>The WBE does experience phenomenological consciousness, but this is not correlated with the words it’s saying.
Does this not make it a philosophical zombie? If the qualia and the talking-about-qualia are not necessarily correlated with each other, how did such a coincidence come about originally, in the actual physical system?
If the relationship between me saying “I experience qualia”, and my qualia, is functionally isomorphic to the relationship between my emulation saying “I experience qualia” and my emulation’s qualia… does this not imply that my claim of experiencing qualia is similarly not correlated with the words I’m saying, for the same reason?
Separately: I like the possibility that the EM field just cannot be emulated in the necessary detail to get convergent behavior, that’s one which hadn’t occurred to me. But… this doesn’t exactly feel like it pushes against computationalism? It feels more like saying that, yes, qualia is a computation, but the only computer with sufficient computational power to compute the program happens to be computers made out of infinitely-continuous analog EM fields.
I also note that if that’s true, we really ought to figure out how to harness EM fields for our own mundane computation. This feels like evidence it isn’t true, but I admit that’s mostly about pessimism that such a cheap source of compute could exist.
If the relationship between me saying “I experience qualia”, and my qualia, is functionally isomorphic to the relationship between my emulation saying “I experience qualia” and my emulation’s qualia
Let’s say in the original brain there is a contiguous chunk of EM field which is what it’s like to be you. In the process of creating a digital emulation of the field, at the hardware level, the field and its causal pathways would get broken up and reshuffled in a way which does not preserve spatiotemporal continuity. Even modulo some diffeomorphism, the shapes in the WBE hardware would be different to the shapes in the original brain. They could have their own experience, but it would be a very different experience to the original brain.
But if you only look at the functional relationships between input and output, you would ignore all this intermediary detail.
Also, if you find the premise of hypercomputation with fields of qualia entertaining, check this out.
but this would not actually cause my WBE to not talk about having phenomenological consciousness, right?
The relationship between the simulated neurons and the simulated em fields would be identical, therefore my whole brain emulation would talk about having phenomenological consciousness for the same reason that I do, except it wouldn’t have it?
edit: coming back to this, I sort of anticipate that you will point to the fact that I’m just looking at the edges of the system, because that’s true in a sense
but if I actually had the physics simulator in front of me, and I could compare the wbe to the real world brain, then I would be able to find the point of divergence, and then I wouldn’t be talking about edges anymore, we’d be examining the nitty-gritty details
I want you to make a prediction about what would happen in that circumstance. would I be able to find the point of divergence and fix it? what happens if I did? if not, why wouldn’t I be able to?
Yes, it would not stop the WBE from talking about phenomenal consciousness.
The WBE would still have phenomenal consciousness (the entire point of my article is that everything does), but it wouldn’t have the phenomenal consciousness described by the simulation. Rather, it would have the phenomenal consciousness you’d expect if you analysed the WBE hardware running the simulation.
You wouldn’t find this divergence in inputs and outputs, rather you do need to look at the internal states.
Perhaps if we ran the WBE simulator next to a WBE simulator simulator (so we can nondestructively analyse both the simulated WBE and the simulated WBE hardware), if you ran our translation function on the simulated WBE and the simulated WBE hardware you’d get different internal states. But if you ran the translation function on the simulated WBE and the simulated WBE inside the simulated WBE hardware, you’d get the same internal states).
Out in baseline reality, if we applied our translation function (not possible nondestructively) to a brain and WBE hardware, we’d see similar divergence in internal states. Recall that our translation function can only return equivalent internal states for the human as well as the digital simulation of the human if you can figure out how to write one which can traverse the digital simulation abstraction stack. My argument is that even if you did, it would be so complex that I would find it implausible as a proposal about how the universe works (well, assuming the simulation hardware has an architecture similar to current human computers).
Regarding edges of the system, picking the edges of a system is an opinionated choice and not an objective fact of the universe (unless we are talking about something really low level and universal, like Andrés’ whole EM field topology thing). Those edges are not objective facts of the universe; you might pick edges around the (brain, WBE) which do not reveal a point of divergence in the inputs and outputs, but I could just as easily pick different edges. Better not to try to coarse-grain the system like this and to consider the system as a whole, including its internal states.
It may be illustrative to consider that I anticipate that analytic functionalism may well be equivalent in its implications to my preferred qualia structuralist interpretation of physicalism, but only if we examine reality at a fine-grained/high enough resolution. See this conversation.
I could try to deconstruct the psychological proclivities which lead humans to want to coarse-grain reality, but I believe that this is well trodden philosophical terrain...
How do I tell that I’m not in the same position as that WBE, who is talking about phenomenological qualia it doesn’t actually experience (since it experiences something wildly different)?
it sure feels to me like the reason I talk about having qualia is downstream, causally, from the qualia itself… but if I am correctly understanding your model, that’s not true. the interaction between my neurons, and my EM field, is isomorphic to the interaction between the WBE’s simulated neurons, and the simulated EM field, yes?
so if the WBE’s reason-for-talking-about-having-qualia is not actually that it has qualia, then neither can mine be?
I ask for clarification, because I used the word divergence to describe the difference between the two systems, base reality vs emulation, but you seem to be saying that both systems would diverge in exactly the same way, which makes me think you’re using the word differently… I can’t tell if you actually think the wbe will behave the same
i would probably get around the ‘edges vs interior’ problem by just postulating, for the sake of the thought experiment, that we emulate the entire universe. that way the edges *have* to be well-defined and agreed upon
How do I tell that I’m not in the same position as that WBE
You cannot really do this by trying to prove this to yourself. You can only do this by looking at your subjective experience and accepting this from first principles, given that it’s the only thing you’re experiencing.
so if the WBE’s reason-for-talking-about-having-qualia is not actually that it has qualia, then neither can mine be?
I think that if you are trying to infer the internal state of entities very different to yourself then reasoning processes which lean on talking-about-having-qualia are largely bunkum. Perhaps this might draw accusations of anthropic or biological chauvinism, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to look at my own biology and the biology of others and accept that similar things might generate qualia in similar ways. Anyway, at no point have I made talking-about-having-qualia load-bearing to my argument, even though it is a popular subject of thought experiments. Instead I have proposed alternative reasoning processes.
I can’t tell if you actually think the wbe will behave the same
Haven’t we already specified that the simulation is perfect for the sake of argument? I’m sorry but we’ve been going long enough that I can’t remember now. My point is that even a perfect simulation might not have the same qualia, because in order to make predictions about qualia in unfamiliar systems, we have to look at the hardware before we can figure out what’s going on in the simulation, and going from the hardware to the simulation is an opinionated process. I could propose a translation function which does actually derive a qualia state from the hardware which is identical to the original brain’s, but any such function is going to be unfathomably baroque.
Perhaps it might be helpful to – rather than reasoning about this from a human’s perspective, imagine you are a divine creator who despite their omniscience has forgotten how the universe works. They can’t remember what function they used to relate the structure of matter to the structures in the minds of beings – and for this reason, they also only have access to the raw shapes of matter, because in order to access human knowledge and understand the ways that humans categorise raw shapes of matter into reified concepts, they first must derive human internal experience from raw shapes of matter. When trying to rederive the translation function they came up with back when they raised the firmament, what’s your prior that our amnesiac God would construct something so complex that it could also pull some highly specific qualia out of complex digital hardware?
>The WBE does experience phenomenological consciousness, but this is not correlated with the words it’s saying.
Does this not make it a philosophical zombie? If the qualia and the talking-about-qualia are not necessarily correlated with each other, how did such a coincidence come about originally, in the actual physical system?
If the relationship between me saying “I experience qualia”, and my qualia, is functionally isomorphic to the relationship between my emulation saying “I experience qualia” and my emulation’s qualia… does this not imply that my claim of experiencing qualia is similarly not correlated with the words I’m saying, for the same reason?
Separately: I like the possibility that the EM field just cannot be emulated in the necessary detail to get convergent behavior, that’s one which hadn’t occurred to me. But… this doesn’t exactly feel like it pushes against computationalism? It feels more like saying that, yes, qualia is a computation, but the only computer with sufficient computational power to compute the program happens to be computers made out of infinitely-continuous analog EM fields.
I also note that if that’s true, we really ought to figure out how to harness EM fields for our own mundane computation. This feels like evidence it isn’t true, but I admit that’s mostly about pessimism that such a cheap source of compute could exist.
Let’s say in the original brain there is a contiguous chunk of EM field which is what it’s like to be you. In the process of creating a digital emulation of the field, at the hardware level, the field and its causal pathways would get broken up and reshuffled in a way which does not preserve spatiotemporal continuity. Even modulo some diffeomorphism, the shapes in the WBE hardware would be different to the shapes in the original brain. They could have their own experience, but it would be a very different experience to the original brain.
But if you only look at the functional relationships between input and output, you would ignore all this intermediary detail.
Also, if you find the premise of hypercomputation with fields of qualia entertaining, check this out.
but this would not actually cause my WBE to not talk about having phenomenological consciousness, right?
The relationship between the simulated neurons and the simulated em fields would be identical, therefore my whole brain emulation would talk about having phenomenological consciousness for the same reason that I do, except it wouldn’t have it?
edit: coming back to this, I sort of anticipate that you will point to the fact that I’m just looking at the edges of the system, because that’s true in a sense
but if I actually had the physics simulator in front of me, and I could compare the wbe to the real world brain, then I would be able to find the point of divergence, and then I wouldn’t be talking about edges anymore, we’d be examining the nitty-gritty details
I want you to make a prediction about what would happen in that circumstance. would I be able to find the point of divergence and fix it? what happens if I did? if not, why wouldn’t I be able to?
Yes, it would not stop the WBE from talking about phenomenal consciousness.
The WBE would still have phenomenal consciousness (the entire point of my article is that everything does), but it wouldn’t have the phenomenal consciousness described by the simulation. Rather, it would have the phenomenal consciousness you’d expect if you analysed the WBE hardware running the simulation.
You wouldn’t find this divergence in inputs and outputs, rather you do need to look at the internal states.
Perhaps if we ran the WBE simulator next to a WBE simulator simulator (so we can nondestructively analyse both the simulated WBE and the simulated WBE hardware), if you ran our translation function on the simulated WBE and the simulated WBE hardware you’d get different internal states. But if you ran the translation function on the simulated WBE and the simulated WBE inside the simulated WBE hardware, you’d get the same internal states).
Out in baseline reality, if we applied our translation function (not possible nondestructively) to a brain and WBE hardware, we’d see similar divergence in internal states. Recall that our translation function can only return equivalent internal states for the human as well as the digital simulation of the human if you can figure out how to write one which can traverse the digital simulation abstraction stack. My argument is that even if you did, it would be so complex that I would find it implausible as a proposal about how the universe works (well, assuming the simulation hardware has an architecture similar to current human computers).
Regarding edges of the system, picking the edges of a system is an opinionated choice and not an objective fact of the universe (unless we are talking about something really low level and universal, like Andrés’ whole EM field topology thing). Those edges are not objective facts of the universe; you might pick edges around the (brain, WBE) which do not reveal a point of divergence in the inputs and outputs, but I could just as easily pick different edges. Better not to try to coarse-grain the system like this and to consider the system as a whole, including its internal states.
It may be illustrative to consider that I anticipate that analytic functionalism may well be equivalent in its implications to my preferred qualia structuralist interpretation of physicalism, but only if we examine reality at a fine-grained/high enough resolution. See this conversation.
I could try to deconstruct the psychological proclivities which lead humans to want to coarse-grain reality, but I believe that this is well trodden philosophical terrain...
How do I tell that I’m not in the same position as that WBE, who is talking about phenomenological qualia it doesn’t actually experience (since it experiences something wildly different)?
it sure feels to me like the reason I talk about having qualia is downstream, causally, from the qualia itself… but if I am correctly understanding your model, that’s not true. the interaction between my neurons, and my EM field, is isomorphic to the interaction between the WBE’s simulated neurons, and the simulated EM field, yes?
so if the WBE’s reason-for-talking-about-having-qualia is not actually that it has qualia, then neither can mine be?
I ask for clarification, because I used the word divergence to describe the difference between the two systems, base reality vs emulation, but you seem to be saying that both systems would diverge in exactly the same way, which makes me think you’re using the word differently… I can’t tell if you actually think the wbe will behave the same
i would probably get around the ‘edges vs interior’ problem by just postulating, for the sake of the thought experiment, that we emulate the entire universe. that way the edges *have* to be well-defined and agreed upon
You cannot really do this by trying to prove this to yourself. You can only do this by looking at your subjective experience and accepting this from first principles, given that it’s the only thing you’re experiencing.
I think that if you are trying to infer the internal state of entities very different to yourself then reasoning processes which lean on talking-about-having-qualia are largely bunkum. Perhaps this might draw accusations of anthropic or biological chauvinism, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to look at my own biology and the biology of others and accept that similar things might generate qualia in similar ways. Anyway, at no point have I made talking-about-having-qualia load-bearing to my argument, even though it is a popular subject of thought experiments. Instead I have proposed alternative reasoning processes.
Haven’t we already specified that the simulation is perfect for the sake of argument? I’m sorry but we’ve been going long enough that I can’t remember now. My point is that even a perfect simulation might not have the same qualia, because in order to make predictions about qualia in unfamiliar systems, we have to look at the hardware before we can figure out what’s going on in the simulation, and going from the hardware to the simulation is an opinionated process. I could propose a translation function which does actually derive a qualia state from the hardware which is identical to the original brain’s, but any such function is going to be unfathomably baroque.
Perhaps it might be helpful to – rather than reasoning about this from a human’s perspective, imagine you are a divine creator who despite their omniscience has forgotten how the universe works. They can’t remember what function they used to relate the structure of matter to the structures in the minds of beings – and for this reason, they also only have access to the raw shapes of matter, because in order to access human knowledge and understand the ways that humans categorise raw shapes of matter into reified concepts, they first must derive human internal experience from raw shapes of matter. When trying to rederive the translation function they came up with back when they raised the firmament, what’s your prior that our amnesiac God would construct something so complex that it could also pull some highly specific qualia out of complex digital hardware?