Prof. John Searle lectures

Please watch the rest of the videos.

Daniel Dennett on Consciousness

Nice video. Do watch it.

Intentionality article

Good article on Intentionality

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/qualiagregory.pdf

Qualia

Qualia (singular, quale) is a philosophical term referring to the experiential properties of sensation; the "redness" of red, the "warmness" of warmth, the "garlickness" of the taste of garlic, and so on. By definition, it is impossible to know or understand qualia without direct experience of them, and as a result, they are inherently person-specific and uncommunicable. (One cannot be certain whether or not the "redness" that another sees is experientially identical—or even similar—to the "redness" that one sees, even when looking at the same object.)
The term "qualia" originated in philosophy, although it has been picked up by some scientists (and rejected by some philosophers).

Qualia have become a major component in many modern formulations of the philosophy of mind because of their role in illustrating the difference between knowledge-by-description about, such as might be programmed into a computer, and knowledge-by-acquaintance of, which can only be obtained through direct experience. Computers, like p-zombies, are often assumed to lack qualia and therefore be in some way intrinsically different from humans at a fundamental cognitive level. Whether this is a distinction that actually makes a difference is, apparently, another matter.

Controversies about qualia include:

• Whether qualia exist at all.
• Whether "qualia" is a useful concept/word.
• Whether qualia have interesting epistemological properties, such as being irrefutable and/or ineffable.
• Whether qualia can have unaccountable variations and absences.
• Can computers have qualia.
  • If not, how does that affect AI and mind uploading.
• Whether qualia defy physical explanation/description.
  • If so, whether that is best explained by dualism (qualia are not physical), or by mysterianism

(qualia are physical, but for some reason incomprehensible to humans).
The last dispute is particularly significant. Concern about the problem of qualia (and consciousness in general) is about the only motivation for philosophers to reject physicalism or naturalism that is not propelled by mysticism or religious dogma.


Objectivity and Testability

The concept of qualia has been rejected by some philosophers and neuroscientists as not even wrong, or simply untestable and therefore useless. It also has scientific defenders. It is, after all, hard to dispute that one seems to have qualia, subjectively. One's pain hurts, and one's food has a taste, and so on. Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran and philosopher William Hirstein have suggested that one person's qualia could rendered accessible to another once we have the ability to "connect" two brains via some sort of cable. Unfortunately, this technology is a long way off.^[1]
 
Daniel Dennett, like many in the cognitive sciences, characterizes qualia as a useless and unfalsifiable concept, saying that it must be possible to know if a change in qualia occurs and that there is a difference in having a qualia as opposed to not having one.^[2] Simply ignoring any ineffable forms of qualia (or alternatively just redefining them as some measurable property a la Ned Block^[3]) is the de facto position in the cognitive sciences as something must have a measurable effect if you want to do an experiment on it, and consequently, not have your research grant tossed in the garbage bin. Once again, this problem could theoretically be solved if we could hook up two brains Ramachandran-style, but that's currently impossible. As a result, certain versions of qualia tend to be seen as fuzzy or speculative at best with harder versions such as the inverted spectrum tend to be written off as philosophical woo.

 Qualia and Computers


There is, even among naturalists, a widespread apprehension than robots, computers and artificial intelligences would lack human-style emotions, and perhaps even sensation.^[10] It is certainly a staple of science fiction, where androids are by default emotionless, unless of course fitted with an emotion chip. Star Trek's Mr Data is also astonished by "real" touch, when a piece of human skin is grafted onto him by the Borg Queen — whatever tactile sensors he has being fitted with lacking that special something.

Perhaps the origin of the idea lies in the fact that there is no obvious way to program in emotional feelings and sensory qualia. Or perhaps it is because computers and robots are perceived as running on "pure logic", which is seen as a separate faculty to emotion and sensation in humans. A counteragument is that humans are made of matter, and robots are made of matter, and no magic pixie dust is responsible for sensation and emotion in humans.

There are some researchers who think they can programme "artificial qualia" into an AI, but they caution that: a"[w]e are not interested in the problem of establishing whether robots can have real phenomenal experiences or not.^[11]

 What qualia are for
V. S. Ramachandran believes that qualia have a purpose: if an entity has a complex mind with a lot of different things going on, and if it has the ability to manipulate concepts, then it is in danger of paying too much attention to the wrong things, of getting lost in its thoughts. It needs some things to stand out, to be more urgent or compelling than others.^[1] Pain is obviously compelling. Colour is like mental highlighter — in fact, synaesthetes can use mental highlighting to perform some tasks more effectively^[12]. On a related theme, Richard L Gregory has hypothesised that present experience is more vivid than recalled experience because we need to pay attention to the present. If we had perfectly vivide recall of past experience, we might get confused and start reacting to it as though it is happening.<sup>[13]


See the whole article here: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Qualia</sup>

Intentionality by Prof. Searle

Cont: Functionalism and consciousness

According to functionalism, one might be tempted to say that a conscious system is a computational system that is capable of posessing functional properties. If we consider Bill Gates, aside from his obvious physical properties, the kinds that any physical thing might have (e.g. his weight, height, his particular chemical composition), one can attribute various properties to him: he is Chairman of Microsoft; he is a computer programmer, etc. Each of these properties are functional properties, and by virtue of having them he is conscious.

Of course, going by that definition, a pocket calculator could be said to be conscious. So it seems that to answer the problem of consciousness, functionalism needs more than a theory of functional processes and properties. Intuitively, consciousness seems linked to the ability to posses functional properties that are capable of producing qualitatively different mental phenomena, what some philosophers refer to as qualia.

But it seems entirely possible, and coherent with functionalism, to suggest that two people could experience entirely different qualia with exactly the same equipment, e.g. two people with the same visual "equipment" could see a block of colour; one could see "red", the other "green" (putting linguistic considerations aside). This phenomenon is known as inverted qualia, and poses no problems for functionalism as such. In fact, in Inverted Earth Ned Block pointed out that one could conceivably render someone unconscious, invert their visual equipment and put them into a room that is identical to that of a second person except that all colours are reversed; in this situation, their qualia would be identical, since what it would be like to experience the colours would be identical for both people, despite their hardware and the reality they are seeing being opposite to one another.

However Block also raised several problems with qualia that affect functionalism in particular. The first is to say that if we accept that inverted qualia pose no problems to functionalism as such, then we must also accept the logical possibility that my visual qualia in a given situation might be identical with your auditory qualia in a given situation, since there is no necessary connection between qualia, the person's hardware and the environment that is 'causing' the experiences. This is both perplexing and attractive to those who feel materialism to be too inhuman, since it suggests that my listening to Beethoven's 5th symphony and your reading a novel set in the Napoleonic wars could evoke exactly the same mental phenomena; what is is like for me to listen to the music could be identical to what it is like for you to read the book. Romantic as this seems, it does make explaining functional states and properties extremely difficult, as you can no longer use the hardware nor the environment as a reliable reference point.

There may also be mental states that aren't public, such as unconscious states, and so that functionalists cannot accurately describe nor explain, at least not objectively, since they cannot get any reliable information by interacting with the owner of the states, they can't look at the brain states, and they can't rely on the subject's environment.

One can also posit the existence of zombies, unconscious beings that have the same behaviour and the same brain states as a conscious being, but no qualia. The functionalist ought to be able to distinguish a zombie from a conscious person, but given that all of the public information seems identical to that of a conscious person, how could one ever know? How could we know everyone else isn't a zombie, or that we ourselves aren't zombies? By being so liberal about qualia and their relation to the brain and the subject's environment, functionalism solves a lot of the problems associated with behaviourism and identity theory, but it also opens the door to extreme forms of scepticism, and makes it extremely unlikely that it could deliver any scientific explanations of the functioning of a specific mind-brain.

John Searle: Consciousness and Causality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=yCii726A4Jc

This is a longer video, but worth watching. Enjoy.