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/sci/ - Science & Math

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11208592 No.11208592 [Reply] [Original]

How can qualia exist if our brains are just giant neural networks?
Where does sensation come from?

>> No.11208648

It's a feature

>> No.11208649

Define qualia.

>> No.11208664

>>11208592
Why would qualia not exist if our brains are just giant neural networks?
Who even cares? If it can’t be tested, it’s a waste of time to discuss.

>> No.11208674

>>11208592
from the giant neural networks

>> No.11208678

/sci/ is afraid of this question

>> No.11208684

>>11208678
>/sci/ is scared of non empirical conjecture

No, it’s just useless.

>> No.11208688

>>11208674
>>11208664
Because that understanding of our brain only explains why we make choices and respond to things, not why we actually experience those things. The only thing different about us and some super-advanced neural network is that we experience qualia.

>> No.11208694

The edge of the neural network. Imagine your brain as a all of those systems.

At the "edge" is your consciousness. A low dimensional slice of all of that complexity reduced to simple emotion to create singular decisions.

Otherwise your body would be trying to go 100 directions every second. It's just a concentrated decision making output.

The reason it feels real? Because it's a continuous function with memory.

>> No.11208695

>>11208694
to abstract it simpler

Option A or Option B

evolved through time

Eventually it was found that keeping a log of success chances was useful

so we got some memory

Eventually your output function had continuous memory and operation. Eventually you create enough recursive systems so that you can even imagine and analyze memories or "potential futures" via imagination.

It's an illusion.

You can feel it if you look for it. It's just the output of all of these systems at once. That's it.

>> No.11208697

>>11208695
Just match consciousness up, what is it?

Your nerve inputs, your visual inputs, etc all tied to a single output function. Humans are more complex so you can also search through memory or imaginations.

You can do a simple exercise to see

-> check through past 5 minutes
->imagine 5 different outputs (actions)
-> make some present decisions, aka move some shit around like your arms
etc

It's nothing complex. It's derivable in simplicity by basic analysis.

>> No.11208700

>>11208695
>Experience is an illusion you experience.
>Don't mind mind, it's just in your mind.
>>>Wrong.

>> No.11208701

>>11208688
>The only thing different about us and some super-advanced neural network is that we experience qualia.

How the fuck do you know they don’t experience qualia?

You don’t. This is why it’s a useless discussion.

>> No.11208703

>>11208700
You don't experience anything. You have some memory of a concentrated output very encoded.

The vast majority of your brain is unrecorded, unexperienced.

>> No.11208704

>>11208703
>You don't experience anything
You know your philosophy has gone wrong somewhere when you deny that people experience things.

>> No.11208705

>>11208701
Yep, we are just a very complex NN output array at any instant.

>> No.11208706

>>11208703
Don't fucking tell me what I experience of record you ramshackle upstart

>> No.11208707

>>11208704
How real is your memory?
How real is your imagination?
What if you realized they operate the same exact way

>> No.11208709

>>11208592
I don't even know what qualia is, how do I know if I experience it.

>> No.11208710

>>11208706
If you want the truth at least have an ego that can handle it

>> No.11208711

>>11208694
I like that idea.

>> No.11208713

>>11208707
>Source: trust me bro
This is some retard tier nonsense. Talk about what you know.

>> No.11208716

>>11208707
My own experiences are the *only* thing I can be sure of being real. Descartes showed this. Your thesis is so stupid that it can't be taken seriously by anyone.

>> No.11208721

>>11208713
>>11208713
So the human brain is a huge number of systems. The interesting part is how it is combined. you can find a central point in every system similar to a NN output array. The unique and interesting combinations of this are the output that you might understand as consciousness.

The feeling of being real. Is because you are a continuous function. It's sort of like how you recognize that a rock you hold up will fall. You feel like you are real because you expect to have a thought in +X time.

>> No.11208723

>>11208592
i suspect the answer lies within the fact that neither "consciousness" or "you" are quite what we naively assume

>> No.11208725

>>11208721
aka the pattern you see in a rock falling to the ground is similarly a related pattern in your own thoughts that you self-identified and expect.

Hence, feeling alive or real is because you expect to continue to make decisions and feel nerve input.

>> No.11208726

>>11208721
>The unique and interesting combinations of this are the output that you might understand as consciousness.

No it isn't. lmao @ this baby tier physics undergrad philosophy

>> No.11208729

>>11208726
practical research

>> No.11208731

>>11208729
have you ever read a book on consciousness in your entire life?

>> No.11208743

>>11208649
define "define"

>> No.11208744

>>11208592
>qualia
Welcome to 2019 newfriend.

>> No.11208747

>>11208664
nu /sci/ in a nutshell

using a single branch of philosophy while disregarding all others is essentially religious thinking

very unscientific

>> No.11208753

>>11208747
Science is empirical, whether you like it or not.
If you want to pretend that “rationalism” works, and that you can magically know things by making no observations, you can do that in the ballpit with the other children.

>> No.11210004

>>11208684
>qualia is non-empirical conjecture
NPC detected.

>> No.11210005

>>11208592

From God.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism

>> No.11210015

>>11208664
Just because you don't doesn't mean nobody else does. Qualia is important because it is a phenomenon and apparently has a location in space and time.

>> No.11210017

>>11208684
>totally not my biased opinion

>> No.11210031

>The very condition of empiricism (fucking experience) isn't real. >Experience DOESN'T exist, it is just an abstraction of something I experience.
Two words: Metaphysical materialism.

>> No.11210384

>>11208753
Shut the fuck up retard
Kant ended this 300 years ago, catch up

>> No.11210386

>>11210384
Kant didn't have toilets that flushed, empiricism gave us that

>> No.11210388

>>11208592
>Where does sensation come from?
the top part of your brain is where sensation comes from.

>> No.11210405
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11210405

>>11210388

fucking pleb you are just such a materialist hack you don't understand the higher levels of gnosis and where they come from which is why you will always be a hack just o the payroll that never innovates or discovers anything, you will be nothing but a number cruncher, an accountant for real men of science because you lack vision and understanding

>> No.11210413

>>11208592
open individualism

>> No.11210421

>>11210405
okay guy who has never met me and never studied the human brain and how it works. thanks for your opinion.

>> No.11210442

>>11210421
He’s clearly just larping as a “gnostic” or whatever the fuck /x/ bullshit meme is popular over there right now. Because that’s oh so funny and clever and not shitposted on here every single damned day. God I hate you stupid children.

>> No.11210443

>>11210421
I study the human brain and he's kind of right

>> No.11210466

>>11210442
it's funny when you post the real answer and get treated like a moron for it. lmao.

>> No.11210467

qualia is what it feels like to be a given object/function

So the sensations you feel are the indicators in your internal model of the world.

>> No.11210533

>>11208592
I think it's a phenomenon caused by the experiences from assigning weights to said neural network

>> No.11210820
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11210820

>>11208649
this is a completely honorable question. qualia is the immediate feels of experience. but for me the better questions is this - how can visual qualia be so different from auditory qualia and from olfactory qualia and from tactile qualia etc if they are all just the same neuronal potential spiking?

my guess is that these different modalities of qualia are encoded using different dimensional manifolds, and we sense the different dimensionalities as qualia.

>> No.11211006

>>11208747
>>11208753
>>11210384
>>11210386
I enjoyed this argument, thanks guys

>> No.11211084

>>11208592
Watch a MRI of it, it's not a big mystery. Areas light up during qualia as when the original event occurred. No scientific ground whatsoever to suspect it being anything special or magical. The brain is also the most complicated thing we have ever seen.

>> No.11211157

>>11208684
If it's useless, then just shut up, retard

>> No.11211218

>>11211084
What does MRI have to do with qualia?

>> No.11211277

>>11210820
Those neurons are themselves "visual qualia". We can't step behind qualia, since everything we encounter is merely sensory information itself already-qualia. The brain is visual qualia, as is the rest of the body, as is the rest of the visual universe. This is what most of /sci/ don't realize, since they think that biological objects and qualia are two separate items, when really everything we know of those biological objects are themselves co-equal to what we refer to as "qualia".

>> No.11211329

>>11211277
/sci/ is mostly metaphysical materialist. This is a religion in denial of qualia. Thank you for trying anyways

>> No.11211376

>>11211329
Well it's okay to be a materialist, even though I'm not one personally. But it's ridiculous to have so poor an understanding of the basic terms of usage that you end up making statements like "color isn't fundamental, it's just a by-product of the brain's interpretation of a particular light-frequency" even though that same brain itself is entirely COLOR, namely pink. You can replace brain with "neurons" or "eyes" and the same fact holds. These people should at least recognize that qualia is inseparably covering everything they consider to be separable from qualia. If the color "pink" doesn't exist fundamentally, then neither does the organ known as the "brain" exist as such -- since you can't separate any visual object from the color it's composed of. If you wish to give color a secondary status, that's fine, but then colored objects automatically gain the same status.

>> No.11211379

>>11211277
Yes but are qualia passed by reference or value?

>> No.11211382

>>11211376
>namely pink
stopped reading, take highschool biology and come back

>> No.11211387

>>11211382
Replace "pink" with whatever color you consider the brain to be and the point still stands.

>>11211379
Don't know what this means.

>> No.11211405

>>11211387
I don't consider the brain to be any color. It simply is. You are obviously not intelligent enough to realize why philosophy is a dead end.

>> No.11211410

>>11208592
Is qualia necessarily tied to neurons and consciousness? What about chemical bonds? What if every grain of sand in a desert experiences pain?

>> No.11211414

>>11211410
There is no proof that "qualia" exist. Claiming they exist is like claiming "God" exists, can't be disproven but it can be dismissed.

>> No.11211419

>>11211405
Every visual object has color, including the brain. Science is a branch of philosophy.

>> No.11211424

>>11211419
>Every visual object has color
define color

>> No.11211430

>>11211329
It's sad because I'd like to think of scientifically-literate people as superior to the religious masses or priest-classes, but in many cases they stand on the same stage, just repeating a different dogma. Guess it's just human hubris at the end of it, with people not being able to acknowledge their ignorance regarding something and instead attempt to bend the facts to fit their existing worldview. I can't even believe some of the comments I'm reading in this thread, by supposedly university-educated individuals. Thinking that denying objective facts of experience will help the flawed-and-failing models of biology they follow remain relevant.

>> No.11211454

>>11211430
>objective facts
Holy shit you are actually retarded. There's no such thing as a fact, only observations which are backed by mathematical analysis.

>> No.11211612

>>11208705
I think having a healthy suspicion of anolgies about the experience of being a human on Earth, bounded by the zeitgeist s latest technologal trend, is wise.

>1800 " You the body is like a steam engine, coal goes in, produces work, some steam escapes."
>1992 " The body is actually like a market,*Snorts coke* you just put p and dump the body, and you fucking make money. *Snorts more coke*

>> No.11211618

>>11208721
So who is expecting the thoughts/falling rock ?

>> No.11212526

>>11211612
This is so true. Thanks for putting it in good words. So many people do this.

>> No.11212587

Okay, two things:
1. The second you think science is able to or already has given you an answer to any of these questions, you have fooled yourself; their subject matter is completely incompatible with the scientific method
2. Just because these are not scientific questions doesn't mean they aren't important and worth asking

Phenomenological experience/sentience/consciousness/subjective experience of qualia are all different terms for the FEELING of existing. If it is LIKE anything to be you, or if you are in any way aware of/capable of beholding yourself (over time I've come to believe that those two things necessarily imply each other, but that's another subject), then you possess this trait.
So how do you know if something possesses that trait? How do you know if something is conscious? That's where the problems start.
It isn't possible. It isn't possible to objectively/scientifically determine whether something is conscious or not, and it isn't possible to prove that you are conscious to somebody else. Anyone claiming otherwise is mistaken

The experience of being is only accessible to the entity experiencing it.
Exhibiting "thought" (computation) or personality does not logically imply consciousness; intelligence and consciousness are separate properties a system can possess and one can hypothetically exist without the other. There's no way to be sure if any facets of human behavior (for example) are purely attributable to consciousness, as there's no way to establish controls or causality. As such, a sufficiently advanced intelligent system could most likely reproduce any behavior we typically associate with humanity
1/2

>> No.11212588

2/2

So it is impossible to verify consciousness in anything other than yourself. There is a logical/categorical barrier between phenomenological experience and what we generally consider "reality"

This works both ways, however. A conscious system is, conversely, unable to bridge that gap from the other direction and objectively verify the reality of anything they experience as exterior stimuli. Who's to say that "you" aren't the only entity in existence, and all your ideas of "objective reality," concepts like 3-dimensional space and the passage or even existence of time, hell even mathematics and fundamental logic, are simply components of the subjective dream you're conjuring for yourself? Or any other number of possible ontological configurations?

Science can examine what is scientific, and phenomenology can examine what is phenomenological. Ne'er the twain shall meet, and in fact if you do wish to apply one to the other, the more you think about it the more you'll come to realize you don't even understand what you're asking; it makes no sense.

So instead of having an existential meltdown because of these twin dilemmas, take the Mu-pill and bravely act out your existence on the knife-edge of complete uncertainty. No answers will ever come. Drop you attachment to the idea of obtaining them and simply act because you can

>> No.11213221

>>11211454
Is that a fact?