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Comment by aklein | Hacker News Reader

TBH, I don’t really understand why this is a problem. An explanation is not an experience; it cannot provide to the human brain the same information. Suppose you neurologically induced an experience of seeing that new color without “really” seeing it - surely this would be sufficient to communicate qualia? (And if not, surely it’s just a matter of adjusting the inducement to some degree).

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Isn't "an explanation is not an experience" basically the problem? Like, if you could perfectly describe all the physical conditions to induce the experience of a color, there would still be something missing from that description which you can't get without consciousness in the loop. You can't communicate or describe it without the actual experience part.

Most (all?) of our "science" doesn't require any sort of notion of consciousness to work, we can describe the motion of a projectile or an orbit in a way that doesn't depend on having an "experiencer." But there's this weird category of stuff for which that isn't true. (At least, for now).

Doesn't that just point to the fact that our ability to describe is limited and lossy? In the color example, we're trying to convey information about the effects of one of the senses without using that sense. It could very well be that without using that particular sense, the brain just isn't stimulated the same way.

Would there still be something missing if you could “perfectly describe all the physical conditions to induce the experience of a color”? I don’t see any reason to assume that’s self-evidently true, and it’s not something that we have the ability to test. Obviously if you start from the assumption that qualia exists then you will conclude that it must exist.

We haven’t experimentally verified that such neurological inducement is possible. I bet we’ll be able to do so, but until then the question remains.

This sort of philosophical question becomes more important when you think of second-order-and-beyond. Think of, in this case, that color is just a manifestation of experience. But that manifestation of experience applies to, for example, the beautiful smells that a rose throws out into the world. To a degree, the redness has an affectation on the world, which is separate to each person.

my theory is that these things are just questions of resolutions of varying latencies.

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