I think the "hard" qualia question can potentially be answered by the emergence argument.
The much more difficult part of "why do I have qualia" is not the qualia part, but why am "I" attached to this body's consciousness, as opposed to the billions of other candidates?
This isn't just relevant to other people. The question is also 'why does a human form a single consciousness?'.
If consciousness emerges purely from information exchange in a complex system, then consciousness would be primarily driven by communication interactions between regions of the human brain and the rest of the body. This in turn means that there should be a way to merge or split consciousnesses.
For example, a bidirection man machine man interface would allow two humans to form one shared consciousness given a high bandwidth communication link. This can be tested.
> The question is also 'why does a human form a single consciousness?'
The answer should be obvious to anyone earnestly thinking about the question: it doesn't. The "single consciousness" is just the abstraction we apply. We can, and often do, apply that same model to entire groups of people from cliques, to communities, to cultures, to nation states and just about any cross section of humanity one cares to. With a little effort we can apply the same model to internal mental processes[0].
The human mind is good at abstraction, which is fortunate because abstractions are useful. Unfortunately, it is often so preoccupied with any given abstraction that it forgets that abstractions are only useful contextually, because abstractions are not reality.
[0] As in Internal Family Systems, a model sometimes used in therapeutic contexts.
Absolutely, even ancient Buddhist thinking comes to the same conclusion: consciousness isn't a single "thing", it arises moment to moment in contact with sense organs (including "thinking" or "mind" as a sense organ). There isn't a single point of consciousness that is "I", that's just an abstraction we develop.
If I were to run a single-threaded program on a dual core machine, would it run twice as fast?
I'm not suggesting this is a strong analogy, perhaps, but I don't see why putting a high bandwidth link between two brains would necessarily do anything at all.
(Actually -since human brains are very adaptable- maybe we would see something happen.
But emergence is not something magical. It happens when parts that are made to go together are actually together.
Eg. when you assemble cogs and cylinders and wheels into a car. The whole is more than the sum of the parts.
If you mix in some random parts from a cruise ship, you don't suddenly get a car that can go on water and carry 1000 passengers. You just get a bunch of parts that don't go together )
This discussion explicitly started with the assertion that "consciousness is just an emergent phenomenon resulting from any sufficiently powerful cognitive system (either biological or artificial) with sufficient inputs of its environment and, crucially, of itself"; note carefully the word "any", as that's what this downthread discussion has been pushing hard against, and what the thought experiment you are arguing against is itself directed at. You, instead, seem to be very much in agreement and seem to be in alignment with this other side thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36462646
> The question is also 'why does a human form a single consciousness?'.
It doesn't seem to. When dreaming, it's possible to carry out conversations with other "people" in the dream which are indistinguishable from conscious beings you meet when awake. There's usually a single "self" in dreams, but the brain certainly seems to form extra consciousnesses on demand which react as though they had a sense of "self".
Is that different from having an imaginary conversation "in your head" with an imagined person?
i.e. I often imagine conversations I'm about to have in my "mental pre planning" phase, usually when dealing with government officials - many of whom are belligerent officious jobsworths. They're obviously not "me" and their responses aren'y something I "think" about before they respond "in my mind".
Could that be a temporary virtual consciousness (like a virtual CPU)?
It’s just time sharing, we can’t really do parallel thought. But signal processing does happen in parallel obviously, often times not even having to “interrupt” the CPU (e.g. reflexes can react before the signal reaches the brain, but the brain itself also has different parts, so coordinating walking won’t disallow thought)
I think you’re mistaken, in that it’s naturally the same consciousness but different identities and recognisably different/altered personality states that come in and out in DID. The consciousness itself is always the same and continuous.
From the famous split-brain experiment I would conclude that they don’t share every memory. We are just very good at filling in the blanks, like we can bullshit forever about why that apple happened to be in our hand, even though we have no idea.
I don’t completely get your second sentence, but we can surely hold multiple conflicting ideas simultaneously — we are absolutely nowhere near rational.
This is a very underappreciated perspective, but with any significant period of isolation conbined with effective meditation will likely point you in this direction. Plant medicines can accelerate the path to that experience. And for me it brought incredible peace. Perhaps its ignorance, perhaps I'm wrong, but it feels as real as the love of my children.
I think that biology does limit these questions down — it is entirely likely that the answer to that is as simple as “there is a biological structure for that, and we only have one of those”.
Or even if it’s not such a hard limit, there are still likely similar bottlenecks that prefer a single one from arising, etc.
Something akin to the anthropic principle seems relevant here. Feeling that ‘I’m’ attached this body is what it feels like to be these atoms. If I were instead composed of your atoms, it follows I might find myself wondering the exact same question.
The much more difficult part of "why do I have qualia" is not the qualia part, but why am "I" attached to this body's consciousness, as opposed to the billions of other candidates?