No confusion, I just pointed out that there are complex systems (e.g. a bee hive) where the fact that we can remove any element (eg. a bee) without affecting its overall performance doesn’t mean these aren’t core essential components of the system.
So the argument against (bees, qualia, neurons) can’t be valid.
The assumption in this thread is that you lose something when you remove the neuron e g. lose the qualia of red. Maybe you are thinking of the argument for replacing neurons one by one but we would need to understand neurons and be able to interface with them chemically in an identical way - which we are not able to do. It is likely that the only way to accurately replace a single neuron is to replace it with another identical biological neuron.
These discussions will get resolved when researchers can use BCI to run experiments on themselves. Not that far away…
You might be confusing our inability to explain the difference in the beehive when you remove one bee. Clearly there will be a difference but our models are too naive to understand it or predict the consequences.
that’s a very good argument. I guess it means cognition is a continuous effect not a discrete one. Perhaps that obvious all along - a human is more sentient than a cat, which is more sentient than a frog - but that all seem to have some level of cognition.
Good grief did this thread degenerate to arguing about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin quickly.
…but don’t stop, quite a provocative read.
One, they are all divas and won’t share!
regards relearning, remember the brain consumes like 50~% body energy, with vast number of excess connections during childhood, but there are critical periods for development, in adulthood it only consumes 20% energy and vastly less plasticity. You can rewire or damage the brain while young and vast recovery is possible, during adulthood recovery far more difficult.
If a human doesn’t see during youth, and his eyes regain vision while adult, he has severe trouble developing a correct sense of vision, some say he can’t develop such. There are things like acalculia, inability to recognize faces, etc that can occur from brain damage in adults, and from what I hear no recovery occur or rarely occur.
Even sense of motion can be lost, the person seeing the world as a series of screenshots, with no recovery in sight. So the idea that aspects of color vision or all of color vision could be lost in adults from brain damage with no possible recovery is tenable, and cases likely exists in the research literature.
As for qualia it likely emerges from the network structure, the information content or organization.
The conscious perception of time is likely very important to understand qualia, iirc, it is believed that we experience consciousness as a sequence of timeless moments, or presents, with illusion of continuity between these instances provided as an illusion.
There is debate against the discrete frames idea, some say it is something else
Discrete frames theory[edit]
Purves, Paydarfar, and Andrews (1996[9]) proposed the discrete-frames theory. One piece of evidence for this theory comes from Dubois and VanRullen (2011[10]). They reviewed experiences of users of LSD who often report that under the influence of the drug a moving object is seen trailing a series of still images behind it. They asked such users to match their drug experiences with movies simulating such trailing images viewed when not under the drug. They found that users selected movies around 15–20 Hz. This is between Schouten’s alpha and beta rates.
Temporal aliasing theory[edit]
Kline, Holcombe, and Eagleman (2004[11]) confirmed the observation of reversed rotation with regularly spaced dots on a rotating drum. They called this “illusory motion reversal”. They showed that these occurred only after a long time of viewing the rotating display (from about 30 seconds to as long as 10 minutes for some observers). They also showed that the incidences of reversed rotation were independent in different parts of the visual field. This is inconsistent with discrete frames covering the entire visual scene. Kline, Holcombe, and Eagleman (2006[12]) also showed that reversed rotation of a radial grating in one part of the visual field was independent of superimposed orthogonal motion in the same part of the visual field. The orthogonal motion was of a circular grating contracting so as to have the same temporal frequency as the radial grating. This is inconsistent with discrete frames covering local parts of visual scene. Kline et al. concluded that the reverse rotations were consistent with Reichardt detectors for the reverse direction of rotation becoming sufficiently active to dominate perception of the true rotation in a form of rivalry. The long time required to see the reverse rotation suggests that neural adaptation of the detectors responding to the true rotation has to occur before the weakly stimulated reverse-rotation detectors can contribute to perception.
Some small doubts about the results of Kline et al. (2004) sustain adherents of the discrete-frame theory. These doubts include Kline et al.'s finding in some observers more instances of simultaneous reversals from different parts of the visual field than would be expected by chance, and finding in some observers differences in the distribution of the durations of reversals from that expected by a pure rivalry process (Rojas, Carmona-Fontaine, López-Calderón, & Aboitiz, 2006[13]).
In 2008, Kline and Eagleman demonstrated that illusory reversals of two spatially overlapping motions could be perceived separately, providing further evidence that illusory motion reversal is not caused by temporal sampling.[14] They also showed that illusory motion reversal occurs with non-uniform and non-periodic stimuli (for example, a spinning belt of sandpaper), which also cannot be compatible with discrete sampling. Kline and Eagleman proposed instead that the effect results from a “motion during-effect”, meaning that a motion after-effect becomes superimposed on the real motion.
Thanks for raising this. I agree, lots of significant implications.
This study quotes peak at 43% of daily glucose use at age 5, for those that are interested.
This qualia thing is so much like the “Élan Vital” Élan vital - Wikipedia
I guess, all that philosophical “non-sense” will disappear in the same way. We just need the “DNA” 
In the same way, we will discover that conscience is nothing special. Machines may have it.
I think ‘qualia’ is tied to self-awareness. Got to have that first. I also think you need it for consciousness (not the same thing).