Thinking about qualia, trying to avoid getting trapped in the hard problem of consciousness along the way.
Tempted to model qualia as a region with the capacity to populate itself with coarse heuristics for difficult-to-compute features of nodes in a search process, which happens to ship with a bunch of computational inconveniences (that are most of what we mean to refer to when we reference qualia).
This aids in generality, but trades off against locally optimal processes, as a kind of ‘tax’ on all cognition.
This is a literal shower thought and I’ve read nothing on this anywhere; most of the literature appears to be trapped in parts of the hard problem that I don’t find compelling, and which don’t seem necessary to grapple with for this angle of inquiry (I’m thinking about something closer to the ‘easy problems’).
Any reading recommendations on this or related topics?
Following up to say that the thing that maps most closely to what I was thinking about (or satisfied my curiosity) is GWT.
GWT is usually intended to approach the hard problem, but the principle critique of it is that it isn’t doing that at all (I ~agree). Unfortunately, I had dozens of frustrating conversations with people telling me ‘don’t spend any time thinking about consciousness; it’s a dead end; you’re talking about the hard problem; that triggers me; STOP’ before someone actually pointed me in the right direction here, or seemed open to the question at all.
Is qualia (it’s existence or not, how and why it happens) not the exact thing the hard problem is about? If you’re ignoring the hard problem or dismiss it you also doubt the existence of qualia.
I guess I should have said ‘without getting caught in the nearby attractors associated with most conversations about the hard problem of consciousness’. There’s obviously a lot there, and my guess is >95 percent of it wouldn’t feel to me like it has little meaningful surface area with what I’m curious about.
Thinking about qualia, trying to avoid getting trapped in the hard problem of consciousness along the way.
Tempted to model qualia as a region with the capacity to populate itself with coarse heuristics for difficult-to-compute features of nodes in a search process, which happens to ship with a bunch of computational inconveniences (that are most of what we mean to refer to when we reference qualia).
This aids in generality, but trades off against locally optimal processes, as a kind of ‘tax’ on all cognition.
This is a literal shower thought and I’ve read nothing on this anywhere; most of the literature appears to be trapped in parts of the hard problem that I don’t find compelling, and which don’t seem necessary to grapple with for this angle of inquiry (I’m thinking about something closer to the ‘easy problems’).
Any reading recommendations on this or related topics?
Following up to say that the thing that maps most closely to what I was thinking about (or satisfied my curiosity) is GWT.
GWT is usually intended to approach the hard problem, but the principle critique of it is that it isn’t doing that at all (I ~agree). Unfortunately, I had dozens of frustrating conversations with people telling me ‘don’t spend any time thinking about consciousness; it’s a dead end; you’re talking about the hard problem; that triggers me; STOP’ before someone actually pointed me in the right direction here, or seemed open to the question at all.
Is qualia (it’s existence or not, how and why it happens) not the exact thing the hard problem is about? If you’re ignoring the hard problem or dismiss it you also doubt the existence of qualia.
I guess I should have said ‘without getting caught in the nearby attractors associated with most conversations about the hard problem of consciousness’. There’s obviously a lot there, and my guess is >95 percent of it wouldn’t feel to me like it has little meaningful surface area with what I’m curious about.