualia. But this intuition is so speculative and so poorly based on my part that it probably doesn't warrant comment from others! :) So I might leave it there and just wait to see what people come up with in the future. Cheers, Philip To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
