alt Hacker NewsI honestly don't see what the whole framework gets you. Red (or all qualia) is just the reaction of your nervous system to a stimulus. Since that reaction is shaped by common context/associations, the "subjective experience" is quite comparable between similarly raised humans.
I think the whole philosophy of mind/subjective experience field is one of the few remaining anti-reductionist hold-outs, but I simply don't see a good enough motivation to stick with that view, especially given the abysmal historical track record for anti-reductionism (just consider early chemistry/alchemy, early biology, astronomy, ...).
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Calling that anti-reductionist is misunderstanding the issue.
> Red (or all qualia) is just the reaction of your nervous system to a stimulus.
Yes, Chalmers would call that one of the easy problems. Computers can do that - react to sensor data, which they have internal representations of - and most people don't assume they're conscious.
The hard problem is how you get from that to a conscious experience of those stimuli, which we tend to assume that computers (and LLMs?) don't have.
That's not an anti-reductionist position, it's pointing out the fundamental philosophical difficulty in making that leap from non-conscious organizations of matter to conscious ones. Even a hard-core materialist/reductionist who is honest will acknowledge that, assuming they've understood the issue.
I'm cool with scientists taking the "shut up and calculate" approach, after all we have to do science, and if you can't do experiments you're doing philosophy. The problem here is the same problem as with quantum hypotheses -- people have forgotten their materialist perspective is an experimental framework and are trying to claim the map is the territory and put the cart before the horse.