The problem of subjective experience is the dominant issue afoot in the study of consciousness. The question is, largely, by what means are those subjective phenomenal states in our heads, as our intrinsic knowledge of ourselves and our world, enabled to be there?

This very intrinsicality is its mystery. Qualia are, at least, what we know of the world. Any object or idea will have its intrinsic qualities for us. Our physical brains enable these qualia in consiousness, but what are they in themselves? Are they simply a physical thing? But what kind of physical thing? Or are they some kind of non-physical thing: perhaps a soul, or the kind of thing that could be removed from a human to produce a zombie?

This paper explores qualia from the perspective that they are information about the world and our mental states. How do we detect the information from which qualia are assembled? I argue here that what we are exposed to are differential relations among intrinsically unknowable physical objects: the sources of information. What is detected are internal physical difference relations which are the information, some of which is destined for qualia.

I then look at what information is in the physical world. Difference relations among particulars of the world are necesary for there to be anything to know at all. Difference relations are the organisation of those particulars. All our knowledge of the world comes from our capacities to detect difference relations. 

Our detection of those relations which we are able to discern, either immediately or mediated, gives us our "information" about the world. In the physiological process of our detecting these external difference relations we produce new difference relations. These are relayed and further transformed by the rest of the brain net. At various stages of processing that "sense-data" which we now have, we select information which is significant within the current context. That information is presented as qualia and consciousness engages with context to produce meaning and behaviour.

Next I look at whether qualia can be non-physical. By considering difference relations as counter-entropic it becomes clear that increasing the order in the universe requires some kind of work, viz. organising things. Since information can only be available as difference relations, ie. as order in the system, any information in the world must be gained by doing some work on the system, if only the work of neurons in detecting and converting to sense-data. Information is physical difference relations and so cannot be non-physical.

Now, qualia are informational phase-spaces of the brain-net which are available for consciousness. They must have some physical component. But the argument that information is physical suggests that qualia, being intrinsically informational, must also be physical and in fact identical with that phase-space result of pre-conscious sense-data processing. I argue that qualia are simply what the brain makes of our sensory systems' results as they flow through it.

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If physics is seen as the relations between its particulars then the large-scale aspects of the universe are a function of relational processes between these elements. These processes follow a procedural combinatorics similar to cellular automata, the emergent behaviour of which can show considerable coherence. Ie., emergent systems in the physical world are a function of the relations that persist between their parts. If emergence is considered as a function of relations, then consciousness can be understood as an emergent property of the relations persisting in the architecture of the body/brain. 

In my paper at CRII I suggested that information was a more fundamental factor in the universe than physical objects as such. This implies that the relations between things are the actual fundamental elements of the universe. But, as relations are essentially informational and knowable as sense-data, our knowledge of these relations is our subjectivity. Thus, it is possible that the deep structure of the universe is actually knowable, despite Kant. 

The problem then becomes not where does our subjectivity come from but how is it that there is an apparently objective physical aspect to the universe which may be seen as the source of the sense-data in the first place? Whence arises the solidity and objectivity of things? How do we come to speak of a physical universe, when what we know is informational and the particulateness of things is a matter of its relations, its procedural evolution? It is very likely that the deep structure of the universe is all we actually know. The so-called objective world exists in a bootstrap relationship with us and perhaps we have to say that I am not something which exists in this body but something which is a process of relations with the informational universe from which the by-products, such as "separate" objects, fall out as artifacts of our way of speaking about things. But one must ask then: Why have we developed this way of speaking? and to what extent are other, say tribal, ideas of the physical actually ideas of the physical at all? 

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I examine several examples of Artificial Life (AL) systems in which sensing and therefore the requisite sensors are used as a functional part of the system, ie used with intentionality on the part of the system designer and with intentionality on the part of system "creatures". 

It is one of the basic concepts of AL that it involves the simulation, in computing systems, robots and other hardware/software configurations, of various functions which operate within, so to speak, "normal" biological life. These processes usually consist in the simulation of evolutionary processes and the use of genetic algorithms to develop independently behaving, or autonomous, entitities which are able to carry out some subset of the possible distinguishing characteristics and processes of living systems. These often include processes of sensing, feeding (or other survival maintenance), mating and reproduction, mobility and the like. The entities being considered are usually some kind of cellular automaton which has some of the characteristics which make up the idea of "agenthood".

In examining sensing in AL systems I want to explore the role of sensory processes and their extension into the areas of comunication between agents and the development of intentionality within an agent. The processes of sensing, communication and intentionality all contribute greatly to the question of the actual assessment of the success of AL projects in their implementation of aims such as the emulation and recapitulation of the evolution of biological organisms from bacteria to humans.

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