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Article 3368 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Subject: Re: Strong AI and panpsychism (was Re: Virtual Person?)
Message-ID: <1992Feb1.221135.8322@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Indiana University
References: <1992Jan29.182654.25060@aisb.ed.ac.uk> <1992Jan29.235810.11317@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Jan30.205045.29216@psych.toronto.edu>
Date: Sat, 1 Feb 92 22:11:35 GMT
Lines: 68

In article <1992Jan30.205045.29216@psych.toronto.edu> michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) writes:

>[a brief discussion of his view that all matter has "phenomenal
>consciousness", or "qualia"]

As I said earlier, I don't like to characterize my view this way,
partly because it sounds as if I'm ascribing qualia to inert lumps
of matter, which I'm not, and partly because it suggests simplistic
panpsychist view that every atom has some consciousness, and that
human consciousness just comes about from putting enough of those
atom-consciousnesses together, which is far from what I think.

>I am a bit confused by this claim, for the following reason.  You have
>stated elsewhere that, where there is information processing, there is
>qualia.  You have also said in a recent posting that you felt that 
>materialism, even of the functional variety, was inadequate to explain
>consciousness or qualia.  Given this, why do you need to make the
>"counterintuitive" claim that all matter has qualia?  If it is just
>to explain how it is that humans have it, I don't see how this is any
>more of an acceptable explanation than believing that it's something
>special about the physical substance of the brain that yields qualia.  Each
>of these "explanations" appears to be no more than a "it just *is*, OK?!"
>kind of claim.  There is no reason to prefer pan-qualia-ism to a
>"causal powers" view, since *neither* seem to be explanations in the
>standard sense.

I never said that it was an explanation -- in fact I explicitly said
that I think that qualia are a huge mystery.  Saying that qualia arise
from information-processing doesn't make the mystery go away, it
just constrains it slightly.

I outlined by reasons for thinking that qualia arises from information
processing very briefly in an earlier post.  It starts from the given
that humans have qualia, and the assumption that these somehow arise from
physical states.  Then one can use various considerations to try to
constrain the physical properties that are likely to be relevant.  These
considerations, e.g. the fading qualia argument I mentioned earlier 
(among others), suggest that only the information-processing properties
of matter are relevant.  Then there arises the question of *which*
information-processing properties -- e.g. do you need processing of
a certain complexity before qualia will arise?  Something like this is
the standard AI view, I presume, but the more I thought about this the
less convincing it seemed to be -- where would this arbitrary threshold
come in to play, and why?  Furthermore, many of the human processing
subsystems that have qualia associated with them -- e.g. the colour
system -- are actually quite simple.  Finally, I come to the conclusion
that this "complexity" barrier is only invoked to avoid ascribing qualia
to simple systems like thermostats, because of the counter-intuitiveness
involved.  But I don't find it so counter-intuitive, myself; qualia are
strange but fundamental things, it seems quite natural to me that they
should be pervasive, rather than only somehow arising from particularly
convoluted systems.  The information-processing view leads to a much
simpler picture of the universe, I find, whereas the "complexity"
view, at least if combined with any dualist considerations, makes
qualia seem like very arbitrary things.

So what I've summed up here all too briefly are some plausibility
considerations that lead from the given that humans have qualia, to
the inference that other simpler systems may have qualia, too (just
as we do with animals; I've just taken it a step further).  But
the original given, of course, is a mystery, and I don't claim to
have an explanation for it; although the subsumption of qualia into
the framework I've outlined might take a step or two along the way.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."


