these random particle movements could sometimes temporarily simulate valence-generating systems by chance, even if only for a fraction of a second
I see. :) I think counterfactual robustness is important, so maybe I’m less worried about that than you? Apart from gerrymandered interpretations, I assume that even 50 nematode neurons are vanishingly rare in particle movements?
In your post on counterfactual robustness, you mention as an example that if we eliminated the unused neural pathways during torture of you, you would still scream out in pain, so it seems like the unused pathways shouldn’t matter for valenced experience. But I would say that whether those unused pathways are present determines how much we should see a “you” as being there to begin with. There might still be sound waves coming from your mouth, but if they’re created just by some particles knocking into each other in random ways rather than as part of a robust, organized system, I don’t think there’s much of a “you” who is actually screaming.
For the same reason, I’m wary of trying to eliminate too much context as unimportant to valence and whittling the neurons down to just a small set. I think the larger context is what turns some seemingly meaningless signal transmission into something that we can see holistically as more than the sum of its parts.
As an analogy, suppose we’re trying to find the mountain in a drawing. I could draw just a triangle shape like ^ and say that’s the mountain, and everything else is non-mountain stuff. But just seeing a ^ shape in isolation doesn’t mean much. We have to add some foreground objects, the sky, etc as well before it starts to actually look like a mountain. I think a similar thing applies to valence generation in brains. The surrounding neural machinery is what makes a series of neural firings meaningful rather than just being some seemingly arbitrary signals being passed along.
This point about context mattering is also why I have an intuition that a body and real environment contribute something to the total sentience of a brain, although I’m not sure how much they matter, especially if the brain is complex and already creates a lot of the important context within itself based on the relations between the different brain parts. One way to see why a body and environment could matter a little bit is if we think of them as the “extended mind” of the nervous system, doing extra computations that aren’t being done by the neurons themselves.
I see. :) I think counterfactual robustness is important, so maybe I’m less worried about that than you? Apart from gerrymandered interpretations, I assume that even 50 nematode neurons are vanishingly rare in particle movements?
In your post on counterfactual robustness, you mention as an example that if we eliminated the unused neural pathways during torture of you, you would still scream out in pain, so it seems like the unused pathways shouldn’t matter for valenced experience. But I would say that whether those unused pathways are present determines how much we should see a “you” as being there to begin with. There might still be sound waves coming from your mouth, but if they’re created just by some particles knocking into each other in random ways rather than as part of a robust, organized system, I don’t think there’s much of a “you” who is actually screaming.
For the same reason, I’m wary of trying to eliminate too much context as unimportant to valence and whittling the neurons down to just a small set. I think the larger context is what turns some seemingly meaningless signal transmission into something that we can see holistically as more than the sum of its parts.
As an analogy, suppose we’re trying to find the mountain in a drawing. I could draw just a triangle shape like
^and say that’s the mountain, and everything else is non-mountain stuff. But just seeing a^shape in isolation doesn’t mean much. We have to add some foreground objects, the sky, etc as well before it starts to actually look like a mountain. I think a similar thing applies to valence generation in brains. The surrounding neural machinery is what makes a series of neural firings meaningful rather than just being some seemingly arbitrary signals being passed along.This point about context mattering is also why I have an intuition that a body and real environment contribute something to the total sentience of a brain, although I’m not sure how much they matter, especially if the brain is complex and already creates a lot of the important context within itself based on the relations between the different brain parts. One way to see why a body and environment could matter a little bit is if we think of them as the “extended mind” of the nervous system, doing extra computations that aren’t being done by the neurons themselves.