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Article 3672 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jbaxter@physics.adelaide.edu.au (Jon Baxter)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Panpsychism
Message-ID: <jbaxter.697880190@adelphi>
Date: 12 Feb 92 07:36:30 GMT
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>>David seems to see qualia wherever there is "information processing
>>of the right kind".
>
>_That_ may well be reasonable, but his notion of "the right kind"
>has it occuring in thermostats.

If one accepts the notion that qualia, as we experience them, are very closely
tied to the information processing properties of the brain, then it is
difficult to avoid the conclusion that thermostats probably have qualia.
The way I get driven to this conclusion is by imagining a heirarchy of
information-processing devices, thermostats at the bottom and our brains
at the top. In between we have all sorts of other devices like computers,
plant controllers, insect ganglion, mammal brains etc. For now I'll just
concentrate on the animals. Its pretty clear that other mammalian brains have
qualia, and it is likely that a lot of these qualia are similar to our own. I make
this claim because these animals behave just as if they *do* posess qualia like
ours. Of course this doesn't *prove* that they have qualia, but given that
their brain structures are similar to our own (we evolved from common descendants
after all), and they behave in such a way that humans are always tempted to
anthropomorphise their actions (e.g the dog is scared, or tired, has heard an
irritating high-pitched sound, etc) then it seems reasonable to suppose they
posess qualia, almost as reasonable as it is to suppose that humans other than
myself posess qualia. The only thing the other animals lack relative to ourselves
is beliefs about their qualia. But then there are a lot of humans that probably
don't have any beliefs about their qualia either.

When I analyse my own qualia I realise that a large part of their content seems
to arise from processing, recoding and representing "information" about the
world around me. Following this line of thought it seems likely that even insects
possess some rudimentary qualia as they do quite a lot of processing, recoding
and representing of their environment. From insects its not much of a step
to thermostats, thermostats basically do about the most primitive possible
processing, recoding and representing of their environment.

I agree that none of the above constitutes a water-tight argument for the
existence of qualia in thermostats, but as we have no causal explanation for
the existence even of our own qualia (i.e a materialistic derivation of the
existence of qualia) it is difficult to offer anything more than plausible
reasons for the existence of qualia in "simpler" devices. These plausible
reasons are of the same kind as the ones I use to justify the existence of
qualia in brains other than my own, and as such must have some validity.

Jonathan Baxter,
School of Information Science an Technology,
Flinders University of South Australia.


