Artificial Consciousness Remains Impossible (Part 2)
The problem I have with qualia is that the argument assumes that qualia are a transcendent, non-physical thing. Why can&#x27;t a qualia, eg, the experience of the redness of red, simply be what that conscious thing experiences when a set of neurons is activated in a particular way?<p>I know that sounds circular, so I&#x27;ll expand. We can&#x27;t know exactly how one person experiences a particular shade of red vs another person. But we can know that one person can experience the exact same shade of red in different ways in different contexts: what thing is red (a rose vs a welt), or what it the current lighting is, or their mood on different days. From that we can conclude that the red qualia isn&#x27;t some transcendent fixed property.<p>We also know from experiments on conscious, human subjects undergoing brain surgery that stimulating certain networks can result in complex phenomena: eg, the subject smells fall leaves with a hint of maple syrup, say. Or they suddenly feel the impression of being in the presence of a long dead aunt.<p>The brain builds up associations, and each &quot;node&quot; that is activated nudges associated nodes into activation, and so on. I assume we&#x27;ve all had the experience where we are trying to remember the name of someone: we picture them in our mind and all we can come up with is the feeling it has two syllables and starts with a vowel. In those cases those associations are manifest but it wasn&#x27;t enough to trigger the primary node (the name) we are seeking.<p>Why can&#x27;t qualia simply be the state of consciousness when a particular set of nodes are in a particular state. So many other experiences seem to be exactly this; why assign a mystical, non-physical property for the case of subjective experiences?<p>I&#x27;m in the camp that the most likely outcome is that artificial neural networks can be conscious and have real experiences, but the toy networks we have today don&#x27;t have nearly the right topology to achieve such states.