Qualia are distributed representations in neural firing rates. They represent sensory experience in very high dimensional spaces. They contain a great deal of information, and shift rapidly before all of that information can be captured by other brain regions.
We know roughly what the brain is doing when people report different experiences. Rapidly shifting high dimensional representations match the reported properties of qualia and the causal effects on cognition they need to have.
There is no way to get your brain to reduce its bandwidth to just the redness. Information is always high even if it’s supplies by guesses or priors. Dreaming is the ultimate example but sensory processing is always partly generative.
I have absolutely no idea what you mean by any of this. And I’m trying to quit wasting time on consciousness discussions. They rarely go anywhere and there’s no obvious payoff if they did. So: Leaving Orbit.
This distinction is a great crux. Red is a actually a very large amount of information! Why would you think it’s only 3 bits? The brain does not use a ‘color’ slot with a compressed symbolic representation of color. Our representation of red is quite rich, containing information about associations (warmth, emotions, etc) and would be represented by a quite specific point in a complex high dimensional space.
Red itself is just one of rainbow’s colors and can be encoded in 3 bits. But what you are speaking about is its functional role—its association with emotions etc.
In equation it is more obvious: letter T can denotes one of several physical variables—it an be used for time but also for leghth, energy etc. T as time appears in multiple equations.
Qualia are distributed representations in neural firing rates. They represent sensory experience in very high dimensional spaces. They contain a great deal of information, and shift rapidly before all of that information can be captured by other brain regions.
We know roughly what the brain is doing when people report different experiences. Rapidly shifting high dimensional representations match the reported properties of qualia and the causal effects on cognition they need to have.
If I see something red, there is no much information − 3 bits? - and also it is stable and not shifting.
There is no way to get your brain to reduce its bandwidth to just the redness. Information is always high even if it’s supplies by guesses or priors. Dreaming is the ultimate example but sensory processing is always partly generative.
Qualia are atoms in experience and all complexity is relation between them. Atoms are simple but relations are complex.
Do you not think qualia are related to brain function?
Functional part for sure and for qualitative part it is only important that they are different from internal perspective.
The similar question is “Do you think that F=ma represent physical law?”
Moreover, if we take hidden variable in some computation, like x:=x+1, - here x has causal power, but we will not see x in the inputs and outputs.
I have absolutely no idea what you mean by any of this. And I’m trying to quit wasting time on consciousness discussions. They rarely go anywhere and there’s no obvious payoff if they did. So: Leaving Orbit.
This distinction is a great crux. Red is a actually a very large amount of information! Why would you think it’s only 3 bits? The brain does not use a ‘color’ slot with a compressed symbolic representation of color. Our representation of red is quite rich, containing information about associations (warmth, emotions, etc) and would be represented by a quite specific point in a complex high dimensional space.
Red itself is just one of rainbow’s colors and can be encoded in 3 bits. But what you are speaking about is its functional role—its association with emotions etc.
In equation it is more obvious: letter T can denotes one of several physical variables—it an be used for time but also for leghth, energy etc. T as time appears in multiple equations.