On Tue, Jun 15, 1999 at 06:01:46PM -0500, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> Of course not. If we can't comprehend the First Cause or qualia
> ourselves, because our reasoning processes deal only with
> Turing-computable ontologies, I would hardly expect us to be able to
> explain qualia to a skeptical Turing-computable being! Remember, qualia
> are enormously improbable; the only reason we're allowed to have them is
> because of the enormous number of races combined with the Anthropic
> Principle. To any skeptic, the probability that our race is
> congenitally brain-damaged would exceed the probability of our having
> actual qualia. You'd have to open up the neurons and demonstrate that
> we're messing with Weird Physics, after which the whole qualia business
> would be more plausible.
Can you go through your reasons for believing that qualia are enormously improbable? I understand it has something to do with the seeming impossibility of finding a definition for "instantiation" of a computation, but what is the connection exactly?