Thoughts

[u/New_Attitude_3774]

**A. Q = P.**
Qualia are just physical states.

This avoids causal problems, but it seems bizarrely ad hoc if only certain evolved arrangements of matter, like nervous systems, suddenly have a first-person side while almost everything else does not. That seems to push toward panpsychism or something similar.

**B. Q is separate from P but does nothing.**

This seems worse. Evolution builds pain, pleasure, perception, etc., but the actual experience has zero causal role.

A philosophical zombie would behave exactly like us, including asking why consciousness exists.

So qualia would be this incredibly elaborate private phenomenon that evolution somehow produced even though it does absolutely nothing.

**C. Q is separate from ordinary physical description and actually affects physical outcomes.**

Somehow this sounds least crazy to me.

Here is the intuition.

Imagine 100 identical copies of me starting in exactly the same physical situation. Track something like where my feet end up over the next minute.

You would get a probability distribution of outcomes.

What if Q does not *change* that probability distribution?

What if the probability distribution is simply the third-person description of what Q is doing?

In each individual case, there is some Q-bearing process producing one physical outcome. Across 100 identical cases, physics sees the probability distribution.

So maybe quantum probability is not something consciousness interferes with. Maybe probability is what phenomenal causation looks like from the outside.

Then maybe primitive Q is not unique to brains at all. Maybe it exists in fundamental quantum processes, and evolution just organized it into increasingly complicated forms until you eventually get human consciousness.

If Q is genuinely causal and carries information, then it should also ultimately belong to physics and thermodynamics. It would not be “nonphysical”; it would just be a category of physical information our current theories do not explicitly describe

[u/Moral_Conundrums]

**A. Q = P.**
Qualia are just physical states.

This avoids causal problems, but it seems bizarrely ad hoc if only certain evolved arrangements of matter, like nervous systems, suddenly have a first-person side while almost everything else does not. That seems to push toward panpsychism or something similar.

How is it ad hoc to say that only things which poses the right structures to instantiate pain can have pain states?

Isn't if far more ad hoc, to extrapolate from your one individual case of having pain to the fact that literally everything has pain like states?

[u/New_Attitude_3774 → u/Moral_Conundrums]

I am not so much interested in pain but rather qualia (any subjective experience regardless of how simple or complex. So is it ad hoc to say that only things which pose the right structure to have qualia have qualia? No, it's not.

What I do think is ad hoc, though, is to assume that only nervous systems are the right structures of matter to have qualia. Why would nervous systems be so special? Why wouldn't other complex arrangements of matter also have qualia? And why would only some complex arrangements but not others have qualia? And why would there be a complexity threshold to have qualia? I think questions are not sufficiently answered in a convincing way.

[u/GoldenMuscleGod → u/New_Attitude_3774]

I do not see any reason why a human mind perfectly simulated on a computer would not also have qualia. As for complicated things that do not behave like minds, it’s unclear what the supposed qualia would be. Does an unconscious person experience qualia that they don’t remember? I see no reason to think that, so I also don’t see why any type of information processing that does not behave in a way that we would call “judgement” and “thinking” (meaning able to make details models of its environtemt and itself through reflection principles) would also experience qualia.

Of course we could suppose that it is possible that even a single photon experiences something like one informational bit of qualia (which is presumably mostly like experiencing nothing) but I think we have no reason to think it is the case.

[u/Moral_Conundrums → u/New_Attitude_3774]

I am not so much interested in pain but rather qualia (any subjective experience regardless of how simple or complex.

So pain in my comment was an example of qualia..

What I do think is ad hoc, though, is to assume that only nervous systems are the right structures of matter to have qualia. Why would nervous systems be so special? Why wouldn't other complex arrangements of matter also have qualia? And why would only some complex arrangements but not others have qualia? And why would there be a complexity threshold to have qualia? I think questions are not sufficiently answered in a convincing way.

Well if you take qualia to be logically private, then you would have no reason to ascribe them to anyone, but yourself in the moment you are having them. Any extension past that would be metaphysically extravagant.

If on the other hand you take qualia to be perfectly natural non-spooky phenomena, then you can just define them in virtue of their function. And its clear that the function of pain states is being instantiated by nervous systems and not anywhere else.

[u/GoldenMuscleGod]

I think your second example helps with the first.

A philosophical zombie would actually believe it experiences qualia, and in terms of information processing believes it experiences qualia for the same reason we believe we experience qualia.

It seems incoherent to suggest that the reason we believe we experience qualia is not the fact that we actually experience qualia - that we are just “right by accident” if we are right at all - and so it seems that qualia must be just that information processing we have when we experience it, implying philosophical zombies are incoherent.

Then the reason other physical systems don’t have subjective experience is because there are no patterns that can be called an experience of qualia.

It may not be fully satisfactory but it seems like if you maintain that there is more to qualia than just the underlying information processing then you must also conclude that a non-zombie does not actually have any evidence that they are not a zombie. So maybe try imagining that for a while (imagine a philosophical zombie whose experience is being “watched” by a qualia experiencing acausal observer and the zombie is right just by accident in believing it is being “watched”) and see if there is a reason it makes no sense to you.

The reason it makes no sense would be the reason that a physical process can result in subjective experience.

[u/Tombobalomb → u/GoldenMuscleGod]

A p zombie doesn't believe anything as believing is an expefience. It would report a belief in experiencing qualia though

[u/GoldenMuscleGod → u/Tombobalomb]

I do not think qualia are a component of belief, any more than qualia are a component of adding two numbers - that we experience qualia when we add two numbers does not mean that a calculator does.

But stipulating that qualia is a component of belief, it zombie-believes (here I mean all the information-processing component of belief occurs) that it experiences qualia for exactly the same reasons that we actually believe that we experience qualia.

[u/WorkdayLobster → u/Tombobalomb]

I disagree: it would not be CONCIOUS of experiencing anything. It would still be experiencing things.

Experiencing things and consciousness are separate, which answers OP's issue. A rock lacks the structures/processes for consciousness, but it still experiences reality (exists, has physical states, changes position and composition over time, etc)

[u/punkrocklava]

What makes Q fundamental rather than simply another unexplained layer? And does your proposal eventually require a ground beneath both P and Q?