Hmm. I cannot imagine red and green being swapped. I mean I can imagine that any given red thing becomes green, but I think you're proposing something different - that a rainbow is GOYRBIV or something and the color cube is just ... different. I can pretend to imagine it, but it's not coherent enough to tell me anything about the universe.
Given I have no clue if my actual internal perception of "red" is the same as anyone else's, I'm not sure if there's another kind of imagining you're thinking of.
It is not obvious to me that imagining flipping one's optic nerves is meaningfulling different in terms of our experience than flipping around one's neurons. If a brain interprets a signal from an optic nerve as recieving red light (when the light is of wave length normally called green) where the signal is from a normal optic nerve, that seems identical in terms of experience to an optic nerve sending a signal that the brain interprets as red because the optic nerves that transmit the signals are switched. It is like saying 1+2 is meaningfully different from 2+1. The ordering doesn't matter if the end results are indistinguishable. There is no discernible difference in the results so it seems to me they should be thought of as the same, it seems nonsensical to define the first one as something like "experiences from different qualia" and the second as "mere differences from optic nerves." In no way does the former seem indicative of a deeper difference that I can identify.
this exact thought experiment is discussed in a bit of detail by one of the big beasts of illusionism, daniel dennett here: https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DennettQuiningQualia1988.pdf#page=5.54 (especially section 3 though the whole thing is good).
I'm not sure what's the thing you argue with? Like, yes, you can modify my retina which is actually part of my brain, if you look at embryology, or my specialized neural pathways that shuffle info, like LGN.
If you meddle with higher regions, then uhh how do I know that the guy on the other end of this is me actually? You can meddle in such ways that I definitely would not think he is me, like reshaping my brain to match someone else's and ways that would probably preserve it, like deleting 10 random neurons? It's kinda question begging.
Thus, people’s values are in fact pointing to the context of their experiences, to their qualia, not to actual world states
Uhh, they are part of the world, and as you just pointed to, they have brain states that can be modified, so they dislike their brains being in some states, right?
Introduction
Sometimes people say they don’t understand what consciousness is, what it points it, what even is qualia. They sometimes claim they themselves don’t have conscious experience. If that’s you, or if you want a clear explanation to share to such a person, read on.[1]
This is inspired by a real conversation, including confusions that lead to clarifications.
It can be seen as a response to celene's thoughts on consciousness.
Imagine that your red and your green are swapped
Vals: You have seen red, you have seen green. can you imagine what it’d be like for those colors to be swapped in ur experience and yet for ~everything else to stay the same? This is generally sufficient to point at what qualia is.[2] Your experience of red or green is a thing not described by describing lightwave frequencies.
Also, have you noticed you can experience touch sensations outside your body? To notice it, try this protocol: Observe that touch information is spatially located, eg. you know where the touch on your hand is. Then, blow on your hand. You directly feel airflow, and this felt sense is located outside the hand.[3] So in fact your experiences are not just sense data, they don’t correspond to physical signals directly.
Denialist: I could imagine the position of my color cones being swapped around.
Vals: Can you imagine this happening inside ur brain (eg. you were infected by advanced civ nanobots that rewrote it intelligently to swap your felt perception of green and blue), without affecting anything outside of it. Your experience of the world would change even if the world didn’t change.
Denialist: Uh yeah i could imagine that the signals from red color cones get changed to be parsed by my brain as the ones normally from the green color cones and vice versa. And then i would see red things as green and vice versa.
Vals: And after that, would something have changed in the world?
Denialist: No. Or only in the sense that i am part of the world it would. I would mistake red things for being green and so on until i got used to the change. Presumably after a point in time my brain would get used to it and it would feel normal again.
Vals: I think this is sufficient enough to point to “experience”/”consciousness”. Consciousness is the space in which something changed. Experience is the thing that changed. There’s an experience of Red that becomes an experience of Green.
Denialist: I don’t think so? That’s just swapping the sensory input my brain receives. like i agree that my brain can process and adapt to sensory input
Vals: In the hypothetical your sensory input did not change. It was stuff after the “sensory input” layers that changed.
Denialist: well sure like the optic nerves get changed right
Vals: No they don’t, only the brain neurons are changed.
Denialist: Presumably it’s possible. Because like, you could imagine the world where my red color cones started responding to green light and vice versa, and make the changes to my brain necessary to match how my brain would respond to signals in that world.
Vals: So you accept it’s possible to have two different situations in the world (you seeing red, vs you modified brain seeing green), with no difference in your sensory input?
Denialist: Sure. but why does this require consciousness to be a thing
Vals: My goal here isn’t to “require consciousness to be a thing”, but to help you understand what people mean when they talk of their experiences and being conscious.
Denialist: You could also do this to an image classifier, is an image classifier then conscious? What about something like a simple filter that doesn’t even have a neural network behind it. I don’t think people typically consider these to be conscious
Vals: It’s a different question to ask “why does consciousness exist” or “what counts as conscious”. You don’t need to challenge people to answer the difficult ones, for them to answer “what is consciousness/experience”
Denialist: I’m not asking why! I’m asserting that most people don’t consider an image filter to be conscious. so clearly they are referring to something beyond a modifiable processing of sense data.
Vals: I didn’t give you a rule for determining what was or wasn’t conscious, that you can then try to invalidate by giving counterexamples. I gave you an example of two experiences that are different, so you can understand what an experience is. the experience of red is different from the experience of green.
Denialist: I’m not sure i have experiences. in this sense.
Where we discover Denialist in fact has experiences
Vals: If you became entirely paralyzed, and couldn’t move at all, and no one could measure anything based on your outside behavior, and we showed you green, and later showed you red. would you be experiencing something different when you see green vs when you see red?
Denialist: I would probably respond internally differently even if i was paralyzed! Like i obviously believe i have thoughts, i could write down on my scratchpad “ah, i am seeing green” and “ah, i am seeing red”
Vals: okay let’s zoom in at the layer between the experience and the thoughts. We can disregard the claim that “experience is sensory input” because we can again just modify your brain so you directly experience what you normally experience when exposed to green light. So you can imagine that there’s a sense of green, or a sense of red. And that these turn into thoughts, and those turn into scratchpads. Green qualia is that sense of green, red qualia is that sense of red. “Experience of green” is that sense of green in your mind.
Denialist: i agree i have the ability to detect colors. and process them
Vals: and imagine colors?
Denialist: Yeah i mean i have a visual field. I can draw images on the visual field or superimposed on the visual field. I don’t really see this as different from thinking thoughts on a scratchpad.
Vals: You seem to have exactly the same consciousness and experiences of ~everyone else, and the fact that you have the same mechanisms and descriptions of inner processes is evidence that you’re indeed talking of the same thing, just using different words. The visual field is experience. the sense perception when you blow on your hand is experience. and your thoughts are experience.
Denialist: Ok but it is trivial to write a computer program that can do these things! it doesn’t even have to be an NN-based computer program! and most people wouldn’t think that would be conscious
Vals: My best guess is that you’re wrong about this, that it is fact very difficult and complex to create experiences, to create computation that mixes information in that way. People are rightly tracking that something very complex is happening in their experience fields. Different information from very different sensors and imaginations and inner world models are coming together into a visual and sense and thought space. It’s not at all obvious this thing has ever been recreated outside of animal brains
Denialist: I mean, what are the capabilities required? taking in an image feed, processing it in a certain way, being able to draw to a different image, superimpose that image over your direct visual field, generate some text based on the feed and the previous text generated, etc. If the required specifics are complex enough than yeah i’d need a neural network. like if you wanted me to do generalized image recognition
Vals: yeah, I broadly guess people are tracking this necessary complexity, and indeed (sophisticated) people are much more likely to consider neural networks to have increasing chances of being conscious as they can do these more complex things. Based on this conversation, I guess you are conscious and have experiences, and that your mind had failed to understand these concepts because of trying to find an intersection of contradictory things different people said.[4]
Denialist: i agree that if we restrict ourselves to the more sophisticated people you largely get things like computational theories and panpsychism which would agree that neural nets start becoming conscious and so on. i do think that the FHE[5] thing poses a significant challenge to computational consciousness as traditionally posed tho. and i already talked about my disagreements with panpsychism in the post. which are mostly esthetic/why-is-this-meaningful questions
Vals: We don’t have any good precise theories of consciousness and experience, this is hard. But gravity existed as a thing before we had equations to describe it
Denialist: But like, is consciousness just the abilities you describe, or is there some additional properties produced by the abilities? and if so, what are these additional properties? if it’s just the abilities, then why do we need a separate somewhat nebulous term for it?
Vals: I don’t particularly think there are “additional properties” that aren’t fully constrained by the computation that’s happening. I believe a future theory of consciousness will explain and fully predict what qualia a mind would have, based on simply physical information on the system. and we’ll be able to verify it experimentally.[6]
Vals: There are many prosaic reasons to speak of qualia. For example, most people dislike pain, and especially suffering, which is qualia/experience. Most people dislike it even if it’s not linked to bodily harm. Thus, people’s values are in fact pointing to the context of their experiences, to their qualia, not to actual world states. (though additionally many people care about the world state and the extent to which the qualia they have help them understand world states). It’s thus important to have words and concepts for experiences, qualia, etc.
Denialist: I don’t think that you need to speak of qualia in order to talk about preferences? Like I don’t think emotion is just a number but hypothetically you could imagine a world where it is, and certain things made the numbers go up and down, and agents had preferences over the numbers. And that would work perfectly fine and there wouldn’t necessarily be a “qualia” to the numbers
Vals: No in fact, being anti-p-zombie means both that an identical-to-human without experience is impossible, but also generally that “things that do the same things as humans but without experience” are impossible. You just can’t do the computation without having the experience. If the computation is the same it has the experience. If it’s as complex as emotions then it’s emotions. If it’s not then it’s not. It’s probably possible to do some basic quasi agents, with limited world models and understanding, and limited preferences, and indeed these might have limited experiences and qualia (maybe none?). I think your example is kinda building that. But we are the complex things where many people know and care about the distinction between their experiences and the actual world
Vals: Responding to “I don’t think that you need to speak of qualia in order to talk about preferences?” It is necessary to talk about preferences over qualia. Take a few artists who want to create an experience of green. They don’t care about lightwave frequencies, they want to create the experience. There are multiple ways to get there, maybe with direct stimulation of eye cones, maybe with psychedelics, maybe with brain modification. It’s a great concept to have.
Denialist: Hmm. That is somewhat compelling.
The conversation ended here. Thank you, I guess?
Final thoughts
Conversations are great ways to clarify misunderstandings. If you read this and still don’t understand what “experience” is, message me and let’s figure it out! Also, I didn’t clarify everything proactively - this is somewhat of a LessWronger inside baseball conversation[7] - so do comment about anything you’d like clarification on.
Responding to Mikhail's comment, here are some optional clarification as to context, scope, and intention. This is not meant to be a philosophy paper that establishes abstract criteria upon which any entity can determine if they have experience, but to address specific claims Denialist made.
Broadly it seems Denialist believed that
- many people have differing and contradictory accounts for what experience and consciousness is (imo True)
- there is no useful definition or use for qualia, experience and consciousness, and people who use it are making a mistake (imo False)
- they do not have qualia or experiences as people understand these (imo False, at least based on my understanding, based on evidence in the conversation that their processing corresponds to usual human processing)
So my goal is mostly to give one positive example of a useful use for the word qualia/experience, and to clarify misunderstandings of what it can mean. I think it's much more likely that humans who coherently describe their touch senses and visual experiences and thoughts in ways similar to other humans but seem only hung up on the words "qualia" or "experience" are semantically hung up rather than experientially different.
I'm using coupling rather than decoupling here. Humans have much shared evolutionary history and DNA and education, I'm pretty sure if we scanned Denialist's brain we'd find very much the same kind of structures I have. This is baseline assumed. Against this assumption, for a given human who then claims they don't have Qualia, then I am interested in checking if somehow they might have developed differently and process things differently. So I only needed to confirm they are processing the same way to have evidence they're not different enough that they don't have qualia.
I didn't attempt to quantify the strength of this. My prior was probably 99% belief that 98%+ of functional humans have qualia (and here I qualify Denialist as functional). I expected them to say weirder stuff about not having visual processing or not having the normal connections, if they didn't have qualia, so I updated upwards to them indeed having qualia, but probably not far away from my prior.
It’s the thing that was just swapped.
Though physically it’s only sensors in your hand/on your skin that cause you to have the experience, your brain creates an experience that’s above/around the hand. If you dear reader don’t believe this to be the case for you, please share more about this.
Different people have different explanations and takes on what consciousness is, on what experience is. Many of these takes are mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, even if all were mutually exclusive, that wouldn’t warrant that none of them are true, only that all but one of them are true. I recommend understanding at least one explanation, mine.
Fully Homomorphic Encryption. See Celene's post and responses
For example, by predicting what our qualia would be when changing our brain X way, then changing our brain X way. Warning, Fun times ahead.
I cross-posted to LessWrong after discovering Celene's post got interest, and realize now I might have realized this would find an audience here given this comment. I notice I failed to notice something interesting.