People can only communicate their conscious experiences by analogy. When you say "I'm in pain," you're not actually describing your experience; you're encouraging me to remember how I felt the last time *I* was in pain, and to assume you feel the same way. We have no way of really knowing whether the assumption is correct.
We can both name a certain frequency of light "red" and agree on which objects are "red." But I can't tell you what my visual experience of red is like, and you can't tell me what yours is like. Maybe my red looks like your green -- the visual experience of red doesn't seem to inhere in the frequency's numerical value, in fact color is nothing like number at all, so nothing says my red isn't your green. "Qualia" refers to that indescribable aspect of the experience. If your "qualia" can be communicated with symbols, or described in terms of other things, then we're not talking about the same concept -- and using the same word for it is just confusing. Going back to your computer-and-mouse example: if I admit your panpsychist perspective and assume that a computer mouse has qualia, those qualia are not identified with the electro-mechanical events inside the mouse. I could have full knowledge of those (fully compute or model them) without sharing the mouse's experience. ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T41ac13a64c3d48db-Med65915d05938166d1cc3e1f Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
