Comment by fssys
7 days ago
No, qualia are not fundamental to existence, this is an example of Wilfrid Sellars' "myth of the given" - to have a quale of a colour or a shape appearing in your vision you must have a concept of that colour/shape. Qualia in that sense are not prior to cognition. Maybe we can say they are necessary as an element of concept formation and language, ie for sapience.
You really don't need a concept of a colour or a shape, and it's a fairly typical academic fallacy to assume you do.
That's directly confusing experience with categorisation and labelling of experience.
If you touch a very hot object your nervous system will pull your hand away before your brain registers what's happening. The qualia of pain are pre-conceptual, preverbal, and precranial, and your consciousness only catches up later.
Surely this implies exactly the opposite - you don't register the pain, don't feel it, until after you pull your hand away. It's a reflex action in response to heat. Qualia require a brain to process sensory input.
yes
reflexes have nothing to do with qualia. you can differentiate objects without knowing what is a triangle and what is a square, or that this colour is red. but I think qualia as commonly understood involve concepts in a way that means they are not immediate experience in some kind of cartesian sense. We speak of them as categorised. certainly the way people commonly speak about them they are very carefree about invoking "the qualia of a horse" or some other specific object.
Not fundamental to existence but fundamental to consciousness.
Theoretically the person sitting next to you could be a zombie, no qualia, the lights are off, he's just having a conversation with you with nothing going on behind the scenes. And there's no way to tell, except that it's reasonable to extrapolate that since you feel something, he probably does too.
My argument is that qualia are actually cognitive artefacts bound up with language, not the base elements of "what it is to be" you or me, which is how people often speak of them, so the p-zombie concept is a bit nonsensical to me.
They are what they are (its a subjective phenomenon). I'm not claiming to know where they come from.
This is exactly my take also. Qualia and consciousness are the same thing. I have it, other humans appear to have it, other mammals appear to have it, LLMs don't.
you think qualia are the soul then!
1 reply →
Except that you don't know LLMs don't. For all we know we're torturing them.