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Inverting qualia with group theory — LessWrong

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David Chalmers describes the inverted qualia thought experiment, in The Conscious Mind, as an argument against logical supervenience of phenomenal experience on physical states: one can coherently imagine a physically identical world in which conscious experiences are inverted, or (at the local level) imagine a being physically identical to me but with inverted conscious experiences. One might imagine, for example, that where I have a red experience, my inverted twin has a blue experience, and vice versa. Of course he will call his blue experiences "red," but that is irrelevant. What matters is that the experience he has of the things we both call "red"---blood, fire engines, and so on---is of the same kind as the experience I have of the things we both call "blue," such as the sea and the sky. The rest of his color experiences are systematically inverted with respect to mine, in order that they cohere with the red-blue inversion. Perhaps the best way to imagine this happening with hum

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