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2016-06-22
qualia

I have been following the discussion thread here on the topic of qualia. I was also interested in recent reports about observations made by brain scanning on brains affected by LSD (Carhart-Harris 2016) which seem to show that a great many additional areas of the brain are activated as the test subject experiences vivid drug-induced hallucinations. That seems to suggest that it is not in the nature of the data itself to be of a special kind that contains the information stored in a quale, but rather it is due to the procedure that is interpreting the data. That is analogous, perhaps, to a person, accustomed to reading novels, reading a dictionary by mistake and wondering why the plot seemed so confusing. I accept that the information content of an experience must be stored internally in some form. However, rather than being a replication of something which forms the input to our sensory perceptions, it must instead be a replication of some aspect of the output. A replication of the input would be procedurally inefficient since it would need to be re-processed to extract the information every time the experience was recalled. A replication of the output, however, would already be in a form which was appropriate for interpretation. That form will be peculiar to each individual brain. It is the interpretations, and all the associated connections to other experiences and to the actions often taken in response, which may have some correspondence between brains.



References:

Carhart-Harris et al (2016) “Neural Correlates of the LSD experience revealed by Multimodal Neuroimaging” Proc. Nat. Acad. Sc. April 2016


2016-06-26
qualia
Reply to Hugh M. Noble
RE: " a great many additional areas of the brain are activated as the test subject experiences vivid drug-induced hallucinations"

Is this really surprising in the case of LSD!? 

Unless of course the person dies, in which case the "areas of the brain activated" may end up being somewhat less...

DA








2016-06-26
qualia
Reply to Hugh M. Noble
Dear Hugh,I think you are right. Qualia patterns are going to be determined by the output from the collating sensory pathways that normally give us a clear picture of a boring coffee cup but in some cases may give a psychedelic buzz.

But that output, being the sending of action potentials out from the last cells in the sensory pathway chain, must also be an input to whatever has the experience. If this output is not an input to anything then it is not going to be experienced or reported or even function as a set of 'signals'. So qualia should be patterns of input-six-steps-further-in rather than input to the sense organs.

And if every brain learns to partition incoming information differently as it builds the ability to negotiate the world thenI agree that whatever is the sixth input in each brain may get a completely different pattern of signals. There are reasons for thinking that some of this is hard wired, but also reasons for thinking that some of it is very much not. So experiences of tomatoes in my head could be quite different from those in others and not just in ineffable qualitative terms. One might be able to show that a different number of degrees of freedom were involved in the encoding.

2016-06-27
qualia

RE : “So experiences of tomatoes in my head could be quite different from those in others”

E.g. if you like them and they don’t…

DA


2016-06-27
qualia
Reply to Hugh M. Noble

By the way, Hugh, how do you define “input” and “output” in these cases?

You say that “a great many additional areas of the brain are activated as the test subject experiences vivid drug-induced hallucinations.” But what does that establish? Could the said test subject draft a complex legal document, solve a series of mathematical equations, write a quality philosophical essay, etc?

Obviously no. So if you’re suggesting that “output” increases with the number of “areas of the brain activated" by drug induced states (are you?), that is highly questionable and depends very much on what you might mean by “output”. (Craziness, however, does seem to increase markedly…)

DA


2016-06-27
qualia
Reply to Hugh M. Noble
An interesting observation.  I agree completely that the raw quale itself is not stored, but rather the interpretation of the same.  This is the most efficient and readily usable form for the quick use required in our evolutionary journey.  
Your reference to a form of storage "appropriate for interpretation" is in keeping with analysis of perception and conceptualization by Charles S. Peirce.  His categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness are applicable to the knowledge process from perception to conceptulization.  Peirce did much work on the epistemological and psychological aspects of knowledge aquisition.  Here is a chart from Wikipedia's entry on Peirce's categories that may be of interest to you.

Peirce's categories (technical name: the cenopythagorean categories)

 

Name:

Typical characterizaton:

As universe of experience:

As quantity:

Technical definition:

Valence, "adicity":

Firstness.[9]

Quality of feeling.

Ideas, chance, possibility.

Vagueness, "some".

Reference to a ground (a ground is a pure abstraction of a quality).[10]

Essentially monadic (the quale, in the sense of the such,[11]which has the quality).

Secondness.[12]

Reaction, resistance, (dyadic) relation.

Brute facts, actuality.

Singularity, discreteness, “this”.

Reference to a correlate (by its relate).

Essentially dyadic (the relate and the correlate).

Thirdness.[13]

Representation, mediation.

Habits, laws, necessity.

Generality, continuity, "all".

Reference to an interpretant*.

Essentially triadic (sign, object, interpretant*).

 *Note: An interpretant is an interpretation (human or otherwise) in the sense of the product of an interpretive process. (The context for interpretants is not psychology or sociology, but instead philosophical logic. In a sense, an interpretant is whatever can be understood as a conclusion of an inference. The context for the categories as categories is phenomenology, which Peirce also called phaneroscopy and categorics.)

References:  https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Categories_(Peirce)&printable=yes