In the case of robots, how about if you could give it some sort of ‘feelings’ it would actually experience as unpleasant or pleasant? They don’t have to be our exact human manifestations of how we feel; knotted stomach, anxiety etc..
I guess that would be the challenge. Have some sort of stimulus that it would want to avoid or have.
From there it would just be a matter of programming couplings of desired stimuli to particular situations.
I can offer what I’m always told by my Christian friends. They honestly believe their interpretation of scripture is led by The Holy Spirit. Without it, you can’t truly understand the Bible. Nevermind that they all seem to be led in a different way.
And at some point in this continuum of couplings you will have replicated human raw feels. “Knotted stomach” isn’t a quale - qualia are ineffable, remember. “The quale that can be named is not the true quale” … apparently :rolleyes:
Well that’s just silly.
If you can not even name it, it doesn’t exist.
I mean, even the gods have names..
I could accept the idea of qualia as “an internal/personal experience”. That would include sensory experiences and feelings or emotions involving our organs, such as taste, being cold being in love or having an itch.
After all I could never experience your particular itch.
The translation isn’t precise - it comes from the Tao Te Ching: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” It’s centrally bound up in the concept of ineffability.
But do they have qualities that can be named? Which ones? Any contradictory ones? Same-same for qualia.
There’s a bit more to qualia than just being internal experiences.
How would you know? All itches could be the same, and you wouldn’t know. Ineffability, right?
I agree. The Chinese Room paradox is nonsense, since it is impossible to construct such a room without a nearly infinite number of cards. You could do it practically with states (that is writing down what just got said and responding based on it) and a meta-analysis of the state, which might be what consciousness is all about.
After all, what is the difference between solving a problem consciously and subconsciously? It is just watching yourself in the process of solving it, as opposed to the answer popping out.
Personally, I wouldn’t restrict the term to believers in the supernatural; there are some dualists who nevertheless don’t believe in anything supernatural, David Chalmers being one example. Generally, by ‘qualia fan’ I’d designate somebody who thinks that there is at least an epistemic gap between the physical and the mental, i.e. that it isn’t possible (not even in principle) to account for subjective existence solely in physical terms. Mild forms of this would be somebody believing in strong emergence, or non-reductive (e.g. Russellian) monism. In such a case, any explanation of mental content will invariably still contain references to the mental, but this need not imply that the mental is substantially different from the physical.
I think it’s possible in the same way that it’s possible I’m a brain in a vat, but I think it’s pretty much useless to assume something is a p-zombie if there’s no way to tell otherwise. To me a p-zombie is like an invisible, intangible unicorn – sure, one could be following me around, but it’s undetectable so it’s useless to think about. Once you start postulating things that are exactly like something else except in one way that absolutely nothing in the universe can detect, it’s hard not to just jump ship to “everything is an illusion”, “maybe invisible monkeys are what dark matter really is” or any other number of crazy things.
I used to work with a very pleasant chap who believed that the bible was the inspired word of God and that he could feel the truthfulness of it.
I offered an experiment where I would write out a number of short passages from the bible and mix these with a similar number of short passages that I had written, worded to sound as though they had come from the same translation, but made up by me and presumably uninspired.
He would then sort these into inspired and uninspired. Sadly he demurred; he was very polite about it but felt it was perhaps a bit blasphemous.
I wish I could believe in a supernatural god but I cannot suspend all logic. People need religion…but I get quite upset at believers who think atheists lack moral conscience and want to impose their superstitions, which I think religions are, on me.
Religious people Condemn the sins they don’t commit and forgive the ones they do. The condemn sexuality, but forgive shopping on the sabbath or divorce.
Oops, I meant homosexuality
I love you and want to co-write comic books with you! (Now, do we know any artists?) 
I’d say yes, they are possible. It’s a “Turing Test” sort of thing; you can always use a “brute force” method.
In the main, I agree that a system that is able to use words and ideas with full appropriate attention to meaning and context must “understand” the ideas. But alternatives could exist.
(Marvel Comics explored this with their “Life Model Decoy” androids, intended as dummy targets to draw the fire of assassins. Over time, they became more and more sophisticated, until one eventually became a character in a story, with goals and hopes and aspirations of her own. Or…just a sim? That’s the joy of the Turing Test: once you pass it, nobody can know, ever again, if you really comprehend, or are just faking it surpassing well.)
Yeah, they want the Ten Commandments posted in our schools and courthouses, but they don’t seem to realize that Yaweh called for the death penalty for anybody who does any work on the Sabbath. Mow your lawn, die. Wash your car, die. And as you said, go shopping, die.
Most of them don’t even know that, because DeMille left it out of his movie. Most of the ones who do, say Jesus made that invalid. I think they have a very weak case for that, since Jesus explicitly said that not a jot or tittle of the Mosaic Law would change until heaven and earth pass away, and he greatly weakened the criteria for being guilty of murder and adultery, but if they’re right, then why are they so hot for the parts of the Mosaic Law that don’t inconvenience them?
So do I. So do most people I know.
Littering?
What contempt for our shared world.
Keeping library books overdue?
Oh, come on, the last time anyone checked out Appointment in Samarra was when it first came out. Besides, they surely have another copy if someone MUST read it this week.
Hypocrisy? Tsk tsk.
Intellectual arrogance? Eh.
The same for me as well.
But then again, I can recognize that stealing a hundred dollars is lightyears away from raping and murdering someone.
Many Christians would agree with me…until they remember God hates all sins equally.
How do tell the girl who was raped her father that she has to honor him according to the bible?