How do bumping beer cans jointly experience the subjective taste of a strawberry? How can a soul push cations across bilipid membranes? Neither materialist nor non-materialist answers seem to be adequate, which does suggest that there’s a problem here that needs dissolving more than it needs solving. In the absence of adequate evidence, my preferred hypothesis is a kind of neutral monism.
I look in front of me and see a purple box. By any of a variety of possible causes, my attention is brought to bear on my current action, and I notice that I am looking in front of me and seeing a purple box. My working memory happens to be large enough to admit both active neural pathways at once: seeing the purple box and noticing that I see it. The overlap between the active neural pathways is large but not total, and in some key places there are “coincidence detector” neurons that take input from both pathways and fire when both are active in a short interval. The information sent by the coincidence detectors contains what? -- it contains information that says I’m aware of and having an experience of a purple box. And given that input to my decision processes, I can act, not only on the sight of the purple box, but on a very curious bit of information we can call the subjective awareness of the purple box.
On this account, qualia is nearly epiphenomenal, in that we can act on the fact of its existence but not on its character (i.e. it remains ineffable).
By any of a variety of possible causes, my attention is brought to bear on my current action, and I notice that I am looking in front of me and seeing a purple box.
What sort of a thing am “I” that the expression “my attention” refers to anything? What am I, that I can possess an attention? Do I have it in the way I have hands, or in the way I have the recollection that 17 × 2 = 34? Can I sometimes have two attentions, or zero, or half of one?
I would love to be able to comment on the degree of meaningfullness, truth, well-informedness, originality and clarity
of you comment, but I find myself suddenly confused by what sort of things meaningfullness, truth, well-informdness, originality and clarity actually are. Do you have one or zero of them...?
A theory about qualia is that they’re epiphenomena, which I interpret to mean that causation goes only one way (from physical events to qualia), not both ways. I used to immediately reject that theory because we’re physically discussing qualia. But then I speculatively proposed the neural argument above, and realized I was wrong. We only ever discuss the fact that we have qualia. We don’t discuss the content of the qualia themselves. In fact it seems we can’t discuss the raw experienced content of the qualia. So maybe they are very nearly epiphenomenal, with one niggling exception that the facts of their existence are apparently causally linked both directions (perhaps as explained by that putative neural mechanism).
Um, that might still be badly expressed, but it’s my best effort. If it still doesn’t work, then the whole idea is probably badly formed.
Perhaps a differently evolved or designed neural architecture could discuss the content of qualia. We might simply lack the wiring for it.
How do bumping beer cans jointly experience the subjective taste of a strawberry? How can a soul push cations across bilipid membranes? Neither materialist nor non-materialist answers seem to be adequate, which does suggest that there’s a problem here that needs dissolving more than it needs solving. In the absence of adequate evidence, my preferred hypothesis is a kind of neutral monism.
I look in front of me and see a purple box. By any of a variety of possible causes, my attention is brought to bear on my current action, and I notice that I am looking in front of me and seeing a purple box. My working memory happens to be large enough to admit both active neural pathways at once: seeing the purple box and noticing that I see it. The overlap between the active neural pathways is large but not total, and in some key places there are “coincidence detector” neurons that take input from both pathways and fire when both are active in a short interval. The information sent by the coincidence detectors contains what? -- it contains information that says I’m aware of and having an experience of a purple box. And given that input to my decision processes, I can act, not only on the sight of the purple box, but on a very curious bit of information we can call the subjective awareness of the purple box.
On this account, qualia is nearly epiphenomenal, in that we can act on the fact of its existence but not on its character (i.e. it remains ineffable).
What sort of a thing am “I” that the expression “my attention” refers to anything? What am I, that I can possess an attention? Do I have it in the way I have hands, or in the way I have the recollection that 17 × 2 = 34? Can I sometimes have two attentions, or zero, or half of one?
I’m a brain in a body. My attention is a cognitive process for allocating scarce processing resources.
I would love to be able to comment on the degree of meaningfullness, truth, well-informedness, originality and clarity of you comment, but I find myself suddenly confused by what sort of things meaningfullness, truth, well-informdness, originality and clarity actually are. Do you have one or zero of them...?
The rest of your comment was great, but I lost you at the last sentence, could you re-express it?
A theory about qualia is that they’re epiphenomena, which I interpret to mean that causation goes only one way (from physical events to qualia), not both ways. I used to immediately reject that theory because we’re physically discussing qualia. But then I speculatively proposed the neural argument above, and realized I was wrong. We only ever discuss the fact that we have qualia. We don’t discuss the content of the qualia themselves. In fact it seems we can’t discuss the raw experienced content of the qualia. So maybe they are very nearly epiphenomenal, with one niggling exception that the facts of their existence are apparently causally linked both directions (perhaps as explained by that putative neural mechanism).
Um, that might still be badly expressed, but it’s my best effort. If it still doesn’t work, then the whole idea is probably badly formed.
Perhaps a differently evolved or designed neural architecture could discuss the content of qualia. We might simply lack the wiring for it.