It does. If psychologists came out with a study that 1 out of 10 people don’t experience qualia, I would feel rather certain that I was one of those out of 10 that don’t experience it. Just like WrongBot, I think. However, my actual expectation is that we are all the same at that level of brain organization, and wonder what aspect of my experience people are labeling ‘qualia’.
Seeing red doesn’t mean seeing something with a little XML “red” tag attached,
Actually, this is exactly what I hypothesized qualia were: little reference tags of meaning that we attach to things we recognize.
When using an entirely new medium, I feel like I experience the creation of new qualia. For example, here on Less Wrong, each comment has a username. After some experience on Less Wrong, it feels like the username is different from (and more than) a set of green underlined letters in bold font at the upper right hand corner that tells you the person who wrote the comment—it’s like a separate object that means the source of the comment, and as soon as it has that extra meaning, it gains this elusive quale-like aspect.
However, my actual expectation is that we are all the same at that level of brain organization
I have an opposite hunch: that the further removed any part of our internal constitution is from the world outside our skins, the more we vary.
My reason is that there are many ways of doing the right thing to survive and reproduce. The genome isn’t big enough to contain a blueprint for a whole brain, so evolution has come up with a general mechanism (which no-one actually knows anything about yet) for the whole thing to organise itself when the newborn is dropped into an unknown environment. The organisation an individual brain ends up with is constrained by nothing more than the requirement to make the organism function in that environment.
Look around you at the variation in people’s personalities. They’re even more different inside their heads than that.
It does. If psychologists came out with a study that 1 out of 10 people don’t experience qualia, I would feel rather certain that I was one of those out of 10 that don’t experience it. Just like WrongBot, I think. However, my actual expectation is that we are all the same at that level of brain organization, and wonder what aspect of my experience people are labeling ‘qualia’.
Above, Orthonormal wrote,
Actually, this is exactly what I hypothesized qualia were: little reference tags of meaning that we attach to things we recognize.
When using an entirely new medium, I feel like I experience the creation of new qualia. For example, here on Less Wrong, each comment has a username. After some experience on Less Wrong, it feels like the username is different from (and more than) a set of green underlined letters in bold font at the upper right hand corner that tells you the person who wrote the comment—it’s like a separate object that means the source of the comment, and as soon as it has that extra meaning, it gains this elusive quale-like aspect.
I have an opposite hunch: that the further removed any part of our internal constitution is from the world outside our skins, the more we vary.
My reason is that there are many ways of doing the right thing to survive and reproduce. The genome isn’t big enough to contain a blueprint for a whole brain, so evolution has come up with a general mechanism (which no-one actually knows anything about yet) for the whole thing to organise itself when the newborn is dropped into an unknown environment. The organisation an individual brain ends up with is constrained by nothing more than the requirement to make the organism function in that environment.
Look around you at the variation in people’s personalities. They’re even more different inside their heads than that.