What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind

[1] https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/video/consciousness-as-...

As I understand it, a common form of this framework is basically panpsychism, but more science-y and less metaphysics-y. Some people believe that consciousness may arise from a fundamental field in the universe just like how there's an electromagnetic field or a Higgs field. I vaguely remember hearing one theory that posits intelligent life forms are to the field of consciousness what photons/electrons are to the electromagnetic field — that is to say, spikes or clusters of energy in the field that stand out drastically against the background noise.

Yes, a photosensor doesn't have that kind of sensation, and that's because there is nothing going on inside of it that would correspond to that sensation (no neural correlate, so to speak). In the humain brain there is enough that is going on (the complexity and quantity is staggering) that our range of inner experience is easily representable by it. And "experiencing" merely means that we are processing those representations in a way that enters our cognition, like "mere" perceptions do as well.

It seems that you are thinking that perceptions lead to experience, and then nothing else. My view is that perceptions lead to internal processing that in turn is itself perceived by our cognition, in addition to the original perceptions. And it's the texture of this perceived processing that we call "experiencing". That is, it doesn't stop at the "experience" step, because then we wouldn't know anything about it. Instead, the information about the experience then enters our cognitive processing as a subsequent step. And that's how we don't perceive just "red" full stop, but also an associated "experience" of the red. But again, we wouldn't know about that experience if that wasn't information that enters our mind. And I see no puzzle about such information entering our mind.

> Dennett most certainly tackles the "hard problem", by convincingly arguing the problem is ill-defined and not a real problem.

No, like everyone else he admits defeat before it and tries to define it away. Whatever the relationship between qualia and physical reality, we experience them (I do. Dennett might not, haha) which requires some explanation. Once you have that everything else is easy, but there’s no reason for there to be an experience at all.

And the point isn't "can you deny that the simulation has qualia?" (though I do find denying that pretty implausible); it's that it feels pretty clear to me that having the level of understanding that would be demonstrated by such a simulation-plus-analysis would in fact constitute a solution to the "hard problem".

(Of course, that would be entirely irrelevant for anyone who believes that my scenario is impossible in principle. For instance, if someone thinks that humans don't think with their brains but with their immaterial souls, they should predict that all attempts to do the sort of thing I describe will end in failure: you might get the machine do do exactly what the brain-meat does, but that won't lead to human-like behaviour because human-like behaviour is enabled by human-like souls which the simulator doesn't have.)

My maybe-uncharitable view is that the "hard problem" is "hard" because it is not really a problem so much as it is a decision to refuse ever to admit that we understand. No matter how detailed and complete an explanation we might have of human consciousness, you can always say "nope, that doesn't explain why there's anything it feels like for me to eat a perfectly ripe peach". Even if (as in my fanciful scenario) that explanation enables us to trace every detail of the processes that lead from being eating the peach to saying "mmmm, that's delicious", to wanting to buy more peaches in future, to rhapsodizing about how no mechanical explanation could ever do justice to the experience, etc. Even if (again, as in my fanciful scenario) the explanation lets us identify (down to the level of neuron-activations) what is common between the experience of eating a peach and the experience of eating a plum, what is different between the experience of eating a ripe peach and the experience of eating a not-so-ripe one, what is shared by all experiences of seeing something a bright scarlet colour, and so forth.

To me, this all seems like saying that gravity is ineffable, that although we can write down Newton's or Einstein's equations and compute exactly what happens when two massive bodies are near one another, there's still always something left unexplained. I can imagine, I say, things that behave according to the same equations but don't really have mass: they might instead have not actual mass but some mere facsimile of the real thing. Or that chess is ineffable, that although a machine can choose chess moves (and beat grandmasters) it isn't really playing chess but doing some mere facsimile of chess-playing. And one can go through the same manoeuvre with any concept at all. Consider the Hard Problem of Trousers: we may be able to analyse the way in which pieces of fabric are made and shaped and put together to make trousers, but that still leaves completely unanswered the question of why the resulting object is a pair of trousers. After all, I insist, I can imagine taking exactly the same pieces of fabric and putting them together the same way to make something that could be worn like trousers but that aren't really trousers...