From: Metaqualia (metaqualia@mynichi.com)
Date: Fri May 28 2004 - 01:35:00 MDT
> the alleged "awareness" can't affect Chalmers's brainstate in any way.
A lot of people seem to be ignoring that our physical body, which supposedly
cannot be affected by qualia in any way, actually spits out sentences like
"I see the redness of red".
If red alone was enough to cause a 'redness of red' quale, then the body
would not be able to report it because the information "i see the redness of
red" would not be encoded anywhere, just be a mystical experience arising
from the lowly "red". At best we could point at stuff and say "red" but
never point at ourselves and say "qualia".
Now, I believe that humans are built with the delusion that qualia exists.
They are built with neural machinery that spits out stupid stuff like
"yellowness of yellow". There is an evolutionary advantage in having such
kind of delusions, OR they only arise because of an unexpected interaction
between sensory pathways and self-analysis modules. Otherwise Chalmers could
not possibly be talking about qualia.
The biggest conceptual problem to me seems not to be "why do qualia exist";
they are there because the brain says so of course - but why can we be a
process, why can we be locked inside a mind, what is this "I" and how can a
third person world create it, who decides who you get to be... and so forth.
We should perhaps be thinking not only "I take for granted that I am me, so
why do I feel all this stuff" but also "once I get stuck in this brain I
start hallucinating like crazy but how did I end up in here?"
This is actually the same problem seen from the opposite side. When you are
done asking yourself why does the earth stick to the house try asking
yourself why does the house stick to the earth... :-)
PS: I think this is my 12th consciousness theory where is my dime???
mq
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