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0 pointscymian2y ago0 comments

Blind people are no more able to understand* (as qualia) "green" than a sighted human is able to understand* gamma rays. The confusion is between working with abstract concepts vs an actual experience. A picture of bread provides no physical nourishment beyond the fiber in the paper it is printed on.
In an abstract space (e.g. word vectors, poetry) green could have (many potential) meanings. But none of them are even in the same universe as the actual experience (qualia) of seeing something green. This would be a category mistake between qualia-space and concept-space
understand in the experiential, qualia sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake

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ben_w2y ago

I don't need the qualia of gamma rays to understand gamma rays, nor to be understood in turn when I say that "I understand gamma rays".

Conversely, I can (and do) have qualia that I do not understand.

The concept of qualia is, I think, pre-paradigmatic — we know of our own, but can't turn that experience into a testable phenomena in the world outside our heads. We don't have any way to know if any given AI does or doesn't have it, nor how that might change as the models go from text to multimodal, or if we give them (real or simulated) embodiment.

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