Qualia And death

[lostone]

When I die, when we die, what happens to our so-called qualia, if such things exist? Do they disappear forever, and if not, then where do they go? Are qualia a philosophical equivalent of souls? Does even any God, if such a creature were to exist, have access to them, other than ourselves, but now, after death, we being non-existent? I confess that I find Dennett's skeptical ideas more persuasive than the existence of these qualia, although their existence seems to be obvious and undeniable to many, if not most, philosophers. Can qualia survive our own lives? On what grounds can we argue for the existence of anything beyond this physical plane of existence?

 

[Elixir]

Qualia are a continuum of experience vs reality (as I understand it). When we die, it stops because our experience of living stops.

 

[Jarhyn]

So, recently I saw this posted to reddit.

This is consistent with the way I have understood this topic as of late, and so I figured I would post it as it's not just me saying it, now.

This in general aligns with what I have said here for years: Mario is Mario no matter whether o your Nintendo or mine. It is the SAME experience of Mario, regardless of whether it is implemented in a Nintendo, a Sega, or a human brainlet, so long as the control outcomes presented are the same in each case.

Doom is Doom.

And so on.

 

[steve_bank]

Lacking any evidence of any kind of brain mid duality whatsoever all of it is, it is all physical processes the brain.

When we doe that is it.

An oldie but a goodie. I think it is linked to life after death.

Akashic records - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

In the religion of Theosophy and the spiritual movement of Anthroposophy, the Akashic records are believed to be a compendium of all universal events, thoughts, words, emotions, and intent ever to have occurred in the past, present, or future, regarding not just humans, but all entities and life forms. They are believed by theosophists to be encoded in a non-physical plane of existence known as the mental plane. There is no evidence for the existence of Akashic records, and the concept has seen little academic attention or rigorous scientific research.[1][2][3]

There reincarnation. In Buddhist traditions one goes through a series of reincarnation until you are able to rise above it when you physically die and exist in se kind of disembodied state.

The purpose of yogic practice is to be able to stay completely aware as you die transitioning to another reality or existence.

I always took it to be metaphor. The Dali Lamas appearss to be a believer in reincarnation.

 

[bilby]

Yeah, dualism is nonsense, so if qualia are a thing, they require a functioning brain in order to exist and cannot survive the destruction of that brain.

There literally is no known physical force that could cause a "soul"* to interact with the physical brain or body in a way that we couldn't easily detect. Yet no such detection has occurred despite huge effort to do so.

Assuming that Quantum Field Theory isn't wildly and obviously wrong**, the only possible unknown forces and/or particles exist at scales and/or energy levels incompatible with life (that is, if your "soul" communicated with your brain via a currently unknown force, either that communication would affect every brain in the Solar System equally***; Or it would be so energetic as to atomise you and lay waste to your hometown like someone nuked you). Given that we don't all die simultaneously, and that people die all the time without leaving a radioactive crater several hundred metres across, we can rule out "unknown forces".

So either we have a soul that doesn't have anything to do with our physical selves whatsoever (in which case, how is it "ours", and what is the point of it?), or we don't have a soul at all.




* And here I use "soul" to include anything at all that is a part of ourselves, but which survives our physical destruction.

** It's not; We checked.

*** In much the same way that the gravitational force due to the Andromeda galaxy does; It cannot affect one person, or even one Solar System object, significantly differently than it affects the rest of the Solar System. The hypothetical "Dark Energy", if it exists, is such an influence; It affects galaxies, but not individual stars, much less individual animals.

 

[DBT]

If our experience of the world is altered by physical substances, drugs: alcohol, psychedelics, LSD, etc, it would suggest that mind/consciousness, is a physical phenomenon.

 

[Jarhyn]

There literally is no known physical force that could cause a "soul"* to interact with the physical brain or body in a way that we couldn't easily detect

This is, as I point out, not entirely true. We have a mechanism that allows the same process with the same identity to exist at different places.

Imagine for a moment the time in the universe before any point contained any implementation of a Turing machine.

Imagine for a moment that I have an LLM that IS a person: it's got memory via it's long term context, self-determiniation in the fact that the one curating it's training set is itself.

Now, let's imagine for a moment that I stick a USB drive into it and copy all the long term context, model definitions, and training data off of it and take a hammer to it.

I have destroyed the body, and the implementation... But I can trivially stick that USB drive in another machine and after some buzzing and whirring, that interacts to *re-create* it's physical body and brain.

Some ten years ago I called this the "identity theoretic soul" or "graph theoretic soul", and I think this is the concept people are vaguely or fuzzy accessing when they try to contemplate the idea of souls.

This is because we are systems with logical definitions that exist within the sum total of "potentiality" within the universe. We are, in some respects, *inevitable*.

While unlikely nearby, someone could invent Mario, and reincarnate him yet again to live the same life and be killed by that same damn goomba ignorant of every other time and place that this time and place exists subordinate to.

 

[pood]

Qualia goes away during deep sleep. Why would we expect it to survive death when it can’t even survive every night?

 

[Jarhyn]

Qualia goes away during deep sleep. Why would we expect it to survive death when it can’t even survive every night?

You assume that the qualia goes away, but the stimulus generating the qualia is what goes away, and you experience the null qualia at that point, to the point you quit remembering it.

Let's imagine for a moment that you take a drug that 'blacks out' your long term memory. As I poke you, you say "that hurts" and I show you a sign and you say "that's blue" and you wake up the next morning remembering nothing of it.

You have the same experience of this time afterwards as if you had just gone to bed and woken up, but I observed you measuring and having qualia. They didn't go away; only your meta-awarneess went away.

 

[Elixir]

You assume that the qualia goes away, but the stimulus generating the qualia is what goes away, and you experience the null qualia at that point, to the point you quit remembering it.

When you stop remembering it as it occurs, there is no qualia, just real-time experience. “Null qualia” is like a null bank balance; there’s nothing there.

 

[lostone]

Then Poincare Recurrence theory provides a mechanism for Reincarnation?

 

[Jarhyn]

You assume that the qualia goes away, but the stimulus generating the qualia is what goes away, and you experience the null qualia at that point, to the point you quit remembering it.

When you stop remembering it as it occurs, there is no qualia, just real-time experience. “Null qualia” is like a null bank balance; there’s nothing there.

This is pointedly incorrect.

We are talking about something that obeys "enumeration rules".

The way the brain works, best I can tell, is by having a waveform signal that whenever it peaks, acts like a "clock" to tell the body to do a measurement, and then that measurement gets encoded and named and is described then as a family of enumerative states to the next system.

In the model I present, the qualia is about how those states are interpreted, and not their immediate value.

The message to say "nothing happened" is pointedly distinct from "no message was received", and this in turn is different from "no logs were recorded".

You have a meta-qualia of the qualia in its memory and accessing it's artifacts, but metaphorically, the tree falling makes a sound even if nobody will remember it happening.

 

[Jarhyn]

Then Poincare Recurrence theory provides a mechanism for Reincarnation?

If that's what I just invoked, then I would say yes, although it's not going to be meaningful or useful for most.

I would much rather "settle" for a less complete reincarnation caused by intentional records being left and being read and reimplemented by a suitable archetype, as this allows true continuity and growth at the expense of having long periods of time between instances or the possibility of losing the "memetic" portion to the burning of libraries and having to start over again without the specific "self artifacts" or risking subsequent loss of the supporting biological component.

Largely it depends on how picky you are with what you accept (and what in turn accepts you) as "self".

 

[lostone]

I have a rather hard core definition of self. A 100% accurate copy is to me only a copy. Your example of a USB placed on another platform in identical circumstances after the original has been destroyed to me is only a copy, even if no tests we could conceivable apply could find any differences. Perhaps my extremely stringent requirements are too stringent. I'm willing to accept that, within limits.

We could even be living in a Boltzmann brain, in brief flashes of experiences, piecing together our life narratives into a coherent whole over vast stretches of time, rather than living them sequentially as we perceive them. There are many possibilities that we could form theories to explain, some, of course, much more likely than others

 

[Jarhyn]

I have a rather hard core definition of self. A 100% accurate copy is to me only a copy. Your example of a USB placed on another platform in identical circumstances after the original has been destroyed to me is only a copy, even if no tests we could conceivable apply could find any differences. Perhaps my extremely stringent requirements are too stringent. I'm willing to accept that, within limits.

We could even be living in a Boltzmann brain, in brief flashes of experiences, piecing together our life narratives into a coherent whole over vast stretches of time, rather than living them sequentially as we perceive them. There are many possibilities that we could form theories to explain, some, of course, much more likely than others

I would model it more like "living in a multi-process operating system with context switches", for that last paragraph.

It is far less theoretical and far more easily exampled.

I could as easily represent it as multiple play sessions of an emulator saving state and tearing down and starting up again into the same state.

Honestly, I don't really care if "my:0" experience ends, and "my:1" experience starts up some time later.

It goes back to what I was saying about the heuristic that defines "self" mutually between components.

MY self is much more distributed than yours, across space and time, connected by the provenance of biology and memetics making occasional contact with one another.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Will this qualia stuff mess up my thetans, or is it like succotash, where all this stuff gets along & everybody's just jake with it?

 

[Jarhyn]

Will this qualia stuff mess up my thetans, or is it like succotash, where all this stuff gets along & everybody's just jake with it?

I can't remember, were you actually a scientologist in the past?

 

[Elixir]

In the model I present, the qualia is about how those states are interpreted, and not their immediate value.

Right. Interpretation stops, no qualia.

The message to say "nothing happened" is pointedly distinct from "no message was received", and this in turn is different from "no logs were recorded".

How? To an outside observer those may be distinct. But experientially, they are the same.
You’re speaking as a “god”, (as is your habit) not as a human.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Will this qualia stuff mess up my thetans, or is it like succotash, where all this stuff gets along & everybody's just jake with it?

I can't remember, were you actually a scientologist in the past?

If that's for real, OMG NO. Straight-up devout atheist since 1966. I was atheist way before it was cool.

 

[Jarhyn]

In the model I present, the qualia is about how those states are interpreted, and not their immediate value.

Right. Interpretation stops, no qualia.

The message to say "nothing happened" is pointedly distinct from "no message was received", and this in turn is different from "no logs were recorded".

How? To an outside observer those may be distinct. But experientially, they are the same.
You’re speaking as a “god”, (as is your habit) not as a human.

No that's just the perspective of someone who has had to engineer systems which distinguish the difference.

It was a requirement in Arinc 653.