Weekly QuEST Discussion Topics, 30 Oct

QuEST 30 Oct 2020

We will continue this week discussing the Types of Qualia.  Starting from where we ended last week with the idea that our simulation we call consciousness (some of the simulation is supported by sensory data and other aspects are created via pattern completion inferencing) that we experience is a result of a set of processes that create the acceptable amount of content that is inferred versus sensed, the amount of situatedness,  and the amount of structural coherence to achieve stability / consistency / usefulness of the conscious representation :

From Dahaene – Stability / consistency / usefulness as features of consciousness:

•       Direct contrasts between seen “consciously perceived” and unseen pictures or words confirm that such ignition (all or none) occurs only for the conscious percept.

•       As explained earlier, nonconscious stimuli may reach into deep cortical networks and influence higher levels of processing and even central executive functions, but these effects tend to be small, variable, and short-lived [although nonconscious information decays at a slower rate than initially expected (39, 40)].

•       By contrast, the stable, reproducible (consistent) representation of high-quality information (useful) by a distributed activity pattern in higher cortical areas is a feature of conscious processing (Table 1).

Note the characteristic – STABLE, REPRODUCIBLE = CONSISTENT, HIGH QUALITY INFORMATION = USEFUL —features of conscious processing!

•       Such transient “meta-stability” seems to be necessary for the nervous system to integrate information from a variety of modules and then broadcast it back to them, achieving flexible cross-module routing.

‘Types of Qualia’:

•       Qualia that capture aspects of the environment – perception representation (some of those are sensation based some are pattern completion inferencing) – JND + single quale entities (noun qualia) fall into this type of qualia–

–     There are dreams that have the feel of being about the environment but are imagined present (feel like they are capturing perception)

–     related there are qualia for what the environment might be at some future time (imagined future)

–     and some about what the environment might have been at some past time (imagined past) –

–     those have to have associated with them the ‘imagined’ quale to capture they are NOT sensory based –

•       and this brings up the point of a type of qualia associated with capturing information about the qualia being attended to

•       Self – the only way to have ‘thoughts’ that aren’t some attribute of a physical entity in the environment is if I can associate them with something in that environment – and that is my mind – thus I need to have a quale of self

–     All thoughts you have (all qualia are thoughts) are ‘felt’ to be part of you – inside your head – part of self – from your perspective

–     Body sensations – hungry / thirsty … qualia are ‘felt’ to be part of ‘self’ – they are tied to you as an agent

–     ToM – since you associate your thoughts to be inside of you – and you deduce other agents are having thoughts – you are willing to attribute those to be their mental states = ToM Theory of Mind

–     Felt reactions – passions and emotions (disgust, love, …)

–     Felt moods – happy / sad / excited …

•       Self:  set of processes that judge the usefulness of alternative plausible narratives that thinking generates – set of processes that determine what is to be experienced!  Any agent that has such a set of processes is creating the quale of self

Qualia about Qualia:

•       Aha – when you create the quale that some qualia is ‘understood’ – you know how to use it to accomplish the tasks you care about

•       Time – the quale of change – all qualia are associated with relative time of occurrence

•       Imagination – associating the idea of this quale is imagined

•       Confidence – associated with any quale – belief in its ‘truthness’

•       Verb – affordances –  verb qualia – relating two or more other qualia on how they can interact

•       Adj qualia – and Adverb qualia – any type of speech since it is designed to communicate qualia between aligned entities – modulates the qualia of other qualia

We then want to examine some of the characteristics of qualia – irrevocable, flexible …