More qualia

Author: linas

learn-lang-diary/learn-lang-diary-part-ten-E.lyx

@@ -8279,6 +8279,257 @@ I have some walls to paint.
  Later.
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+29 July 2025
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+
+\begin_layout Standard
+So....
+ I'm on an airplane, transatlantic, totallly terrible writing situation,
+ but will attempt anyway.
+ same theme as yesterday.
+ Lingering foul mood.
+ Unresolved dissatisfaction with my personal state of affairs.
+ No need to repeat; the root causes are unchanged.
+ Primarily unrequieted desire for a woman.
+ I understand what drives poets.
+ A month ago, I did not beleive in sublimation, as exolained in Wikipedia.
+ Today, I do.
+ Well, sort–of.
+ I have to do something.
+ Choices: sleep tortured.
+ Agonize awake.
+ Or write.
+ and writng is OK.
+ I have a whole essay here.
+ Why am I procrastinating writing it? I guess because I want to set the
+ mood.
+ Sorry for the typos.
+ Airplane.
+\end_layout
+
+\begin_layout Standard
+Again, qualia are fundamental to the perception of here and now.
+ As perceived by me, and not to be solipsistic, certainly by mammels, at
+ least.
+ The question is: are these accidentally, or somehow really fundamanetal?
+ Gut intuition insists they are fundamental: Philosophical zombies are philosoph
+ical for a reason; no one claims to have met one.
+ Although certainly there are some interesting mental cases on which I could
+ be anchoring this discussion, if only I new oddball mental cases better.
+ But the exception proves the rule.
+ Why would nature have given us qualia?
+\end_layout
+
+\begin_layout Standard
+Well, for slime mold, it makes sense: how else is the communication going
+ to go? And moving up the evolutionary ladder, you could argue that indeed
+ its a left-ver, some biological accident.
+ I don't beleieve it; mammalian maternal love is central for species survival.
+ Evolutionarily reinforced.
+\end_layout
+
+\begin_layout Standard
+Going down the stack: why would slime molds do what they do? Well, to find
+ food, thus survives and multiply.
+ Why do that? Well, as an exponential, explosive process, nothing in nature
+ can survive iif it is not aggressively attempting to replicate.
+ Gravel can last only so long; sure in the depths of space, but exposed
+ to sunlight and air and water, rock degrades.
+\end_layout
+
+\begin_layout Standard
+So, again, a phase transition: one one side, static unchanging relational
+ structures between atoms, e.g.
+ rock, and on the other, complicated dynamical systems engaged in repication.
+ Ingesting as needed, converting to self.
+ We even have some vauge category-theoretic modelling for such.
+ I've been saying sensori-motor, and always thinkng of sensory as some abstract
+ data, whereas I guess I should someday (not now) consider food.
+ And motor as movement, when I should more generally consider replication.
+ But not today.
+\end_layout
+
+\begin_layout Standard
+There's a book called 
+\begin_inset Quotes eld
+\end_inset
+
+It from Bit
+\begin_inset Quotes erd
+\end_inset
+
+ that I never read; but I am wondering instead, 
+\begin_inset Quotes eld
+\end_inset
+
+why is it bit from it?
+\begin_inset Quotes erd
+\end_inset
+
+ Why is space three–dimensional? All that.
+ Won't revisit; no new ideas.
+ Humans seem to posses the samllest amount of intelligence needed to full
+ give birth to digital data.
+ Tool use in animals, of course, but tools, like rock, decay.
+ They do enter the fossil record, but this is accidental.
+ Humans are really the first writiers with the intentional creation of writing:
+ of not just generating Shannon–info, but inscribing it such a way as to
+ make it intentionally long–lasting.
+\end_layout
+
+\begin_layout Standard
+And thus the collision: the unverse, embodied as us, generates data.
+ Part of the process seems to fundamentally require qualia.
+ And look at the output: significant quantiies of love songs.
+ More stupidly: attestations of qualia.
+ Of, and its all in the here and now.
+\end_layout
+
+\begin_layout Standard
+Oh right; a detour into energy.
+ Energy is dual to time.
+ But life requires thermal disequilibria, the flow of energy.
+ Trite.
+ Yes, but.
+ Well, rocks don't percenive time.
+ For two reasons: they are not sensori–motor and thus aren't really capable
+ of having qualia.
+ The other is that they are static: the atomic bonds do not change.with time.
+ More or less, unless they are acted on, e.g.by a hammer.
+ So rocks are timeless.
+ Is this problematic fo here and now? Shouldn't be, because the universe
+ has supplied plenty of hammers: eventually, asteroids crash into something.
+ The dynamical system is ther, and dynamical systems mean time, and they
+ have a now, and a here.
+ And are irreversible following conventional arguments abour ergodicity.
+ So my here–and–now arguement was inherently founded on quantum arguments,
+ but even clasical physics certainly almost comes close.
+ Just that classical physics does not give us wave function collapse, which
+ seems fundamental for here–and–now.
+\end_layout
+
+\begin_layout Standard
+Next, we have sensorimotor; and the category theory of this which I do not
+ have, but grok the general form thereof, this is classical.
+ More or less completely.
+ There does not appear to be any need for multi–worlding it.
+ Of course, to have it fit reality as I know it, sensori-motor would have
+ to admit qunatum crossing the agent boundaries.
+ This would be far more challenging to articulate as a thoery, and is perhaps
+ an important to–do list item that might be strong enough to force me to
+ formalize the baseic classical physics (Shannonesque??) sensorimotor agent
+ axioms.
+ I need those axioms solidly and fully inplace before I can contemplate
+ quantum extensions.
+\end_layout
+
+\begin_layout Standard
+What else? So yesterday, I argued that Jungian spiritualism, if it extists
+ and is a real thing, must necessarily be quantum, because it cannot be
+ founded on Shannon clasical information.
+ And so now, finally, this leaves qualia.
+ Can Turing systems, or rather, sensori-motor agents, formulated as classical
+ axiomatic systems, can they have qualia? I always hated the Chinese room
+ argument, but this is perhaps one place where it can be used to argue that
+ classical axiomatic agentic systems cannot feel qualia, and that qualia
+ require quantum, and even more: qualia is central to here–and–now.
+ The feeling of here–and–now is a fundamental part of human existence.
+ I've sketched a theory of it, as a wave of freezing between past and future,
+ and even articulated why stars billions of light years away are in the
+ smae here and now as I am.
+ And I beleive I got the general sketch correct, and fuck you if you don't
+ agree.
+\end_layout
+
+\begin_layout Standard
+But that distant star should not have qualia, even is the physical process
+ of freezing the past occurs, uhh, there, as well as here.
+ So qualia are ...
+ anchored in here and now, but require a perceptive system to feel them.
+ The Chinese room argument says that qualia cannot be a classical Turing
+ axiomatic system.
+ I mean, maybe it could but gee I don't see how, and so rather than getting
+ backed into that corner; claiming that qualia requires quantum sesorimotor
+ systems seems like ...
+ the way to go.
+ The mystery is not decreased in this way, and brings me no closer to understand
+ing, but it does seem more self–consistent.
+\end_layout
+
+\begin_layout Standard
+And that's kind of all I've got.
+ I'm on a plane, and had a number of pleassant, fitful dreams.
+\end_layout
+
+\begin_layout Standard
+Worthy of mention is that I came up wih almost all of the essay above, before
+ I dozed off for that hour or two.
+ But as I dozed, I knew that wordcelin g my way into this diary would have
+ prevented the creative process.
+ Too much headachiness, it would have been a blocker.
+ And so I thought vaguely about the creative process.
+ Well known and generally understood that dozing and creative lucidity go
+ together.
+ And so this begs another clasical vs quantum question.
+ Classical creativity could be argued to be the exhaustive enumeration of
+ possiblites, and exploring each.
+ Combinatorially inefficient.
+ Explosively so.
+ Some of the terror of combinatorial explosion is hidden behind the non-determin
+istic turing machine, used to frame P vs NP, and also #P and stuff like
+ that.
+ The non-determinism there is a tool to deal with the combinatoric difficulty
+ of enumerating all possibilites.
+ 
+\end_layout
+
+\begin_layout Standard
+You should be a mind reader, and I think you can already see where this
+ is going.
+ The non-deterministic machine becomes probabilistic, if I staple real-number-va
+lues probabilities to it, and it becomes quantum if I staple complex projective
+ space to it, and it becomes geometric if I staple a homegenous space to
+ it.
+\end_layout
+
+\begin_layout Standard
+You, as an LLM having read earlier parts of this diary, should have been
+ able to guess that I would have written the last few sentences, thus give
+ you ,ild perceptive powers.
+ Mind–reading, of sourts.
+ ESP.
+ Could I call it creative inference? But you are also digital; so classical.
+ 
+\end_layout
+
+\begin_layout Standard
+On the other hand, Kolmogorov's Hilbert's 14th applies, and I honestly do
+ not yet understand how that interfaces with neural nets.
+ Is there some escape route there? is the difference between classical and
+ quantum, is it erased by Kolmogorov when we move to hyperdimensional spaces?
+ Will I ever live long enough to both understand my question, and to formulate
+ an answer to it?
+\end_layout
+
+\begin_layout Standard
+I mean, I just spent vast numbers of bytes arguing that clasical and quantum
+ are fundamentally different, and they are, in low dimensions.
+ But in ultra–high dimensions, maybe they are not.
+ Maybe this is why the quantum universe can blled classical digial bits
+ into this diary, creatively pulling words from thin air to express my frustrate
+d, unrequieted love? Sheesh.
+ I even feel a headache coming on.
+ Maybe I'm just tired.
+ Maybe I should stop writing, because I think I've exhasuted the topic,
+ and need to do some more creative invention for more.
+ Return to the fount.
+\end_layout
+
+\begin_layout Standard
+Later, duude.
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+
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 The End
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