Qualiaheads is back for another meeting. We recapped some of our visits to ASSC and Models of Consciousness, and other thoughts over the summer.

Here are a couple of the more of less wacky ones

The Triforce of Consciousness

The triforce of consciousness

Despite the overly exaggerated name, this became a useful way of thinking about things for us. Some observations/thoughts:

  • In a non dualist framework, all the information describing the consciousness should come from the brain - ie. the conditional entropy of the conscious experience given the brain activity is 0
  • If we have all the information about the conscious experience and the corresponding brain activity, we would have a theory of consciousness (at least in the easy/real problem sense)
  • Our difficulties arise because we only have brain activity. A candidate theory of consciousness could then predict conscious experience, but evaluating it is very difficult so for now we remain stuck with only 1 of the 3 elements.
  • The only way to get information about the conscious experience out is through introspection or third person reports (assuming they’re accurate) which is a bottleneck
    • could we get more information out by asking how a conscious experience relates to another - then the comparison is made in the “qualia space” before being report, potentially allowing a more informative output?
    • this makes assumptions that the qualia space has some sort of similarity measure, but we agreed on this, at least locally

Smooth qualia spaces

We agreed that it makes sense to talk about a space of possible qualia, and that at least for similar concepts we can interpolate between. Ie. “imagine something between a giraffe and an elephant” or “imagine a colour between purple and blue”. Between very different concepts this seemed harder or impossible eg. “imagine something between Mozart and the number 2”.

Do these local spaces have some structure or dimensionality? The colour wheel is the easiest to think about, having a ring structure. What about red/green colourblind people, do they see a “colour figure-8” instead?

Actually, it doesn’t look like it

Colour wheels for