From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!ccu.umanitoba.ca!access.usask.ca!alberta!ubc-cs!uw-beaver!micro-heart-of-gold.mit.edu!xn.ll.mit.edu!ames!haven.umd.edu!darwin.sura.net!jvnc.net!yal Tue Feb 11 15:24:45 EST 1992
Article 3508 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!ccu.umanitoba.ca!access.usask.ca!alberta!ubc-cs!uw-beaver!micro-heart-of-gold.mit.edu!xn.ll.mit.edu!ames!haven.umd.edu!darwin.sura.net!jvnc.net!yal
e.edu!cs.yale.edu!mcdermott-drew
>From: mcdermott-drew@CS.YALE.EDU (Drew McDermott)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Functionalist Theory of Qualia
Summary: Qualia are sort of the same as beliefs about qualia
Keywords: qualia, functionalism
Message-ID: <1992Feb5.220638.9673@cs.yale.edu>
Date: 5 Feb 92 22:06:38 GMT
References: <1992Feb4.043521.11469@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Feb4.160229.20899@cs.yale.edu> <1992Feb4.193653.25027@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Sender: news@cs.yale.edu (Usenet News)
Organization: Yale University Computer Science Dept., New Haven, CT 06520-2158
Lines: 63
Nntp-Posting-Host: atlantis.ai.cs.yale.edu


  In article <1992Feb4.193653.25027@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:

  >Hang on, I thought on your theory qualia were "fictions", i.e.
  >
  >  "the correct move...is...to stop looking for actual qualia in the system"
  >  "the quale of vivid green is essentially an internal fiction"
  >  "the inescapable feeling that my sensations *really do* have ineffable
  >   qualities is due to the fact that I can't get out of the story my brain
  >   is making up."
  >
  >Or do you want, somehow, to identify qualia with the beliefs one has about
  >qualia?

Yes, scientifically speaking.  That is, the statement "person A is
having a visual experience with a green quale" should be true iff
"person A's brain's self-modeler is currently describing person A as
having a visual experience with a green quale," which could be loosely
paraphrased as "A believes himself to be having such an experience."
If we were, for example, observing a dreaming person, and couldn't
wake him and ask him, then the state of his self-modeler might be our
sole criterion for whether his experience had a certain quale at a
certain time.

*However,* from A's own point of view, qualia are quite different,
having a certain ... ineffable ... quality, and so forth.  If
he insists on taking that point of view, then his beliefs about his
qualia are just false.  If he is willing to accept an ultimately
successful scientific explanation of his mind's activity, then he
might well come to believe that qualia and beliefs about qualia are
"essentially the same."

Cf. free will: I can't help thinking of myself as making uncaused
choices.  It turns out that there are good reasons for modeling myself
this way.  We can now identify "free will" with this particular
self-modeling structure, which presents us with two alternative ways
of looking at the matter:

   Free will doesn't really exist (you just can't help exempting your
choices from causal laws)
   Free will turns out to be the possession of a self-model in which
one is exempted from causal laws.

If you absolutely insist on the freedom you thought you had, you lose.
If you want to know what in this universe comes closest to being "free
will" (the, so to speak, proximal referent in the actual world), then
it is the self-modeling structure described.

Cf. solid objects: Solid objects turn out to be made of very strange
little wave functions.  Take your choice:

    Solid objects don't really exist
    Solid objects turn out to be wave functions (that interact with
other wave functions, e.g., us, in ways best described using words
like "collision")

[The dogmatic tone of the foregoing is due to the task at hand, which
is explaining exactly what the computationalist theory of qualia *is.*
I acknowledge that most people find the theory incredible, but at
least there ought to be such a theory on the table for discussion, or
computationalism has left a big gap.]

                                             -- Drew McDermott


