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?
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?