What qualia are made up of are not easy to be accurate about. My favourite thought experiment that interrogates this question is,
Of course it isn't. We have a very poor understanding of brain states. So all we can say is that Mary will learn something new today. But it's not reasonable to extend this to an assumption that a physicalist explanation of qualia is impossible in principle and will become available in the future.
As it happens I'm not a physicalist, and I suspect - but can't prove - that physicalism won't solve this problem.
But I also don't like poor arguments, and I think the Knowledge Argument is not a good one.
The problem is more fundamental. Qualia are definitively subjective and the only way to prove that physicalism explains them is to somehow make them objective - with some kind of qualia-ometer. Or consciousness-ometer. Or something similar.
That doesn't mean finding correlates - neural states, chemical processes, quantum uncertainty, whatever. It means being able to measure experience itself.
Without that you can build simulacra that show all the correlates, and possibly behave as if they're conscious.
But all you've done is built a robot. You can't prove it actually has experience - including self-awareness - unless you can measure experience with objective instrumentation.
This is a nice paradox, because it requires science to measure subjectivity itself.
It may or may not be possible. But clearly it's not possible now, and is unlikely to become possible any time soon.
We build things all the time based on the models of the universe we've got. Your argument strikes me as more or less saying, "sure, we built that jet engine, but unless we can measure what 'being a jet engine' is we've just not really built the complete, real thing."
If we build a thing that appears to have "experiences" indistinguishably from how humans appear to, then that is it. That is, the notion of "experience," as you describe it, is more or less meaningless in the context of the very physical world we occupy.
Also: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/artificial-intelligence
I’m quite certain Demis Hassabis uses the term regularly, Nature should unpublish him.
Regardless of the breadth of the spectrum of definitions, at the very bottom you find phenomenal consciousness. The given, undeniable fact that "it feels like something". We don't have a plausible avenue, not even in principle, to even start addressing this fact of existence, to the point that the most rational stance is to assume that it is fundamental in nature.
IMO Biology explains consciousness fine. Reinforcement of sensory data given repeat exposure leaves agency memory.
I think “higher abstraction” is such a flimsy term as to be meaningless.
Nothing is more or less abstract. It’s just the abstract it needs to be to “exist”. Humans are the abstract they need to be to exist on Earth.
This idea there’s layers of abstraction and meaning beyond what we can know literally is just a neural implant from years of having tribal elders dictating we fetishize a small set of bad ideas ad naseum, we conjure alternatives in order to escape.
For example, when an optometrist or neurologist talks about “sight” they’re talking about the biochemical mechanisms that allow us to see. When I read Plato say “I see therefor I am” it was clear to me he was describing the metaphysical act of personal perception. He was describing the “observer” that was present in the moment, perceiving the biochemical process, not sight itself.
Consciousness is something you likely have. But we (humans) don’t know what it is. To my knowledge, we don’t even know where to start looking for it. Consciousness belongs to the mystics today, by default, because science can not claim it. There isn’t something we can hold and point to saying “this, this is what the mystics call a soul.”
Science doesn't yet have an answer, but that doesn't grant the mystics any credibility. There is no 'by default' when we don't know. I'm reminded of a Dawkins quote:
Lecturer: Scientists answer questions of 'how'. If your question is 'why', I refer you to the theologians.
Dawkins: Why the theologians? Why not the gardeners?
(Trivia: If I recall correctly, Dawkins didn't actually give this response, he thought it up far too late.)
> There isn’t something we can hold and point to saying “this, this is what the mystics call a soul.”
That isn't a game-over, though.
The same goes for information processing, but we're fairly confident in what we call a 'computer'.
You can't hold a center-of-gravity, but we're able to reason about those pretty clearly.
> Dawkins: Why the theologians? Why not the gardeners?
I’ve never heard this. My initial reaction is that “god” exists in the unknown. Asking “why go to the mystics for mystical stuff” is a tautology. If you go to the gardener with a question unanswered by science, and they have an answer, they’re a mystic (or have made a scientific breakthrough).
> You can't hold a center-of-gravity, but we're able to reason about those pretty clearly.
Consciousness is not understood. Full stop. We don’t know what manifests it. We don’t know where it comes from. We don’t know where it goes.
We’ve scratched the surface of the biological mechanisms that give rise to the phenomenon we experience. If you look at me and see a biological computer, I think your statement holds. But when I look at me, in a mirror, I see a biological vessel I occupy; and I don’t know what “I” is.
Trying to oversell our understanding of the universe and our place in it does a disservice to science and the work left to be done.
We are biological machines. Sure, we have an awareness of ourselves, but so do computers in some contexts; for example you could argue a certain types of self-modifying or monitoring code has an awareness of itself. It's already been proven that animals have an awareness of themselves when looking in a mirror, such as Dolphins, Chimpanzees, etc. Humans may be a bit further along in our cognitive development but there is no obvious point where you can say "Humans are conscious" because we're all somewhere on a sliding scale of intelligence and self-awareness.
Having a representation of itself doesn't mean it has an awareness of itself.
In your lingo, something can know what it looks like without taking its aspects into consideration.
I think the inverse is true, though: something that cannot perceive a representation of itself cannot be self-aware.
Maybe or maybe not. This is the nub of the debate. I would argue that answering "yes" to this is a partial endorsement of pan-psychism. If the ability to experience qualia is property of certain algorithms or types of information flow then it's a fundemental property of the universe.
Thought experiments about p-zombies and mind simulation are an interesting litmus test to separate different points of view on this.
(sorry) This would mean, at a minimum, that every biological entity down to single cell organisms are conscious. They could be, I don't know.
Everytime you wake up in the morning.
Some work detecting it as well for medical reasons https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.3006294
“I think that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways.”
Everything at one time escaped basic explanation from parts (and there always will be, you can't really explain why the standard model, or whatever more fundamental system which might surpass it)
Consciousness is on the edge of being understood quite a lot better as neurobiology is progressing quite quickly.
While scientific reductionism has its limitations (e.g. trying to fully describe the complexity of a single neuron in c.elegans is sort of a rabbit hole) you still have to understand at least some of the basic mechanisms, the "LEGO blocks" of cognition, before talking about such higher level of abstraction, especially when it's so ill-defined.
I think Feynman' definition of "cargo cult science" is appropriate here, where we are trying to explain our perception of reality via superficial "neural correlates", or attaching to it these arbitrary "complexity theories", etc., without understanding the fundamental driving factors, mechanics and constraints of perception, the "why" and "how" first.