I don't see it as a real problem. If a program or machine asserts that it perceives qualia, who are we to argue it's wrong? We are in no better a position to prove the qualia of our subjective conscious experience other than our physical resemblance to our interlocutor.
Maybe qualia is what it's like for matter to be in a feedback loop with physical interaction. Panpsychism is pretty much my position.
Right now, we are in no position to argue it's wrong, because we have no accepted framework for understanding qualia.
That said, we can still make some simple assertions with confidence such as:
1: A one-line program which prints "I am afraid" does not experience fear qualia.
2: A human being which utters the words "I am afraid" may be experiencing fear qualia (and thus perhaps experiencing pain/suffering).
If you assert that the world is full of philosophical zombies rather than humans like yourself, you may not agree with assertion #2. But we build our ethical and legal frameworks around the idea that we aren't philosophical zombies, rather, that we have feelings and want to avoid suffering.
Once you start talking about more complicated programs, though, we don't know what the right assertions are. We don't have an understanding of what things can suffer and what things cannot, for starters. We generally agree that, say, dogs can suffer. That's why we have laws against animal abuse. But what about programs?
It is absolutely a real problem, because some day we will have to build laws and culture around how we treat AI. Whether or not an AI can suffer (ie. by experiencing qualia that can be considered undesirable) will likely affect how we treat that AI. If we have no way to answer "can this program suffer?", then we are setting ourselves up for regret.
I think there is a step or two missing in between. Abusing dogs isn't just as bad as abusing something that suffers. It's, e.g., doing something that has no value to society (unlike animals being mistreated in a feed lot), or it's something that sews unacceptable levels of aggression. It feels much more complicated than you make it seem.
Hm? There is no objective test for whether I am a philosophical zombie or not.
Consciousness is subjective, so it's simply incoherent to ask whether something is conscious or a zombie.
I imagine thane once someone manage to produce an AI with enough agency to seem sentient it will far exceed human capabilities.
We have deep learning systems that perceive and strategise. Who’s to say that AlphaGo doesn’t have some experience of playing out millions of games?
Or talk to an ant.
There's no reason to expect to be able to understand something's ideas just because it's smarter than you.
Data or whatever AI/Android doesn't share our biology. And since we can't tell whether it's the functioning of our biology or the biology itself which provides us with consciousness, we lack any reasonable justification for assuming Data is conscious. And then he goes further into functional isomorphs at different levels and how that might or might not matter for Data, but we can't tell.
That's the way it goes with these arguments: it always comes down to an appeal to what's reasonable or plausible (those who insist consciousness must be an algorithm are doing the same thing, at least until we have algorithms that seem to be making some progress on the hard problem.) One might equally say other humans share a similar physics. When Dennett said "we are all p-zombies", I suspect he was making the point that it would be highly tendentious to take the position that anything both behaving and functioning physically in the manner of a human would not be conscious, except for humans themselves.
How about mice? Lizards? Fish? Insects? Nematodes? At what point do qualia stop occurring? I see a more or less continuous decline in similarity. I don't see any justification for a cut-off.
I don't think data is conscious. I suspect consciousness might be a side-effect physical computation. I don't believe there's any magic to the human brain's inputs and outputs which cannot be computed, and thus display the appearance of consciousness. In fact I see the Turing test as a thought experiment more than any actual test, a way of removing the appearance of a human body from the task of evaluating an artificial intelligence as a thinking, conscious being. If it quacks like a duck, a rose by any other name, etc.
In fact I'm not entirely convinced that the Western conception of consciousness isn't a learned cultural artifact, that there aren't people who have a more expansive notion of self which includes close family, for example. Have you ever suffered watching a relative hurt themselves? Ever had false memories of injury from childhood which you found out later happened to someone else?
I mean, "philosophical zombie" construct would seem to experience "Colors, tastes, feelings" and whatever concrete, they just would lack the ineffable quality of (philosophical, formal) consciousness - you could brain pattern akin to color sensation for example. This final view is kind of meaningless and I think people are attracted to the view by misunderstanding, by thinking something concrete is involved here.
The issue is providing a scientific explanation for how the physical world produces, emerges, or is identical to consciousness. Arguments like p-zombies and Mary the color scientist are meant to showwe don't know how to come up with such an explanation, because our scientific understanding is objective and abstract, while our experiences are subjective and concrete.
I prefer Nagel's approach to the hard problem, as he goes to the heart of the matter, which is the difference between objective explanation and subjective experience. Science is the view from nowhere (abstract, mathematic, functional), while we experience the world as being from somewhere as embodied beings, not equations.
In your example the abstractions of qualia (thoughts, imaginations, dreams), how are they not labels of experience? That is what ML does, after all.
Today ML may, for all intents and purposes, have roughly the intelligence of a bug, but it has to have awareness to label data. Where does consciousness come in beyond labeling and awareness that ML does not have today?
We label experiences with different words because we have different kinds of experiences. But it's the experiences and not the labels that matter, and the labeling of those experiences does not cause the experience. We say we have dreams because we do have dreams in the first place.
You're proposing that labelling data is the same thing as having an experience, but you haven't explained how data is experience, or why the labelling matters for that.
More seriously though, if we agree that the brain is described by physics, then all it can do, a turing machine can do as well, so at the root all experiences have to be data and computation.
But that gets into metaphysics, which is notoriously tricky.
If you argue that a brain cannot be described by computation and there is something supernatural like soul, that's a fine theory, and the only way to disprove it, is to create working general ai.
Why are those the only two options? There's lots of different philosophical positions, particularly when it comes to consciousness.
The suggestion by Penrose that consciousness is connected to quantum state, and so cannot be copied, or computed on any classical turing machine fitting in the universe, is an interesting way to circumvent strange predictions of functionality, but is not very plausible.
And Jaron Lanier from your other comment explicitly suggests to not use approaches like that, because it would weaken vitality argument, when proven wrong.
Here's Jaron Lanier on the issue of consciousness and computation: http://www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html
He's meteor shower intuition pump is similar to the argument that nations should be conscious if functionalism is true. The reason being that any complex physical system could potentially instantiate the functionality that produces a conscious state. It's also similar to Greg Egan's "Dust theory of Consciousness" in Permutation City.
If one is willing to bite the functional bullet on that, then you can have your simulated consciousness, and the universe may be populated with all sorts of weird conscious experiences outside of animals.
Yes, but not in the way we have. An RNN keeps track of what is going on, for example.
To take in information through sense inputs (eg, eyes) is experience, but in an unconscious way. We get overloaded if the information we take in is not deeply processed before it becomes conscious. A CNN is similar in this manner, but also quite alien.
When we're born our brains have not formed around our senses yet. Our brain goes through a sort of training stage taking in raw sensation and processing it. The more we experience of certain kinds of sensations the more our brain physically changes and adapts. It's theorized if you made a new kind of sense input and could plug it into a newborn brain correctly, the brain would adapt to interfacing with it.
This strongly implies qualia is real, in that we all experience the world in drastically different ways. It may be hard to imagine but my present moment is probably very alien compared to yours, as is with different animals as well as simpler things like bacteria and ML.