I've posted my provisional, personal and no doubt flawed in many ways, model of how human consciousness came to be and how it works at http://www.the-brights.net/forums/forum/index.php?s=&showtopic=9467&view=findpost&p=159955 ( also http://www.zensden.net/ColonelZen/index.html/44 )
The question before the house is does this answer "The Hard Problem" as elaborated in http://consc.net/papers/facing.html . David Chalmers' "Facing the Hard Problem".
My answer is yes. And I'm curious to see whether others can shoot it down.
"The Hard Problem" is
The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.
It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.
And the answer is simply that the experience of the self is the projection of oneself in regard to these things (in room 2c, in my model) cotemporaneous with memories of excerpts and abstracts of the real past sensory experience (including possible inter body sensations) in pursuit of whatever goal the decision process in the brain is seeking. Including possibly answering the question about "do I have these qualia?", In which case it having previously conjured the projection of its puppet of self with those past experiences and they and associated relations coming down through the decision mechanism, it projects itself as the puppet nodding sagely, yes I know those qualia, and in consequence typing this paragraph (after running thousands of little projections about just how having such qualia relate to the abstract model of consciousness referenced and building anticipatory schemas of doing so).
"Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C?" Very simply because "when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing" it explicitly means referencing memories of excerpts and past abstractions of those past real experiences. We seem to have a similar experience to the real experience because the information passes through with reference to those real experiences, but it is not as rich and full as the real experience, for two reasons, the mind simply lacks the resources for full storage of the whole experience when it first occurred and doesn't have it to pass through, just the abstracts, and also the data is tagged as being part of a simulation. The mind knows it is not "experiencing" the sensory experiences live.
But there's an additional and much subtler problem here. You see, I never had a quale until I understood qualia.
Of course I had the experience of seeing red (to revert to the standard example) and would recognise red in any image falling across my retinas. And the word "red" and all its variants (magenta, ochre, brick) would trigger hundreds of past experiences of which one abstracted part was the experience we commonly mean by red. But I never had the "quale" of redness ... depending on where you define it.
But there's no mystery to having and knowing the experience of red. We have physical experiences. We know our brains cut them up, store and recombine them in pieces and can summon those memories up along with their sundry associations. Hardly a hard problem conceptually, though we're far from understanding the mechanics in our brains, our computers and cameras can do the same thing trivially, even though they have no conception of what they're doing while doing it.
So what is a quale? So I learn about qualia. In the puppet theater the self stands with the question, "do you know about abstractions, boy?", and back down through the C wing of levels (let's call them "scenes" from now on) 2 through 4 come the associations of the words "abstractions" and "you", and 4c directs 2c to have the puppet nod wisely. "So boy, do you understand the abstraction 'What x is like?'" ... and again the puppet nods. "So boy, a quale is the 'what it is like' for something we experience. Do you get it?" Happily the puppet nods, relieved that he wasn't about to be scolded for his obtuseness. "So explain to me the quale of red!" shouts the phantom professor in Descartes' theater. The puppet looks around and panics, then finally stammers "Um.... Er... I thought I understood, but I don't think I can ... there's just no way ..." "Excellent!", shouts the imaginary professor, "You've got it!".
But alone in the dark Pinocchio untangles his strings. Where did the mystery come from? There is no mystery to what red is. There is no real mystery to what our brains are doing in sorting out red as we can have our machines do it. And there is no mystery, conceptually, as to how it's done for the same reason though we don't yet have a good correlation between our machines and the mechanisms in goo. At first glance "qualia" like pain and hunger may seem to be candidate mysteries, but if the brain can create an experience out of light, there's no reason it should have a problem doing so about more overt chemical or physical problems. So where is the mystery? And the answer I see is that it was added after the fact.
The problem of the quale of red is nothing about how the brain/mind sees red, it is in seeing red as an abstraction of the experience of red, not the experience itself, nor in the myriad ways memories of such experiences may be recalled in the mind.
The problem, my dear professor, lies not with ourselves, but with our philosophies.
-- TWZ
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