This is the most important lesson to be learned. That it is possible to say things that are true, and that anybody can say them. Truth has its contexts, and it has its nuances, and neither the world of politics and business-the macro world-nor the even larger and more finely nuanced world of personal life-the micro world-can be helped by anything but a fire to accomplish something good.

The problem with saying something like that is that you, the reader, and myself, the writer, both immediately question ourselves, saying "Is that naïve? Do I have any fire to accomplish something good?"

You create effects of quality in all moments of your life. You experience the world-its breakups, its defeats, its sunrises and snowfalls-as good and bad. This simple acknowledgment, of the universality of complicated experience, signifies in any of us willing to step forward a fire to accomplish good.

Maayan told me about seeking "balance" in the visual design of her magazine. Visual balance pervades her existence; she carries it home with her, injects it into those simple tasks like organizing household objects, writing notes to herself, that many of us accidentally ignore. She brings quality to everyday experience, for no other reason than that it can-and therefore should-be done.

In every person is an experience of quality, and the longing toward that new, greater quality is a source of great inspiration.

Before tonight, I was not much inspired. I had my beliefs, but they were technical beliefs, statements of confidence in certain practices and institutions over others. Tonight it's different. I will have to use an anecdote.

Two Scandinavian adventurers, having recently completed an unsupported expedition to walk across Antarctica-a hugely expensive and difficult venture, risking many forms of suicide, including psychological, financial, and literal-commented, when asked why they'd done it, "Because we believe in the power of truth."

It struck me as insane when I heard it. Truth, I thought, had nothing to do with a physical trek across a wasteland. But it does. Truth, first and above all, consists of the acknowledgment of things as they stand. I think of the two men, pulling heaps of food and fuel across an endless tundra. This experience is real, as is everything else we experience. It is our duty to acknowledge the real, and these two Scandinavians were willing to risk everything to do it. This is a humbling experience, as was their trek, as every other worthwhile thing has been. To seek greatness requires great humility and sacrifice.

Maayan, when she makes a drawing, or organizes text and pictures, does it with a sense of purpose and even of righteousness. It is a simple Good, and she can make it real; therefore she must. There is no going back to anything-only our senses of justice and truth can lift us up. 

獅子の種

Members: | Hītan ひぃたん, Hītan : Vocal | Motoki もとき:, Motoki Bass | Haruka ハルカ, Haruka: Guitars | Tetsuyuki 哲之, Tetsuyuki: Drums

Vuena Vista

Artist: Jinn Album: Qualia Release Date: February 6, 2008

Links: Official Website | Official Blog Site | Get the Album here

Jinn hits it off again with their latest hit "Shishi no Tane" (獅子の種) and their latest single "Vuena Vista" from the album Qualia. The Album contains all 11 songs. I'm for one a fan of Jinn and always loved the songs they made, and now they give us these, I can't wait for their next songs to come.

Jinn (ジン) is a 4-member Japanese rock band. They are part of SMEJ's Palm Beach record label.The members of Jinn all attended the same high school, and formed the band in Tokyo in the summer of 2003. In March 2004, the band recorded a demo CD, 0~Zero~ (0～ゼロ～), with 500 copies selling out quickly.

After that in 2005, the band recorded a mini album, Kotosabi no Ki (言錆の樹). In August 2006, the single Raion (雷音) was released, which was featured as the final opening theme to the Blood+ anime series. On November 22 the same year, Jinn also released another single, Malachite (マラカイト, Marakaito).

In 2007, Jinn performed the second opening theme to the Sunrise anime series Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion, Kaidoku Funou (解読不能), which was released on January 31, 2007. Their first full album, Lemmings (レミングス, Remingusu), was released on February 28, 2007. Their second album, Qualia was released on February 6, 2008.

 

Painting by Peter O'Doherty

In the last couple of weeks, as banks have failed around the world and the stock-market has sunk, I've been setting up the foundations of my business. I opened a business bank account but the banker who filled out the form made a spelling error that means  the card has to be re-made. I picked up an armload of brochures from the taxation office so that I could set up my record keeping files (which I'm doing in Google docs spreadsheets). And I've been researching the capital investments I need to make. When I returned to Australia from America I bought a computer and the first 3G phone I saw without thinking the purchases through. I had a Sony VAIO in Los Angeles and bought the nearest thing to it (in appearance) that I found, a Compaq Presario. And I took an instant dislike to the Nokia phone for entirely superficial, but lasting, reasons. Both devices are on the wrong side of an evolutionary divide. Small of memory, slow of operation, limited of function, and there's no way to lift them to a higher order of machine. I grew to loathe Windows: my music library is marooned within an old version of itunes. I read many horror stories about upgrading to itunes 7 with Windows XP, and now even that's gone, given way to itunes 8. No wi-fi modem was bundled with the machine, so I can't easily work with Google docs and am reliant on the woeful word processing program provided by Windows that isn't even comfortably compatible with Microsoft word, and the virus protection program became a voracious memory hog and made the machine function in slow motion. Now the disc drive in the computer is malfunctioning so I can't watch the handful of NTSC DVD's I own (some of them small dance films made by my friend Dana Gingras's new dance company Animals of Distinction.)

I had appointments at the Genius Bar and with a Personal Shopper at the Apple Store in Sydney to look toward buying an Apple computer system. There are parts of Sydney that remind me of New York, or perhaps, since I lived in Sydney first, Sydney anticipated New York for me. The new Apple store on George Street, which is a three storey rectangular glass box, reminds me of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as much in the experience of going there as the appearance. Two flights of glass stairs give the appearance of floating in space and unadorned metal walls and surfaces are the kind I envisaged for my bibliostructures. The Genius Bar feels like a real bar: I keep expecting to be offered a martini made from an exquisite Japanese rice vodka. The serious elegance reminds me of the aesthetics of the NeXT computers, which was exactly the kind of computer that Mies van der Rohe would have created. Just about everything I admire these days is seriously elegant and complex, but subtle: Nick Cave's songs, William Gibson's novels of the twenty first century, Glenn O'Brien and Fabien Baron's retooling of Interview magazine, Peter O'Doherty and Alexis Rockman's paintings, Al Gore's reinvention of the stewardship provided by a public figure.

There's something Leonard Cohen said in the New York Times in 1996 that keeps coming to mind:

"How do we produce work that touches the heart? We don't want to live a frivolous life, we don't want to live a superficial life. We want to be serious with each other, with our friends, with our work. That doesn't necessarily mean gloomy or grim, but seriousness has a kind of voluptuous aspect to it. It is something that we are deeply hungry for, to take ourselves seriously and to be able to enjoy the nourishment of seriousness, that gravity, that weight."

Trying to decide what computer to buy made my head spin. By default the iphone I bought yesterday has become my primary computer. I didn't intend to get an iphone. I didn't think I made so many voice calls, but the preparatory work for my business had seen me make what is usually a month's worth of calls in a day. And I need to be able to search for information on the fly: the Nokia just didn't present websites well, and I couldn't open PDF documents in my emails. The best upgrade solution from my phone service was their iphone pagackage: So I now have a 3G 16gigabyte black iphone. The network at my service provider's store was down so I went to the Apple store (one block away) and they activated my phone for me and showed me how to use it. A salesman (although I think they have some more benign title like customer care operative, or team member) imported my contacts for me, set up the synchronising of my e-mail with my phone, and showed me how to set the alarms and all of the simple functions. Everything felt right, and inevitable. I suddenly understood why the Windows system and the Nokia's functioning bothered me: it was all tricksy, trying obvious things with the technology to spin out sales, and larding up the systems with every feature imaginable, hoping that a few shiny trinkets would capture our attention , without linking them to how human activities were changing through technological developments. There's still a purity about the Apple vision, their machines fulfil one of the functions of mythology, that the information that we take in ties what's eternal about the stages of human life, to our times.

The Sony Walkman was the first piece of technology that captivated me: it was unprecedented and perfectly prescient. The end of the great age of Sony fascinates me, the development of a robot dog to be "man's next friend", the linking of computing and gaming, and the flawed Qualia concept are fascinating. Qualia seemed to come out of nowhere at the time. I think the line was launched in 1999. Like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's novel imagining that Charles Babbage succeeded in creating his computer, The Difference Engine, the products anticipated steampunk. They were phenomenally expensive and housed in finely tooled boxes made of wood and metal, and sold in rarefied stores that had their own perfume pumped through the air. (Although that's not as unusual as I once thought it was, many companies "brand" the air their customers breathe.) At the time I found it bizarre and eccentric that Sony was creating tools for contemporary Charles Darwin's and Captain Cook's, enlightened scholarly generalists and explorers with a spiritual streak.

Qualia is a term from neuroscience -- I'll need to look it up again to properly describe it -- that relates to how we experience experiences. The dictionary in this woeful word processor gives this definition: "essential quality. a property of something, for example, its feel or appearance, rather than the thing itself." I thought that Sony was trying to suggest that their products allowed people to create and store experiences that turned the home entertainment environment into an equivalent of natural history museums and private cabinets of curiosity. The product literature mentioned leaves in rainforests and fine wine. Now it's evident that Sony was just early, that Nobuyki Idei was a seer: the steampunk aesthetic has now taken complete hold. I went to pick up my mail at the post office in Potts Point yesterday and stopped for coffee at Toby's estate, organic coffee, organic soy milk, in a French style bowl. And I saw a sign for what I thought was a real estate agent and followed it to a store tucked behind a parking lot that mixed minimally ornate Edwardian-seeming estate jewellery and diminutive antiques, with pure fibre sensual clothing: plain cashmere and silk jersey, and haute-simple baby toys and archly plain ceramic mugs and bowls and plates. There were also artworks: butterflies laid out on paper, in glass boxes. The customers of this store would have naturally gravitated, now, I think, to Sony's Qualia range of electronics.

Left: Apple iphone wallpaper

There's a Qualia-quality, sweeter, more democratic and warmer, in the Apple products. I'm almost more taken with the quality of the packaging than the phone itself. A black box that feels like cashmere and matte black dividers in the box: if it weren't opaque it could be a display case at a natural history museum. The wallpapers loaded into the phone are classic pre-modern paintings -- the Mona Lisa, a Cezanne still life, a Degas, Van Gogh's Starry Night -- alongside images that could have come from National Geographic (a lotus flower, peacock‘s fan of feathers, section of a rainforest plant, autumn trees, a frog, a monarch butterfly,), and earthrise, the photograph taken looking back at earth from the moon's orbit, by the Apollo 8 astronauts, that Joseph Campbell believed infinitely expanded the horizon for mythology. The ringtones are all drawn from life, snatches of oral history: machines (motorcycle, an alarm, pinball, robots), animals (dogs, ducks, crickets) and pure, generic music (blues, harp, xylophone, piano riff). These aren't abstractions and metaphors but field recordings by made by the computer out in the world.

Yesterday I visited a metalworking shop in the inner city Sydney suburb of St Peters. My new bibliostructures are vastly different from those I made during the L.A. period. I want them to be snapped together from pre-fabricated parts and I don't want to use any glue at all. I had a vision of a book with a metal spine and covers that's inspired by a "floating" steel table by Junya Ishigami. I want one of these tables for the warehouse space I'm looking for. It's extravegantly long -- perhaps as long as three regular tables -- and thin, merely millimetres. It looks like a sheet of steel paper levitating at table height. It's exhilarating, like a magic trick.

I've been reading a lot about magic lately. Nick Cave's albums are bibliographies as well as musical works for me and the latest Bad Seeds album has led me to the Robert Fagles 1996 translation of the Odyssey as well as the biography of Harry Houdini by Larry Sloman that the song DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! was inspired by. At the Kings Cross library I found a book called The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects by Norman Klein.

"In 1993 I visited the Luxor in Vegas soon after it opened. Luxor was billed as "the first pyramid in 2,600 years." While I leaned at the entry, a chunk of the front wall broke off in my hand. It was weightless, made of stucco, chicken wire and Styrofoam. For years, I kept my chunk of the Luxor on a shelf near my computer, beside a piece of the Berlin Wall; next to broken pottery shards from Armageddon (I had found them in a parking lot in Israel, at Megiddo, the spot where Revelations promises the world will end); and finally, near some tattered editions of pulp novels from the fifties (urban ruin as special effects). 

The metalworking shop could have belonged to one of William Gibson's gomi non sensei. The firm specialises in making metal furniture for architects. There were curlicued gates and panels being sanded and polished by the front door. Everything in the shop has an intense patina: drill bits are stored in ancient powder-coated tins. Sheets of various metals are propped up against the walls, hinges are sitting haphazardly on shelves. Arcane tools are fanned out on the tables. At one point a fine down of dust sank through the air until the worker opened the back door to let the air circulate.

The metalworker looked at my sketches and gave me specifications: the side of the spine will need to be about 4mm to allow the hinges to hold when they are drilled in. I'll need a plate with three holes if I'm to pin the pin the signatures inside the spine, and I'll have to have some way of reinforcing the edge of the covers that the hinges screw into. The thinnest metals and aluminium that's standard won't hold up to the kind of wear and tear I want to put a book through, and the surface will look ruined and beat up rather than charmingly weathered. So we discussed softer metals that are easier to work with and show the marks of aging and use more attractively. I came out of the meeting with a list of brass and copper crescent mouldings and butt-hinges to acquire to make test models with. It struck me that I no longer have something coolly futuristic with a reverent nod to modernism but something Victorian, utterly steampunk. A couple of months ago I read an article about steampunks in the New York Times. The protagonist dresses in Victorian suits with tall top hats and has had an articulated brass casing made for his ipod. In a roundabout way I've re-invented that brass encased ipod.

The only thing missing from these virtual events is the boozing and schmoozing! But, we can usually make up for it if and when we have the occasion to meet in person. Good luck Richard - I think it's a terrific idea. 

Tracklist :
Liber Nonacris : 19.25
Acheiropoiètes : 8.30
Le grand dieu Pan : 14.40
Le vingt-et-unième cercle : 5.40

I propose that quantum events are the ultimate fundamental building blocks of all reality. Specifically, when quantum collapse transforms a superpositional state into a specific physical particle. This has been pretty well established scientifically for all physical phenomenon. The inherently random potential of a quantum event is limited or constrained in its uncertainty by how the physical universe shapes the particular superposition of a particle as dictated by the laws of physics. All physical events can ultimately be reduced to countless iterations of this single process.

I believe that all mental events are ultimately reducible to the same basic process of quantum collapse, and that hugely complex mental constructions like the human mind are simply the surprising results of an unimaginably large number of these events occurring in proximity to each other. Thus physical and mental events are ultimately interchangeable. They're merely two different ways of describing the same thing. Thus quantum events can be described in two seemingly discrete ways but which ultimately directly correlate to each other. The two fundamental mental correlates of quantum events are volition and perception. The inherently random potential of a quantum event manifests mentally as a tiny instance of what ultimately becomes familiar to our minds as volition, and the limitations or constraints that shape the superpositional field are the primitive pieces of what we ultimately call perception.

The part of our brains responsible for our conscious mind--the part where our sensations and conceptions (our brain states, in other words) are imposed upon our minds in the form of perception and conversely, where unpredictable, volitional acts of will in our minds impose physical states on our brain--must consist of a never ending field of overlapping superpositions whose shape is directly correlated to the neural activity (perhaps via electromagnetic values) of various parts of our brain. The stronger the influence of various brain states on the quantum mental field of superpositions, the more perceptual the event will be, and the weaker the influence and therefore the more chaotic and Uncertain the events in the quantum mental field are, the more volitional the event will be.

This explains lots of things about why mental phenomena occur in the way they do, and may even give insight into fields such as artificial intelligence and mind interactive technologies. It also explains why the subject of qualia seems so surprising and perplexing to understand. Let's look at a phenomenon that illustrates perception. As an example, we'll use the experience of visually perceiving a red circle on a black field. If we were having this visual experience and consciously focusing on it as completely as we can, our mental experience at that time will have certain behaviors that are understandable from a 'Volition and Perception' perspective. This event would be almost completely perceptual and minimally volitional, which is why we have basically zero conscious control over the nature of the phenomenal experience, why such a highly deterministic shaped mental field is more vivid and detailed than any mental field lacking such an abnormal level of determinism. The qualia that arise from this mental state seem so baffling simply because the shape of the mental field that it creates is created entirely externally. In other words, qualia, by their nature are mental events which could never occur without being specifically imposed by forces outside the mind. It's no wonder then, that they seem to arise in our minds in a mysteriously arbitrary way.

One of the main predictions that might be made from this theory is in the creation of artificial intelligence. In order to create a machine with a truly subjective, experiential mental existence, it must--according to this theory--have an interactive quantum field. We could make simulated artificial minds by substituting the quantum uncertainty aspect with a deterministic random number generator and in theory never be able to notice the difference, but such deterministic minds would be philosophical 'zombies'. Only minds made with an actual interactive quantum field generator that reliably interacted with the various cognitive states of the rest of the artificial brain would be a genuine mind with truly subjective experiences. If this is the case, it's easy to see why we're making such little progress in AI. We generally try to limit or eliminate random or unexplainable cognitive processes in AI. And even if we make something sophisticated enough to where every basic process had an element of uncertainty, we'd probably use deterministic random number generators rather than interactive quantum field engines to provide the uncertainty.

This would also seem to suggest that any successful attempt at making a true artificial mind would result in a mind that could not be perfectly controlled or programmed. The more volitional the consciousness was, the less programmable or predictable it would have to be and vice versa. In other words, the more consciousness a machine possesses, the more it behaves like a person than a machine.

This is just a basic explanation of my theory of mind, but it covers all the core ideas. The main reason why I like it so much is it seems to have an intuitive elegance to it. Also, it allows for all existing physical and psychological facts to remain unchanged since all it claims is a dualistic connection at the smallest and most fundamental level of reality and leaves all higher order phenomenon the same. The other posts on this blog are mostly elaborations, explanations, and examples based on the core idea described on this page.

PowerPoint

We'll be taking on Southeast Asia for two and a half months. Zach Bryant and I will be traveling the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Hong Kong and Macau, and possibly others depending on time and visa restrictions.

Readership, fasten your seatbelts -- it'll be a crazy ride. The next few months will have more pictures, more poems, more Adventures in Food and Drink, and more nonsense than before. I might be able to convince Zach to write a story or two on here as well as a guest blogger.

As soon as we figure out how to Twitter from Southeast Asia, we'll have microblogging of the journey and you can play along at home and save us from bad guys and foreign governments.

Qualia Freaks have the following argument 'Nothing you could tell of a physical sort captures the smell of a rose. Therefore physicalism is false'.

Unfortunately, many people do not find the premise intuitively obvious. 'The task then is to present an argument whose premises are obvious to all, or at least to as many as possible'...'The major factor in stopping people from admitting qualia is the belief that they would have to be given a causal role with respect to the physical world, and especially the brain; and it is hard to do this without sounding like someone who believes in fairies'. 'I seek to turn this objection by arguing that the view that qualia are epiphenomenal [that the world can effect them, but they cannot effect the world] is a perfectly possible one'.

1. THE KNOWLEDGE ARGUMENT FOR QUALIA

'Fred Explains that all ripe tomatoes do not look the same colour to him'. He says that 'it would be quite wrong to think that because 'red' appears in red 1 and red 2, that the two colours are shades of the one colour...to hom, red1 and red2 are as different from each other as yellow is from blue'.

'We should admit that Fred can see at lease one more colour that we can'.

H G Wells' story, he country of the blimd, is about a sighted person in a totally blind community. This person never manages to convince them that he can see, that he has an extra sense'...'We would be making their mistake is we refused to allow that Fred can see one more colour than we can'.

'What kind of experience does Fred have when he sees red1 and red2? It seems that no amount of physical information about Fred's brain or optical system tells us'.

'We have all the physical information. Therefore, knowing all this is not knowing everything about Fred. Physicalism leaves something out'. 'Qualia are left out of the physicalist story.

2. THE MODAL ARGUMENT

'No amount of physical information about another logically entails that he or she is conscious or feels anything at all. Consequently there is a possible world with organisms exactly like us in every pysical respect...but which differ from us profoundly in that they have no conscious mental life at all...What is it that we have and they lack?

'In all physical regards, we are exactly alike. Consequently, there is more to us than the purely physical. Thus, physicalism is false'.

3. THE 'WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE' ARGUMENT

'Thomas Nagel argues that no amount of physical information can tell us what it is like to be a bat', because' what this is like can onl be understood from a bat's point of view, which is not our point of view and is not something capturable in physical terms which are essentially terms understandable equally from many points of view'.

'It is imporrtant to distinguish this argument from the Knowledge Argument.' 'I was not complaining that we weren't finding out what it is like to be Fred. I was complaining that there is something about his experience, of which we are left ignorant'.

'It is hard to see an objection to physicalism here. Physicalism makes no special claims about the imaginative or extrapolative powers of human beings, and it is hard to see why it need do so'.

4. THE BOGEY OF EPIPHENOMENALISM

'Is there any really good reason for refusing to countenance the idea that qualia are causally impotent with respect to the phyical world? I will argue for the answer no'.

'All I will be concerned to defend is that it is possible to hold that certain properties of certain mental states, namely those I've called qualia, are such that their posession or absence makes no difference to the physical world [and] that the mental is totally inefficacious'.

OBJECTIONS TO EPIPHENOMENALISM AND REPLIES

1. It is supposed to be just obvious that the hurtfulness of pain is partly responsible for the subject seeking to avoid pain...but, to reverse Hume, anything can fail to cause anything...The hypothesis that A causes B can be overturned by an over-arching theory which shows the two as distinct effects of a common undrlying causal process.

The epiphenomenalist can say exactly the same about the commection between, for example, hurtfulness and behaviour. It is simply a consequence of the fact that certain happenings in the brain cause both'.

2. Darwin;s theory of evolution holds 'the traits that evolve over time are those conductive to physical survival. We may assume that qualia evolved over time- we have them, the earliest forms of life do not- so we should expect qualia to be conductive to survival. The objection is that they could hardly help us to survive if they do nothing to the physical world'

'The appeal of this argument is undeliable, but there is a good reply to it'

'The advantages for survival of having a warm coat outweighed  the disadvantages of having a heavy one...all we can extract from Darwin's theory is that we should expect any evolved characteristic to be eithe conductive to survival or a by-product of one that is so conducive. The Epiphenomenalists hold that qualia fall into the latter category'.

3. 'How can a person's behaviour provide any reason for believing he has qualia like mine, or indeed any qualia at all, unless this behavious can be regarded as the outcome of qualia?'

'The epiphenomenalist allows that qualia are effects of what goes on in the brain. Qualia cause nothing physical but are caused by something physical. Hence, the epiphenomenalist can argue from the behaviour of others back to its causes in the brains of others, and out again to their qualia'.

'Epiphenomenal qualia are totally irrelevant to survival.'

'It is not sufficiently appreciated that physicalism is an extremely optimistic view of our powers'...'One must admit that it is very unlikely that there is a part of the whole scheme of things...which no amount of evolution will ever bring us near to knowledge about or understanding. For the simple reason that such knowledge and understanding is irrelevant to survival'.

The most fascinating and controversial subject in the field of psychology is consciousness. Some psychologists argue that little progress has been made, that we have done nothing that truly helps us further understand what consciousness really is. We've found the physical correlates of consciousness, but that doesn't exactly explain how the subjective experience is created. Because it can't be explained purely in terms of physical brain hardware like neurons and such, philosophy has taken up a large role in the discussion of consciousness. In reading the blog Conscious Entities, where some of the top minds in the field contribute articles and comments, I came across some very interesting concepts. One is called qualia. Qualia is the experience of things, or the "way things seem". The prototypical example is the color red. We can describe it in terms of a light's wavelength, but we can't truly describe the way it looks. How do you know that what you see as red is perceived the same way as another person? There is no "right" way to perceive a color. In other words, our conscious experience does not directly reflect reality, but rather a filtered representation of it.

I've given a very simplistic overview of qualia compared to what's been discussed by the greatest psychologists and philosophers. If you think about it hard enough, it'll begin to sink in how crazy of a concept it is. Just imagine, we can all be perceiving colors and such in a completely different way than each other, but calling them the same things, and there's no way we can ever know.

Image credit: Conscious Entities (http://www.consciousentities.com)

Qualia are famous and much disputed features about consciousness. The discussion is well known and unresolved, yet I may have come on a unrefutable argument for the existence of qualia.

Qualia exist in the present only, they are complex and irrepeatable. They are also irretrievable. No memory is that good to enable anyone to exactly recall what the experience was at any moment. This is basically an insight that goes back to Heraclitus:

"You cannot step into the same river twice."

This is also expressed in the mirror analogy of consciousness that is used in the Zen tradition. The mirror of consciousness just reflects what anyone experiences. The difference to a mirror of course is that we are conscious of what 'our' mirror reflects. I like the mirror analogy better than the often used theater analogy, because it clearly separates the main quality of consciousness that it is only receptive from the mind that is very active in many respects. Of course the mind has a great influence in what we experience.

So qualia can be regarded as very complex and just momentary existing inner experiences, that once had are lost like what is reflected by a mirror.

304. "But you will surely admit that there is a difference between pain - behavior accompanied by pain and pain - behavior without any pain?" - Admit it? What greater difference could there be? - "And yet you again and again reach the conclusion that the sensation itself is a nothing." - Not at all. It is not a something, but not a nothing either! The conclusion was only that a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said. We have only rejected the grammar which tries to force itself on us here.

Philosophical Investigations

To what degree is Wittgenstein's grammatical dismissal consumptive of the differences in the qualia camps? HIs main point is that the kinds of ostensive langugage games by which we largely compose our notion of "somethingness" are grammatically (that is contextually) inappropriate to the conditions of qualia talk. But his "its not a nothing either" appears like a splitting the baby. What is so tempting about Wittgenstein's answer is that it is so dismissive, that is seems to undercut the entire discourse of disagreement, and place it at the level of language.

Is it necessary to be a Realist to continue the qualia-debate, to think that sentences get their truth by correspondence to Real Facts of the world? Are their any qualia supporters who are non- or anti-Realists? Does everything hinge on the notion of "something"?

[written September 1, 2007]

The first part is the “easy problem.” It is basically a question of cognition, or how we process information. Our attention span, language skills, learning abilities, memory capacity, perception qualities, and problem solving abilities have been well-documented and explain a great deal of mental activity. After that there is the second part, or the "hard problem," and it is in a totally different league. Why is there any experience at all if we are only physical machines and bodies of cells? More generally, what kind of automaton (e.g. the brain, a computer, a cell, and so forth) could generate consciousness? This is a harder scientific question than the easy problem for one simple reason: it could even be metaphysical.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts the questions of consciousness into three categories: descriptive, explanatory, and functional. Essentially this asks What? How? and Why? Describing consciousness is the easy problem, explaining it is the hard problem, and the question of its function is something not normally addressed with the first two. The question of its function comes down to how it is an adaptation in our evolutionary past. There are some ideas that say it is for free will, motivation, better flexibility (like learning), social coordination, and better cognition (like accessing cumulative information we gather). I'll say a little more about the first two in the rest of this article.

There are some simple features of consciousness that everyone is familiar with. I would mark qualia, phenomenology, subjectivity, and flow as the major ones that are most self-evident. Qualia are the raw feelings of sensory perception that you have. How the world sounds, looks, feels, tastes, and smells to us. Isaac Newton wrote "to determine by what modes or actions light produceth in our minds the phantasm of colour is not so easie." Behind the experience of qualia is phenomenology. Phenomenology refers to the organization that is intrinsic in consciousness. The "phenomena" are our thoughts and ideas we use to model the world. (SEP says "... the phenomenal structure of experience is richly intentional and involves not only sensory ideas and qualities but complex representations of time, space, cause, body, self, world and the organized structure of lived reality ...") Subjectivity is something of a casual term that we all know of. Subjective experience is dependent on point of view, and perhaps to some degree, it is uncommunicable to other people. For example, what is it like to be a cat? How would you know for sure? Finally, the dynamic flow of mental life is the storyline played out in your head. William James called it the "stream of consciousness."

There is an explanatory gap present in trying to account for how consciousness exists. In a physical, material universe, it is hard to make sense of how consciousness arises and emerges from it. In spite of this there are numerous attempts to respond to this problem. Some are pretty common such as dualism (from Rene Descartes), where the soul is independent of the physical universe, or a closely related concept, idealism (from George Berkeley), where some contents of consciousness are uninvolved with matter. Other explanations seem odd or just plain absurd, like direct realism (from Thomas Reid), which says that the contents of consciousness are the world itself, or panpsychism (from Gottfried Leibniz), the notion that all matter is conscious. Emergence theory and epiphenomenalism posit that consciousness is the result of the brain's immense complexity, and is therefore a physical construct. (For example, Hofstadter wrote a book I am a Strange Loop, saying consciousness is analogous to a sort of feed-back loop due to its self-reference, the "I.") A strange combo of this idea and quantum physics is supported by Roger Penrose and some other scientists, called OOR. Their theory says a special quantum computation goes on in the mind allowing it to supersede some of the capabilities of rigid programming that regular computers have. (He argues his case in his book Emperor's New Mind.)

Another very impressive question is whether or not consciousness is actually something that makes choices. It is conceivable that our consciousness is merely a byproduct of our deterministic brain so that it is only an endpoint and does not have any control over the brain's processing. Perhaps you're just along for the ride!

Some people (like Colin McGinn) say the hard problem is insoluble. Others (like Daniel Dennett) say it is an illusion; there is no hard problem. Still more (like David Chalmers) disagree with that, saying purely physical explanations are lacking. Take a look at the philosophical zombie, the Chinese room, the color expert Mary, and the Turing test for an idea of controversial issues with physicalism. A philosophical zombie is a theoretical human being that functions just as we do, exhibiting all of the ordinary behavior, but is not conscious. This begs the question, "What distinguishes conscious from non-conscious beings?" The Turing test is a situation played out between computers and humans where both a program and a real subject communicate with real interviewers, and if the interviewers cannot agree if the program is human, it is declared sentient. This raises the issue of whether or not it is even feasible to discern between conscious and non-conscious beings. (In AI research, this Turing test has been carried out in real life and is a part of an annual competition to see who can code the "most" human program. Also, for fun: An xkcd-twisted version of the Turing test.) The Chinese room is where a man sitting in a closed room, using instruction books, "translates" Chinese to English (or back), but does not truly "understand" Chinese. What makes up true comprehension? Lastly, the color expert Mary is a hypothetical scientist who learns all of the academic information about the color red possible, but then experiences seeing it for the first time afterwards. (Many people debate what her experience would be like.) What is the difference between qualia and information about qualia? These thought experiments flesh out some of the ambiguities we have in understanding consciousness, which prove problematic in reliably answering the hard problem.

And so the debate on the hard problem still persists, and one still wonders how and even if the problem can be solved. Can it even be properly understood? Is it in the realm of metaphysics or naturalistic science? How can we tell? Is there anything obvious being overlooked? Surely, the hard problem of consciousness ranks right up there with solving the millennium problems and understanding quantum theory. It is easily one of the hardest problems of the universe, yet it is what you live with every day.

The first part is the “easy problem.” It is basically a question of cognition, or how we process information. Our attention span, language skills, learning abilities, memory capacity, perception qualities, and problem solving abilities have been well-documented and explain a great deal of mental activity. After that there is the second part, or the "hard problem," and it is in a totally different league. Why is there any experience at all if we are only physical machines and bodies of cells? More generally, what kind of automaton (e.g. the brain, a computer, a cell, and so forth) could generate consciousness? This is a harder scientific question than the easy problem for one simple reason: it could even be metaphysical.

Language skills

_

Problem Solving

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts the questions of consciousness into three categories: descriptive, explanatory, and functional. Essentially this asks What? How? and Why? Describing consciousness is the easy problem, explaining it is the hard problem, and the question of its function is something not normally addressed with the first two. The question of its function comes down to how it is an adaptation in our evolutionary past. There are some ideas that say it is for free will, motivation, better flexibility (like learning), social coordination, and better cognition (like accessing cumulative information we gather). I'll say a little more about the first two in the rest of this article.

There are some simple features of consciousness that everyone is familiar with. I would mark qualia, phenomenology, subjectivity, and flow as the major ones that are most self-evident. Qualia are the raw feelings of sensory perception that you have. How the world sounds, looks, feels, tastes, and smells to us. Isaac Newton wrote "to determine by what modes or actions light produceth in our minds the phantasm of colour is not so easie." Behind the experience of qualia is phenomenology. Phenomenology refers to the organization that is intrinsic in consciousness. The "phenomena" are our thoughts and ideas we use to model the world. (SEP says "... the phenomenal structure of experience is richly intentional and involves not only sensory ideas and qualities but complex representations of time, space, cause, body, self, world and the organized structure of lived reality ...") Subjectivity is something of a casual term that we all know of. Subjective experience is dependent on point of view, and perhaps to some degree, it is uncommunicable to other people. For example, what is it like to be a cat? How would you know for sure? Finally, the dynamic flow of mental life is the storyline played out in your head. William James called it the "stream of consciousness."

What is it like to be a cat?

There is an explanatory gap present in trying to account for how consciousness exists. In a physical, material universe, it is hard to make sense of how consciousness arises and emerges from it. In spite of this there are numerous attempts to respond to this problem. Some are pretty common such as dualism (from Rene Descartes), where the soul is independent of the physical universe, or a closely related concept, idealism (from George Berkeley), where some contents of consciousness are uninvolved with matter. Other explanations seem odd or just plain absurd, like direct realism (from Thomas Reid), which says that the contents of consciousness are the world itself, or panpsychism (from Gottfried Leibniz), the notion that all matter is conscious. Emergence theory and epiphenomenalism posit that consciousness is the result of the brain's immense complexity, and is therefore a physical construct. (For example, Hofstadter wrote a book I am a Strange Loop, saying consciousness is analogous to a sort of feed-back loop due to its self-reference, the "I.") A strange combo of this idea that and quantum physics is supported by Roger Penrose and some other scientists, called OOR. Their theory says a special quantum computation goes on in the mind allowing it to supersede some of the capabilities of rigid programming that regular computers have. (He argues his case in his book Emperor's New Mind.)

The Cartesian Theater, representing Descartes'

view of the soul in relation to the world

Another very impressive question is whether or not consciousness is actually something that makes choices. It is conceivable that our consciousness is merely a byproduct of our deterministic brain so that consciousness is only an endpoint and does not have any control over the brain's processing. Perhaps you're just along for the ride!

Some people (like Colin McGinn) say the hard problem is insoluble. Others (like Daniel Dennett) say it is an illusion; there is no hard problem. Still more (like David Chalmers) disagree with that, saying purely physical explanations are lacking. Take a look at the philosophical zombie, the Chinese room, the color expert Mary, and the Turing test for an idea of controversial issues with physicalism. A philosophical zombie is a theoretical human being that functions just as we do, exhibiting all of the ordinary behavior, but is not conscious. This begs the question, "What distinguishes conscious from non-conscious beings?" The Turing test is a situation played out between computers and humans where both a program and a real subject communicate with real interviewers, and if the interviewers cannot agree if the program is human, it is declared sentient. This raises the issue of whether or not it is even feasible to discern between conscious and non-conscious beings. (In AI research, this Turing test has been carried out in real life and is a part of an annual competition to see who can code the "most" human program.) The Chinese room is where a man sitting in a closed room, using instruction books, "translates" Chinese to English (or back), but does not truly "understand" Chinese. What makes up true comprehension? Lastly, the color expert Mary is a hypothetical scientist who learns all of the academic information about the color red possible, but then experiences seeing it for the first time afterwards. (Many people debate what her experience would be like.) What is the difference between qualia and information about qualia? These thought experiments flesh out some of the ambiguities we have in understanding consciousness, which prove problematic in reliably answering the hard problem.

An xkcd-twisted version of the Turing test

And so the debate on the hard problem still persists, and one still wonders how and even if the problem can be solved. Can it even be properly understood? Is it in the realm of metaphysics or science? How can we tell? Is there anything obvious being overlooked? Surely, the hard problem of consciousness ranks right up there with solving the millennium problems and interpreting/understanding quantum theory. It is easily one of the hardest problems of the universe, yet it is what you live every day.

BH