Why does it feel like something to be a computation in a brain (qualia)?
OPH proposes that an experience is the meaning enacted by a selected observer's integrated self-reading. The mathematical step concerns distinctions. If two retained records lead to different continuations when everything else is held fixed, any faithful internal representation must preserve their difference. For an experiencing unit, add the premise that its relevant lived content carries that record-dependent influence. Its lived contents must then preserve those distinctions too: one interchangeable feeling could not mediate different responses under the same conditions. This explains why a lived world must be differentiated under the proposed identity. The calculation alone does not establish that an arbitrary computation feels anything, identify the experiencing unit, or derive the particular character of human redness and pain. Those are further commitments and tests of the account.
What the conditional argument establishes
- Fix the admissible retained records and continuation conditions. Group records together exactly when substituting them never changes the subsequent response.
- Nontrivial self-reading requires at least two such response classes. Otherwise reading the retained record could make no difference.
- A faithful representation must distinguish records from different response classes; the same represented state cannot produce different responses under the same fixed conditions.
- Add a selected experiencing unit and the phenomenal identity: the relevant record-dependent response is mediated by that unit’s enacted lived content.
- Under those additional premises, the repertoire of lived contents has at least as many distinctions as the repertoire of response classes.
The response distinction is operational. Its interpretation as a distinction in experience requires the experiencing-unit and phenomenal-identity premises. The result does not derive the character of every human quality from counting alone.
See also What is the hard problem of consciousness?, Why do many brain processes feel like one experience? (The combination problem), What is a philosophical zombie, and could one exist?, What does Mary learn when she first sees red?
This answer comes from OPH, Observer Patch Holography. OPH is a rigorous, consistent and complete description of the unified, self-creating computational Universe we inhabit. Its consistency is machine-checked: the fixed point at its core is constructed explicitly, and a theory with a model contains no contradiction.
To understand OPH and check every step yourself, start with the free book Reverse Engineering Reality. It builds the theory from the ground up, and the OPH Notebook answers your questions while you read.
read the free bookask the notebookor ask sage:read chapter 40: Does It Feel Like Anything, and What Is Left to Decide?watch a universe make its own particles