cube_flipper

Karma: 368

cube_flipper 14 May 2026 18:08 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: JohnWittle’s comment on: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

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?

cube_flipper 14 May 2026 17:27 UTC
11 points
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in reply to: TAG’s comment on: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
I will reassert my original statement which is that people who were not panpsychists were drawing arbitrary/opinionated boundaries between what is conscious and not conscious and I wanted to demonstrate what outcomes could be reached if we totally sidestepped that. The post itself draws on panpsychism as a maximally-inclusive/inflationary framework for consciousness which permits us to handle the full space of possibilities/uncertainty around whether or not a given structure is conscious appropriately. For this reason I very deliberately only devoted one sentence to panpsychism in the opening paragraph:

Personally, I consider myself a physicalist, but I’m also a panpsychist – because physics doesn’t really seem to deal in hard absolutes, and I find it straightforward to consider that everything is conscious to some greater or lesser degree – so I’m loath to accept any claims which propose that any specific system isn’t conscious.

This post is not specifically an argument for panpsychism except perhaps as a demonstration that panpsychist ways of thinking can be internally consistent. If this post was specifically an argument for panpsychism I would have spilt a lot more ink. My true stance is that I lean panpsychist modulo the amount of uncertainty described in the post. If an empirical program for study of consciousness (some combination of neurostimulation, neuroimaging, and direct reports) demonstrates that consciousness is associated with, as an example, the electromagnetic field, and that the psychophysical laws/translation function which most parsimoniously explain the human experiences being studies also predict significant experiences everywhere else in the cosmos, I would consider that an argument for a stereotypically strong panpsychism in which rocks are conscious. My expectation is we wind up with something less inclusive than that in which the “consciousness amplitude” (for want of a better term) is low but nonzero throughout most of the cosmos.

Most of your Twitter references seem to be to people who claim that qualia “are” mathematical structures, such as Michael Johnson.

Mike does not claim that qualia “are” mathematical structures. Mike subscribed to what he calls qualia formalism – for any given conscious experience, there exists – in principle – a mathematical object isomorphic to its phenomenology. This basically just claims that qualia are lawful and modelling them mathematically is tractable.

And finally, dual-aspect monism is compatible with panpsychism.

cube_flipper 14 May 2026 0:41 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: Fixed Buckets Can’t (Phenomenally) Bind

People designing small chips are going to make sure that the abstract machine dynamics correspond with coarsenings along which decoherence happens, to prevent the machine behavior from having quantum stochasticity.

I’m not claiming something like “every commutative C* algebra with decoherent dynamics corresponds to a useful engineering take on the system”. It’s more like a necessary condition for classical computation than a sufficient one.

Thanks a lot for your comprehensive response. I suspect that if we are talking past one another then this is because we are describing related yet different projects. Rather than specifying a causal structure and then verifying whether or not a given physical implementation follows it, what we are doing at our end is trying to find an unambiguous map from a physical system to the qualia we think inhabits it. In this case, the digital calculator/integer addition would be one of an infinitude of candidate maps.

I wasn’t trying to connect it to monads. I am not sure I understand the idea of monads. Perhaps I don’t believe in them. Nevertheless, non-commutative C* algebras have some aspects of “privacy” in that they cannot be exhaustively measured.

Am agnostic to whether monads are the true object corresponding to qualia (i.e. the output of the map), but C*-algebra/classical contexts seem in the ballpark.

cube_flipper 13 May 2026 19:37 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: cube_flipper’s comment on: Fixed Buckets Can’t (Phenomenally) Bind
My actual comments. First of all:

The sub-algebraic picture suggests that ‘high-level computations’ can be really instantiated as sub-algebras. [...] There is some ‘objectivity’ here (or perhaps ‘pre-conditions for objectivity’), in that which coarsenings form valid commutative algebras depends on the physical system in question.

I feel like there are two kinds of coarse-graining going on in this system description, with different concerns despite being the same thing. You coarse-grain and discard information when you measure a particular C*-algebra; or you coarse-grain by selecting the right C*-algebra to reveal the preferred functional dynamics of your system.

For instance let’s say I have a digital calculator. There might be a C*-algebra corresponding to positions of electrons in the silicon chip; but there also might exist a C*-algebra capable of exposing the causal structure corresponding to integer addition, but this would be exceedingly opinionated/baroque (Claude Opus 4.7 used the phrase, “gerrymandered choice of observables”). There’s nothing which says you can’t do this. But does this happen in practice? By which metric should we favour particular operators, complexity? Symmetry? Anti-opinionatedness? Likelihood of actually being instantiated somehow? My expectation is that the default physicalist expectations around fine-graining should remain preserved, here, but happy to discuss.

The conflation to avoid making here is that a classical context is ‘a mind’ or ‘a person’ or that sort of thing. It can be much more detailed than that. It is more like a virtual world simulation that doesn’t exactly have a reductionist lowest level to it; some details are simply coarsened.

I guess this all squares with my phenomenology? I experience an internal world simulation constructed from sparse observations of the world and my body, not just a ‘mind’. Attentional modulation as choice of C*-algebra makes intuitive sense to me. I wish I had a better way of describing this, but details are clearly coarsened in the sense that while my attention is free to explore this space, it’s clear there is always some kind of compromise being made; internal constructs cast shadows; sometimes perhaps with a little serotonergic assistance one figures out how to rotate some observational basis, thus revealing habitual blind spots. Alternatively, me and Ethan Kuntz did at one point write a whole post about applying the uncertainty principle to spatial and frequency domain qualia.

A given classical context can contain multiple minds.

...unironically, tulpas? DID? 🙃

The ‘phenomena’ here are more like the phenomena of Kant than the phenomena of Chalmers: spatially three-dimensional, multi-personal.

...seems fine, but I remain uncertain what is meant by “multi-personal phenomenal contexts”. I grew tired of reading Claude explain philosophy.

cube_flipper 13 May 2026 19:09 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: Fixed Buckets Can’t (Phenomenally) Bind
Hi, thanks for writing this up. There’s never enough people trying to formalise these types of ideas.

This took me a while to work through given the dense jargon. Would you mind checking my understanding first? And then I’ll add another comment for the actual questions I have.
- A C*-algebra is an algebra of quantum operators (with some functions like addition, multiplication, conjugation, norm, and identity).
- A commutative C*-algebra has a set of operators which all commute together; for instance the position of one particle and the position of another. This makes the algebra of {x_1, x_2} a classical system.
- A non-commutative C*-algebra has a set of operators in which any pair does not commute; for instance position and momentum do not commute and there will be irreducible uncertainty when you try to measure them. This makes the algebra of {x_1, p_1} a quantum system.
- We are mostly concerned with commutative C*-algebras; these constitute a “way of seeing” a quantum system. There will be some inevitable coarsening of the quantum system as it is observed.
This commutative C*-algebra/will be the analog for Andrés’ monads...? It was unclear to me if Andrés’ monads or what part of these monads were intended to be quantum or classical; in my mind I substituted the instantaneous PageRank convergence for the Schrödinger equation.
- These form a meet-semilattice; a partial order of commutative C*-algebras and their intersection sets. For instance, you might start with the root C*-algebra {x_1, p_1, x_2, p_2} (which is non-commutative); the first (finest-grain) level contains the sub-algebras for {x_1, x_2}, {x_1, p_2}, {x_2, p_1}, {p_1, p_2}; the second (coarsest-grain) level contains the sub-algebras for {x_1}, {p_1}, {x_2}, {p_2}.
- For every commutative C*-algebra there is a corresponding topological space (or rather, “C* algebra of continuous functions S → C for a compact Hausdorff space S”. I didn’t quite grok what this object was but I’ll think about it like a topological space.)
- For every non-commutative C*-algebra there is a corresponding non-commutative topological space. This is like a topological space without the notion of points? We don’t use these but I thought it was worth mentioning, in case me or Andrés wanted to think about how all this pertains to quantum rather than classical systems also.
Accordingly, there is a category-theoretic contravariant isomorphism between the category of commutative C* algebras and the category of compact Hausdorff spaces and continuous maps between them.

So you take the meet-semilattice on the left; you can map this to a graph of topological spaces on the right. In my head there is a graph of classical systems on the left and an isomorphic graph of little toruses and spheres and whatever on the right. My intuition kinda fails here also; if you take a point on the surface of a torus, what do you see this corresponding to in the corresponding classical system/C*-algebra?

cube_flipper 11 May 2026 16:24 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: mayfer’s comment on: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
If by no approximations you mean analog… all I can think of is the MONIAC hydraulic computer, used to simulate the flow of money in a national economy. Built at the London School of Economics, a remaining one now lives in the foyer of the Reserve Bank building in Wellington, New Zealand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAZavOcEnLg

Aside from this, my OpenClaw agent suggested wind tunnels and wave tanks, which I think are closer to what you’re getting at?

cube_flipper 10 May 2026 20:05 UTC
1 point
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on: Inverting qualia with group theory
Revisiting conversations had over DM—

How sensitive is this thought experiment to the colour space chosen and its symmetry group? Human vision – at least, in the LGN – uses an oppositional colour model (red–green, yellow–blue, luminance), and further down the line V1 works with individual components a bit like hue and luminance. The chromatic channels are bipolar, luminance is unipolar, hue is circular, and ambiguously the chromatic channels could be swapped.

If the group chosen results in a tighter group of inversions the case would be more robust, but possibly the asymmetry between channels could kill most of them.

cube_flipper 10 May 2026 17:00 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: cube_flipper’s comment on: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
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...

cube_flipper 10 May 2026 16:17 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: JohnWittle’s comment on: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
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.

cube_flipper 10 May 2026 15:49 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Ninety-Three’s comment on: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
Well, I’m definitely not a pancomputationalist (earlier in the piece there are a couple quotes from Mike Johnson discussing how there is no objective way of specifying what computations are happening in a volume of spacetime) and brain-as-an-antenna-for-consciousness theories make me cringe, so...

At the start of the electromagnetic field theory explainer post, I use the line, consciousness is identical with certain spatiotemporal patterns in the electromagnetic field. I think this is about as concisely as I can express it. See also the caveat:

Electromagnetic field theories claim that subjective experience is one and the same with the electromagnetic field – but why the electromagnetic field in particular? More precisely, the claim is that panpsychism is true and the entire universe and all its physical fields are conscious – but it’s the electromagnetic field which has all the interesting behaviour going on at the scales that we care about.

I should be extra clear that I do not wish to reify any unfortunate dualisms. I ultimately do not see physics and qualia as separate from one another – my true stance is closest to dual-aspect monism.

Perhaps the fact we are discussing translation functions from physics to qualia does unfortunately reify such a dualism. Rather, I should express such translation functions as relating the experience of a structure from the outside to the experience of a structure from the inside.

And also see this comment for why I am discussing panpsychism at all, in the first place:

The non-panpsychist accounts people were promoting on Twitter were arbitrary and opinionated and making people mad, and my panpsychist account is illustrating what a less opinionated alternative might look like.

cube_flipper 10 May 2026 2:06 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: RogerDearnaley’s comment on: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
I don’t think this wording is great but it’s more like “every little bit helps toward the one specific thing which ultimately matters”

cube_flipper 10 May 2026 1:35 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: RogerDearnaley’s comment on: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
My stance is that the examples like sentience, ability to feel pain, access consciousness, and various other things etc all have instrumental but not terminal value in the sense that they can be used to maximise phenomenal valence under the curve.

cube_flipper 10 May 2026 1:30 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: JohnWittle’s comment on: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

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.

cube_flipper 10 May 2026 0:59 UTC
8 points
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in reply to: JohnWittle’s comment on: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
Here is your third way:
- The WBE talks about phenomenological consciousness because it is simulating the kind of system which would do this. If we have a magic system which can perfectly emulate the EM field, then sure, these dynamics won’t diverge.
- The WBE does experience phenomenological consciousness, but this is not correlated with the words it’s saying. Given a translation function we are confident in, what the WBE is experiencing is the output of that function as applied to its hardware. Which in the case of the physicalist function I proposed, would be what it’s like to be that hardware, not what it’s like to be the simulation – unless the hardware was designed in such a way that these correlate well with one another. Consider analog hardware in which the spatiotemporal topology of the causal relationships is the same in the WBE as it is in the original brain, for example.
- You can be as confident as you like that your qualia is correlated with your actions because, well, you have direct access to this (though you couldn’t prove prove it to me).
- With regards to both systems, the only way an independent observer could be truly sure what’s going on is by inspecting the physical structure of the (human, WBE) to the level of detail that they could apply their preferred translation function.
With regards to simulation divergence, consider the case where it is actually difficult to simulate the EM field (if physics was continuous, you’d require a hypercomputer, but if it isn’t, digital simulation is expensive anyway). Consider also that evolution could have recruited the EM field for the purpose of running efficient computations of some nature – this may be why evolution has ensnared consciousness at all.

With regards to your edit:

The actual function that my brain performs is to imagine writing a program that models the inner workings of that system

My recommendation is to try playing with both digital and analog models. (Actually, I could tell a really long story about how my electrical engineer friend jailbroke me out of a programmer’s mindset and into a continuous-domain mathematician’s mindset… that would take some time, but it’s a divergence in worldview that I notice when talking to people sometimes. There’s a Type of Guy who wants to translate everything into a short PyTorch program. I used to be that guy.)

cube_flipper 9 May 2026 23:29 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: RussellThor’s comment on: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
Yes, I have been having some excellent conversations with Jess about this, she’s great

cube_flipper 9 May 2026 23:09 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: cube_flipper’s comment on: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
Also, going meta for a moment (having a hard time putting words to this):

I sometimes feel there is a mismatch that happens when I talk to functionalists, which is that I get the impression that they are considering the “whole functional system”/inputs and outputs all the way out at the very edge of the system (like, red light entering the eyes, the word “red” being spoken, etc), and this seems arbitrary and not grounded in internal observations.

And if I am being honest, working with tokens at the level of “red” feels coarse/crude, I prefer to work at a level of detail that’s actually informed by my qualia, like I’ll be thinking about minute red fluctuations in the visual field and what neural structures might underly them. I’d not be working with red in isolation because I don’t think you can even have colour qualia without them being embedded in a field (Richard P. Stanley talks about this sort of type error in this paper).

So, I am trying to find some physical structure whose momentary shape is similar to whatever is happening in the visual field, and this might have an input/output boundary around it equivalent to the boundary between phenomenal and access consciousness – and I am inclined to be skeptical that this extends all the way out into neighbouring cortices, let alone the eyes. But maybe it does, who knows (Emmett Shear once claimed that the brain sends more messages to the retina than the other way around, but this didn’t pass my friend’s fact check).

It’s an outside in, behaviouralist perspective rather than inside out one, and it leads to very different intuitions, but I think they can be worked through. Lmk what you think.

cube_flipper 9 May 2026 22:39 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: TAG’s comment on: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
I’m not sure that my intent is for panpsychism to be doing explanatory lifting so much as the non-panpsychist accounts people were promoting on Twitter were arbitrary and opinionated and making people mad, and my panpsychist account is illustrating what a less opinionated alternative might look like – or at least what it looks like for us to handle the very real uncertainty around panpsychism at all.
What links here?
- cube_flipper's comment on If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level by cube_flipper (10 May 2026 15:49 UTC; 1 point)

cube_flipper 9 May 2026 22:33 UTC
10 points
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in reply to: JohnWittle’s comment on: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
No sweat, thanks for the long comment.

This emulation is not actually related to any phenomenal consciousness in reality, right?

Correct.

1: Yes, I believe the EM fields in the digital computer might have an experience, but the shape of that experience is not strongly correlated with the shape of the digital software. Or perhaps, more crudely: The digital software cannot be a p-zombie because the digital software does not really exist, except insofar as it has a physical manifestation (which would have a phenomenal experience related to the shape of that physical manifestation).

2: I’m not sure I follow but I recommend reading this part of the Lerchner paper and really wrapping your head around how alphabetisation is metaphysical or at least observer-dependent rather than physical.

3: I think that the entire body may have qualia! This doesn’t imply substrate-independence, though. Perhaps if the knee happened to implement an EM field structure with the same shapes/symmetry group as what we experience as colour then your knee could indeed experience red. However, I want the causal structure which is actually linked to talking, so we can correlate external observations with internal ones. In my ideal empirical programme this would involve picking a brain region and perturbing it and correlating this with direct reports. Susan Pockett proposed something like this.

On functionalism: Note that I am arguing against computational functionalism and not functionalism itself – that’s a different matter. Check here, I have been exploring with jessicata whether or not this qualia structuralist account is reconcilable with analytic functionalism. Discussions are ongoing. However, I still think you have to take a fine-grained physics level interpretation of the relevant causal structures, not a coarse-grained computational one, so you still wind up drawing the physicalist rather than computationalist-flavoured interpretations of subjective experience.

Btw, that’s not this Herschel is it?

cube_flipper 9 May 2026 20:10 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Charlie Steiner’s comment on: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
Yes! Exactly. I invite the computationalist or functionalist camp to propose their own mappings, jessicata suggested this.

cube_flipper 9 May 2026 16:24 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: programjames’s comment on: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
I think this would have gone better if you brought more charitable assumptions to the table rather than being rude/pessimistic from the start. I can expand on definitions to an arbitrary depth if asked nicely.