What something better would look like—if I knew that, I’d be busy writing a paper about it. :-) That seems to be a part of the problem—everyone (that I know of) agrees that functionalism is deeply unsatisfactory, but very few people seem to have any clue of what a better theory might look like.
(1) figure out what sort of ontology you think can map to both phenomenology (what we’re trying to explain) and physics (the world we live in);
(2) figure out what subset of that ontology actively contributes to phenomenology;
(3) figure out how to determine the boundary of where minds stop, in terms of that-stuff-that-contributes-to-phenomenology;
(4) figure out how to turn the information inside that boundary into a mathematical object isomorphic to phenomenology (and what the state space of the object is);
(5) figure out how to interpret how properties of this mathematical object map to properties of phenomenology.
The QRI approach is:
(1) Choice of core ontology → physics (since it maps to physical reality cleanly, or some future version like string theory will);
(2) Choice of subset of core ontology that actively contributes to phenomenology → Andres suspects quantum coherence; I’m more agnostic (I think Barrett 2014 makes some good points);
(3) Identification of boundary condition → highly dependent on (2);
(4) Translation of information in partition into a structured mathematical object isomorphic to phenomenology → I like how IIT does this;
(5) Interpretation of what the mathematical output means → Probably, following IIT, the dimensional magnitude of the object could correspond with the degree of consciousness of the system. More interestingly, I think the symmetry of this object may plausibly have an identity relationship with the valence of the experience.
Anyway, certain steps in this may be wrong, but that’s what the basic QRI “full stack” approach looks like. I think we should be able to iterate as we go, since we can test parts of (5) (like the Symmetry Hypothesis of Valence) without necessarily having the whole ‘stack’ figured out.
An additional note on this:
I’d propose that if we split the problem of building a theory of consciousness up into subproblems, the task gets a lot easier. This does depend on elegant problem decompositon. Here are the subproblems I propose: http://opentheory.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Eight-Problems2-1.png
A quick-and-messy version of my framework:
(1) figure out what sort of ontology you think can map to both phenomenology (what we’re trying to explain) and physics (the world we live in);
(2) figure out what subset of that ontology actively contributes to phenomenology;
(3) figure out how to determine the boundary of where minds stop, in terms of that-stuff-that-contributes-to-phenomenology;
(4) figure out how to turn the information inside that boundary into a mathematical object isomorphic to phenomenology (and what the state space of the object is);
(5) figure out how to interpret how properties of this mathematical object map to properties of phenomenology.
The QRI approach is:
(1) Choice of core ontology → physics (since it maps to physical reality cleanly, or some future version like string theory will);
(2) Choice of subset of core ontology that actively contributes to phenomenology → Andres suspects quantum coherence; I’m more agnostic (I think Barrett 2014 makes some good points);
(3) Identification of boundary condition → highly dependent on (2);
(4) Translation of information in partition into a structured mathematical object isomorphic to phenomenology → I like how IIT does this;
(5) Interpretation of what the mathematical output means → Probably, following IIT, the dimensional magnitude of the object could correspond with the degree of consciousness of the system. More interestingly, I think the symmetry of this object may plausibly have an identity relationship with the valence of the experience.
Anyway, certain steps in this may be wrong, but that’s what the basic QRI “full stack” approach looks like. I think we should be able to iterate as we go, since we can test parts of (5) (like the Symmetry Hypothesis of Valence) without necessarily having the whole ‘stack’ figured out.