> Suppose that some aspect of qualia has no effect on behavior in any scenario.
> any aspect of qualia that isn’t detectable through behavior changes is not noticeable even subjectively.
> Imagine a species of vegetarian animal on some planet that has magma covering much of its surface. Evolution in this case has an incentive to engineer qualia in such as way that the animals associate a beautiful qualia with water, a disturbing qualia with magma, and an attractive appetizing qualia with the plant life.
> The animals could be studied by rewiring the infant brains to switch the qualias.
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> My point is that behavior patterns must be isomorphic to conscious experience, because otherwise qualia would have metaphysical properties that are not noticeable even subjectively.
> I am not saying that all preferential behavior is caused by qualia. I am suggesting that qualia has an impact on it that can be experimentally tested.
> Qualia is characterized and determined by the impact on behavior patterns.
> If qualia is not isomorphic to behavior then you must say that there are metaphysical aspects to it,
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On Sat, Jan 14, 2023 at 3:52 PM Gadersd <gad...@gmail.com> wrote:> My point is that behavior patterns must be isomorphic to conscious experience, because otherwise qualia would have metaphysical properties that are not noticeable even subjectively.Not always, some people are very skilled at hiding their emotional inner life from others, you hear stories about people who were always smiling and joking around who then go home and slit their throat, and a great movie actor can look absolutely terrified when a stunt man is chasing him with a rubber ax covered in fake blood, but in reality he's as calm as a cucumber.
> I am not saying that all preferential behavior is caused by qualia. I am suggesting that qualia has an impact on it that can be experimentally tested.There's not even an experiment that can determine if a qualia even exists in something other than yourself, much less figure out its inner workings.> Qualia is characterized and determined by the impact on behavior patterns.That theory may very well be true but a proof of its correctness will never be found and no counterexample will ever be found to prove it incorrect. So there's not much science can say about it.> If qualia is not isomorphic to behavior then you must say that there are metaphysical aspects to it,I know there is at least one conscious being in the observable universe and if consciousness is not related to behavior then Darwinian evolution could not have produced that conscious being and you'd have to resort to voodoo of some sort to explain it. However that doesn't necessarily mean every qualia corresponds to an action because sometimes people just don't want other people to know what sort of qualia they're experiencing so they lie, for example if their boss who they hate asks them "are you mad at me?" they may say "no sir not at all you're a fine fellow".John K Clark
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>> some people are very skilled at hiding their emotional inner life from others, you hear stories about people who were always smiling and joking around who then go home and slit their throat, and a great movie actor can look absolutely terrified when a stunt man is chasing him with a rubber ax covered in fake blood, but in reality he's as calm as a cucumber.
> That is why I stated all scenarios. More precisely, qualia is characterized and determined by all its impacts on behavior in all possible scenarios. Behavior in all possible scenarios is isomorphic to the information processing that goes on in the brain
> If two creatures behave the same under all scenarios that implies they have exact experiences.
> No human wants to be exactly a bat, but experiencing sound like a bat does is something interesting.
> If qualia is characterized by behavior under all scenarios then switching color receptors in infants and [...]
>>> My point is that behavior patterns must be isomorphic to conscious experience, because otherwise qualia would have metaphysical properties that are not noticeable even subjectively.>> Not always, some people are very skilled at hiding their emotional inner life from others, you hear stories about people who were always smiling and joking around who then go home and slit their throat, and a great movie actor can look absolutely terrified when a stunt man is chasing him with a rubber ax covered in fake blood, but in reality he's as calm as a cucumber.> It’s not identical behaviour unless it’s identical under all circumstances.
> any change that does not change behaviour (in this broader sense) does not change qualia.
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> why is everyone talking about experimenting on everything but the qualia, or at best something completely separated from the qualia, itself????
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> A change in a part of the brain that leaves the behaviour of the rest of the brain unchanged must also leave the qualia unchanged. That’s not just a rule of thumb,
A change in a part of the brain that leaves the behaviour of the rest of the brain unchanged must also leave the qualia unchanged. That’s not just a rule of thumb, if it were false, even if only in theory, it would make the concept of qualia meaningless, because you could have an arbitrarily large change in your qualia without noticing.
> Hi John, We all know you never stop repeating this claim, that colorness is not approachable via objective science.
> But this "there is no way" claim would be falsified If experimentalists demonstrated that computationally bound glutamate always produced the same redness experience, and that nobody could ever experience redness (i.e. no function could ever produce redness), without glutamate.
>If you really think differently, you should create a competing camp to "Representational Qualia Theory", making your different predictions.
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> Why do you just continue to bleat and tweet this noise,
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>>> A change in a part of the brain that leaves the behaviour of the rest of the brain unchanged must also leave the qualia unchanged. That’s not just a rule of thumb,>> Not if the part of the brain that has been changed is the part that produces the qualia. And you have no way of proving that the brain you're investigating is even capable of producing qualia. For all we know rocks are capable of producing qualia but they are incapable of producing actions so we have no way of knowing or even suspecting that they're conscious. Personally I doubt that rocks are conscious because I have accepted the axiom that consciousness is the way data feels when it is being processed intelligently, and I see no evidence that rocks are capable of processing information.> Yes, even if the change is made in a part if the brain that is assumed to produce the qualia, such as Brent’s glutamate, the qualia must be preserved if the replacement part interacts with the rest of the brain in the same way as the original part.
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> My axiom is that no part of qualia or consciousness is metaphysical. I like my axiom better, even though I can’t prove it.
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> I agree that your axiom is more specific and that mine is more general.
> Suppose there is some aspect of qualia that can be changed and this alteration is not experimentally testable even in principle.
> and it is not even subjectively noticeable.
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> If you prefer more specific axioms that allow for metaphysical things to exist, well, that is your preference I suppose.
> It is possible to experimentally test if someone notices a subjective difference. An honest person could simply say that he or she noticed a difference.
> Qualia alteration experiments are easy to perform if the subjects are cooperative.
But qualia alteration experiments are a different matter entirely.
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> it's only a matter of time before a company directly interfacing with the brain like neuralink is able to produce more than just white 'sprites" (like a white star or a pixel) in a blind person's conscious visual field by stimulating the primary visual cortex. They'll discover what it is that has a redness quality, then they eventually will be able to stimulate causing colored sprites,
> and say: "That is John's redness"
> Would rewiring the light receptors in the eyes not alter what qualia someone experiences when he or she sees a red apple?
> I don’t claim that the above experiment yields any profound insights, but it demonstrates my point that changes in what qualia someone experiences is detectable through a change in behavior.
>when you and I are talking about consciousness or qualia how do we even know we're talking about the same thing?> There has to be some grounding for comparison. The basis of comparison in this case is behavior. If two entities behave in identical ways in all scenarios that is strong evidence that the same information processing is going on in their heads and that they have the same experiences.
> I know you believe that information processing is isomorphic to conscious experience. Behavior under all scenarios is isomorphic to information processing. Therefore behavior under all scenarios is isomorphic to conscious experience.
> I should emphasize that neuron firing counts as behavior, just internal as opposed to external behavior such as speaking.
> The experience of qualia is isomorphic to some kind of information processing. We do not know the exact information processing that corresponds to particular qualia but this can be observed through experiment.
> Take a large group of people. Show each person a number of different objects, each reflecting a different wavelength of light. Record the information processing that goes in each brain with each different colored object. Take the intersections of the information processing of each person with respect to a single color of light. This is the common information processing corresponding to that color. It can then be said that this particular subset of information processing corresponds to whatever qualia is associated with each color
> The above experiment assumes that each person perceives the same qualia if the wavelength of light is the same.
> For each subject, duplicate his or her brain precisely so that you have a number of identical subjects. The duplication provides a baseline for comparison. Create a set of models in number equal to the number of distinct color qualia that humans are capable of distinguishing,
> Now define an arbitrary baseline for matching color labels to qualia.
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> I’m sorry that you are unable to grasp the concepts.
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> When I say that behavior and experience are isomorphic I am referring to information. If one has all the information detailing all the behavior someone would exhibit under all scenarios then that is equivalent to knowing how information is taken in through the senses and processed through the brain to yield behavioral outputs. As an analogy, it is like knowing the output of a computer for each possible input. If one knows this then one knows what kind of information processing is happening inside the computer to produce the outputs. The idea I am trying to convey is that consciousness is just information processing so that if one knows all the input/output characteristics of a human then one knows what relevant information processing must be going on inside the head.
> If this particular information processing cannot ever have any behavioral effect under any circumstance, then I reason that such information processing doesn’t contribute to conscious experience because if something is consciously noticeable then it can have an effect on behavior as the person could say it out loud that he or she noticed something.
>Perhaps I should have been absolutely rigorous and defined every term I used
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>>Nobody knows, all you can do is watch it and see what it does, and you might be watching forever.
> That is an irreverent detail. [...] Not knowing how something can be achieved is not the same as knowing that something is impossible.
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> You are simply admitting that there are some statements that are true but can’t be known (proven) to be true and some statements that are false but can’t be known (proven) to be false.
> Yet you make the leap and assert to know the statement “The bridge between subject/objective divide can be made” is false. I would love to see a proof of that claim.
> Please provide all the axioms used and demonstrate how you derive the theorem that “The bridge between the subjective/objective is impossible.” Otherwise, asserting the validity of that claim is just as dishonest as if you asserted that you know that Goldbach's conjecture is false.
--On Jan 16, 2023, at 1:13 PM, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:On Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 12:48 PM Gadersd <gad...@gmail.com> wrote:>>Nobody knows, all you can do is watch it and see what it does, and you might be watching forever.> That is an irreverent detail. [...] Not knowing how something can be achieved is not the same as knowing that something is impossible.Sometimes it is. Kurt Godel proved in 1930 that some statements are true but have no proof, that is to say there's no finite number of steps that enable you to go from fundamental axioms to the statement, and in 1936 Alan Turing proved that there is no general method for determining which statements are provable and which ones are not. If Goldbach's conjecture is one of these (and if it isn't there are an infinite number of similar conjectures that are) then 10 billion years from now our descendants will still be looking, unsuccessfully, for a proof that Goldbach is correct, and they will still be grinding through huge numbers looking, unsuccessfully, for a counterexample to prove it wrong. I don't believe this is just a detail, I think it's one of the most profound ideas the human race has ever come up with.John K Clark--
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> John, do you dismiss the eeg recordings of different brain waves when awake,drowsy, asleep (all four stages) as indications of consciousness? Please explain. bill w
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> If consciousness is just information processing then why do you not believe that finding two systems (such as yourself and another human) with similar information processing implies that the experiences are similar, that the other person is conscious too?
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> John, do you agree that a person asleep is unconscious? He cannot make any intelligent actions so he is not conscious. bill w
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On Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 5:06 PM William Flynn Wallace <fooz...@gmail.com> wrote:> John, do you agree that a person asleep is unconscious? He cannot make any intelligent actions so he is not conscious. bill wI believe a sleeping person is not conscious for the same reason I believe a cadaver is not conscious, neither is behaving very intelligently.John K Clark
----On Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 1:22 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:--On Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 2:01 PM William Flynn Wallace <fooz...@gmail.com> wrote:> John, do you dismiss the eeg recordings of different brain waves when awake,drowsy, asleep (all four stages) as indications of consciousness? Please explain. bill wHow did somebody come up with the idea there was a relationship between a squiggle on a graph made by an EEG machine and consciousness? A scientist put electrodes on a subject and observed that when he was acting in an alert intelligent manor he assumed that meant the subject was conscious and noticed that the machine then produced one sort of squiggle, but when the subject was sleeping and not behaving intelligently he assumed he was not conscious and noticed that the machine then produced a different sort of squiggle. So the EEG machine can never be a fundamental test of consciousness because the EEG test is entirely dependent on the assumption that intelligent activity is necessary for consciousness, something I strongly believe is true but will never be able to prove. So I say forget the machine and just look for intelligent activity.John K Clark
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On Mon, Jan 16, 2023, 2:34 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:On Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 5:06 PM William Flynn Wallace <fooz...@gmail.com> wrote:> John, do you agree that a person asleep is unconscious? He cannot make any intelligent actions so he is not conscious. bill wI believe a sleeping person is not conscious for the same reason I believe a cadaver is not conscious, neither is behaving very intelligently.John K ClarkThen why do alarm clocks work on one but not the other? Why would Stephen Hawking after he lost control of cheek still be conscious, while a sleeper not?I think your hypothesis that consciousness derives from intelligent behavior hypothesis is flawed. There are too many exceptions, some of which you yourself have pointed out.Instead, I would venture it was the other way around. Indeed a very logical case could be made that intelligent behavior derives from consciousness and sometimes that causal chain is broken, like in Hawking's case.If consciousness were merely a side effect of intelligent behavior, then breaking that causal chain would result in a philosophical zombies that I see no evidence of.The presence of conscious individuals with paralysis, but not any philosophical zombies logically implies that consciousness is causally upstream of intelligent behavior. Which is also why it is so difficult to directly detect, since causal chains can be broken.
Another line of evidence comes from evolutionary biology, where it is known that eyes evolved before brains. Therefore intelligent behavior must ultimately derive from some sensory stimulus of some sort. Intelligent behavior is always in response to something.
Hi Stathis,I have a question for you. Do you believe it would be possible to create a real glutamate detector?It would be something that would only produce a "that is real glutamate" if there was real physical glutamate in the detector.Nothing else could spoof it, only real glutamate would work.
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>> I believe a sleeping person is not conscious for the same reason I believe a cadaver is not conscious, neither is behaving very intelligently.
> Then why do alarm clocks work on one but not the other?
> I think your hypothesis that consciousness derives from intelligent behavior hypothesis is flawed. There are too many exceptions, some of which you yourself have pointed out. Instead, I would venture it was the other way around. Indeed a very logical case could be made that intelligent behavior derives from consciousness
> Another line of evidence comes from evolutionary biology, where it is known that eyes evolved before brains.
> any philosophical zombies logically implies that consciousness is causally upstream of intelligent behavior.
> Intelligent behavior is always in response to something.
> Read Dawkin's "The Extended Phenotype" for more on why our technologies are a part of us and evolve with us.
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> If I am not mistaken your axioms are as follows:1. Consciousness is some subset of information processes2. John Clark is consciousHow are you reaching the conclusion that intelligent behavior implies that there is consciousness? You are conscious by your axioms and your behavior is correlated with intelligent behavior by observation. How do you jump from this one instance of observed correlation to believing that all intelligent behavior must imply a consciousness?
> How do you know that there aren’t human-like creatures on some distant planet that have intelligent behavior but no consciousness?
> They would not be able to consciously ask questions about consciousness as you do but they may behave as you do.
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>> Evolution must have selected for something that it can see> That or your consciousness is just a lucky accident. Evolution selecting for intelligent behavior does not logically imply that intelligent behavior is an indicator of consciousness. Correlation does not imply causation and you only know one instance of this correlation, namely yourself.
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>>produce a mutated gene that gave a being consciousness, it would be lost in just a few generations due to genetic drift> Do you pity your progeny?
>>and although unproven it probably has done so more than once, perhaps many billions of times> Your axioms only demonstrate one instance.
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>>Huh?> If your consciousness is a lucky accident then your progeny may or may not inherit whatever special gene you have. Your axioms cannot demonstrate that you are not a lucky accident.
> You still seem to be holding on to something beyond your axioms if you assert that this is unlikely.
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>I don't think it's very likely. Do you?I cannot come to such a conclusion by your axioms.>There is indeed something beyond my axiomsPlease explicitly state what principle you are referring to.
--On Jan 17, 2023, at 2:05 PM, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:On Tue, Jan 17, 2023 at 1:57 PM Gadersd <gad...@gmail.com> wrote:>>Huh?> If your consciousness is a lucky accident then your progeny may or may not inherit whatever special gene you have. Your axioms cannot demonstrate that you are not a lucky accident.That is certainly possible, and it's certainly possible that I'm the only conscious being that ever was or ever will be, but just between you and me I don't think it's very likely. Do you?> You still seem to be holding on to something beyond your axioms if you assert that this is unlikely.There is indeed something beyond my axioms and I've already mentioned it and discussed it at some length.John K Clark--
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> It still does not logically follow. If your axioms are the following:1. Consciousness is a subset of information processes2. John Clark is conscious3. Evolution tends to produce intelligent behavior4. John Clark has intelligent behaviorThere is still no way to derive the statement that intelligent behavior likely implies that consciousness is present. You cannot derive a statement of the form X is likely from these axioms.
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Hi Stathis,
All that is true, but you are missing the point.It is a fact that the brain is a redness detector. If redness in consciousness changes to anything but redness, the brain must reliably detect that difference, and be able to report such.You can't do a substitution on a redness detector, because if anything but redness produces a "that is redness output", it is failing to detect redness.
On Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 6:52 PM Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com> wrote:On Tue, 17 Jan 2023 at 10:10, Brent Allsop <brent....@gmail.com> wrote:Hi Stathis,I have a question for you. Do you believe it would be possible to create a real glutamate detector?It would be something that would only produce a "that is real glutamate" if there was real physical glutamate in the detector.Nothing else could spoof it, only real glutamate would work.That's a good question. A detector works by detecting certain physical properties. It might be mass, reflectance, pH in solution, migration in a chromatography substrate, or a combination. A perfect detector would detect all the physical properties of glutamate, and therefore could not be fooled by something that was not real glutamate. But the role of glutamate in the brain is quite well-understood and it is not dependent on all the physical properties: it is only dependent on some of the properties, such as the shape of the molecule and the distribution of electrostatic charge. This could be replicated by glutamate comprising C-14 rather than C-12, for example. A detector that measures mass would be able to tell that it was not real glutamate, but the brain could not, so the glutamate in the brain could be replaced with C-14 glutamate without any change in behaviour or change in qualia.--
--Stathis PapaioannouStathis Papaioannou----
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> You are saying that you are using some principle that guides you to avoid arbitrariness in your theories. Would you disagree if I amended your axioms as follows?:1. Consciousness is a subset of information processes2. John Clark is conscious3. Evolution tends to produce intelligent behavior4. John Clark has intelligent behavior5. Occam’s Razor
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>> Induction is an even more useful rule of thumb, the idea that things usually continue.> I should have been more precise. What I meant by Occam’s Razor is not the original formulation but rather the modern that lower complexity theories are preferred over higher complexity theories, which fully encapsulates the idea of induction from individual instances. Let me call it Occam’s Razor 2.0. Are we on the same page?
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> you seem to be relying on that “rule of thumb” just as much as you are relying on your “axioms.”
> suppose that you detect a particular neuron firing pattern in person A’s brain whenever A is looking at a cow or thinking about a cow, but is not present otherwise. Further suppose that you detect that person B has the same neuron firing pattern whenever B is looking at or thinking about a cow, but is not present otherwise. Disregard the difficulty of knowing if they are thinking about a cow...
> just assume they are not pathological liars about it. By Occam’s Razor, is it unreasonable to conclude that it is likely that the detected neuron firing pattern indicates that a human is thinking in some way about a cow?
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On Wed, 18 Jan 2023 at 04:05, Brent Allsop <brent....@gmail.com> wrote:Hi Stathis,All that is true, but you are missing the point.It is a fact that the brain is a redness detector. If redness in consciousness changes to anything but redness, the brain must reliably detect that difference, and be able to report such.You can't do a substitution on a redness detector, because if anything but redness produces a "that is redness output", it is failing to detect redness.No, the brain is not a redness detector, because redness is not a physical quality that can be detected.
Glutamate has many physical qualities, and some of these qualities are detected by other parts of the brain. Most obviously, glutamate has a certain shape and charge distribution, which causes the shape of the glutamate receptor to change when it binds to it, which sets off a sequence of events causing the neuron to fire. Glutamate has other physical properties, such as mass and gravitational field, but these have no effect in the brain that we know of. But redness is not a physical property of glutamate at all. If you disagree, explain how redness could be detected and how it could have a physical effect in the brain.
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Yea, I admit I don't YET know how that would be done. I'm surprised you haven't called me out on that yet. All I know is that we can be aware of redness and greenness at the same time, as one composite experience. I just know, if you can replace something, and redness doesn't change, then it must be something else responsible for redness, than what you are neuro substituting.One possibility would be a very large single neuron (as I've mentioned a gazillion times in our discussions) that achieves the unified awareness of what is going on in all of its upstream individual synapses. Or it could be a set of neurons doing this.) But of course, if you can replace redness in any of those synapses in that set, and the behavior of the neuron doesn't change, then it can't be that, it must be something else. Other candidates are Orch OR's quantum entanglement or something. And of course the glutamate example is purposely overly simplistic, for explanatory purposes only. The fact that it is so easily falsified is the purpose of using this example.So, can you describe any possible mechanism which achieves your required "supervenience" than that? And what the heck kind of "function" might redness supervene on, other than pure magic?Anyway, as I always say, we'll just need to wait till the experimentalists resolve this impasse.
> I never wanted this to turn in to a philosophical discussion
> If a particular pattern is evident in the brain of all observed people who are looking at cows or say they are thinking of cows but never observed otherwise, then it is meaningful and useful to say that this pattern corresponds to the experience of cows.
> This isolated pattern would be a useful tool to check if any given person is thinking about a cow. Maybe it could be used in milk marketing, who knows?
> Maybe this definition of “cow experience” doesn’t match your philosophical terminology, but it is at least perfectly useful for the rest of us who want to use definitions that have actual use in the real world.
> When I use the term color qualia I mean the intersection of the patterns in the human brain that are present when people look at or imagine light of particular wavelengths and not present otherwise.
> Maybe a particular pattern is only present in myself when I see red light and the same pattern is only present in you when you see blue light. It would be useful to say that my red is like your blue because similar brain patterns imply greater likelihood of similar behavior.
> unless a term is well defined enough to be testable then it really isn’t very useful,
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>> Then all you've done is redefined the word "qualia" in a way that is entirely different from what Brent and I> Then we’ve been talking about different things this entire time.
> I have no interest and never had any interest in non-testable philosophical concepts.
>> explain how redness could be detected and how it could have a physical effect in the brain.
> The same way glutamate can. But you need an additional binding mechanism to achieve the ability for the entire system to be aware of the qualities of glutamate to achieve the situational awareness of the relationship of that pixel of redness, and all the other pixels, at the same time. Something like standing waves of redness qualities in neural tissue, or quantum mechanics.
> Something a mere set discrete logic gates can't do.
> So getting to the end, having substituted everything, and proving that nothing can be dependent on redness/glutamate, just proves that you've done neuro substitution on something that isn't conscious, in the first place.
> One possibility would be a very large single neuron (as I've mentioned a gazillion times in our discussions) that achieves the unified awareness of what is going on
On Tue, Jan 17, 2023 at 5:26 PM Gadersd <gad...@gmail.com> wrote:> I never wanted this to turn in to a philosophical discussionIf the discussion is about the fundamental nature of consciousness then it's going to be a philosophical discussion, it can't be a scientific discussion because the scientific method cannot be employed to investigate it.
> Maybe this definition of “cow experience” doesn’t match your philosophical terminology, but it is at least perfectly useful for the rest of us who want to use definitions that have actual use in the real world.In the real world I use words such as "experience" as you do every day, but this is not the real world, this is a philosophical discussion. Most people, even very very smart people, never bothered to think about stuff like this for two seconds, and they get along just fine.
> When I use the term color qualia I mean the intersection of the patterns in the human brain that are present when people look at or imagine light of particular wavelengths and not present otherwise.Then all you've done is redefined the word "qualia" in a way that is entirely different from what Brent and I and just about everybody else means by the word. That is not progress and can only lead to confusion, and this topic already has enough of that.
> Maybe a particular pattern is only present in myself when I see red light and the same pattern is only present in you when you see blue light. It would be useful to say that my red is like your blue because similar brain patterns imply greater likelihood of similar behavior.If red and blue qualias were exchanged then it would not lead to similar behavior, it would lead to IDENTICAL behavior, so there would be no way to even determine that a change had actually been made.
> unless a term is well defined enough to be testable then it really isn’t very useful,All definitions ultimately come from examples, and nothing is more poorly defined than "consciousness", except perhaps "free will".
On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 3:00 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:On Tue, Jan 17, 2023 at 5:26 PM Gadersd <gad...@gmail.com> wrote:> I never wanted this to turn in to a philosophical discussionIf the discussion is about the fundamental nature of consciousness then it's going to be a philosophical discussion, it can't be a scientific discussion because the scientific method cannot be employed to investigate it.To me, the difference between philosophy and theoretical science is falsifiability. Can your claims be demonstrated or falsified? Any: "you can't do that" claim is very falsifiable. Of the current participants, a clear consensus is supporting "Representational Qualia Theory" which is describing an experimental method (observing the brain in a non qualia blind way) to falsify all the competing sub camps making diverse falsifiable predictions about the nature of qualia. John, if you ever get tired of making this "the scientific method cannot be employed" claim over and over again, you should just communicate to everyone this is what you believe.> Maybe this definition of “cow experience” doesn’t match your philosophical terminology, but it is at least perfectly useful for the rest of us who want to use definitions that have actual use in the real world.In the real world I use words such as "experience" as you do every day, but this is not the real world, this is a philosophical discussion. Most people, even very very smart people, never bothered to think about stuff like this for two seconds, and they get along just fine.To me, it's a religious thing. Do people want to understand what uploading could be like? Currently people fear it, and fight against it. THAT is the problem. We want to show people what it will be like to be uploaded to an avatar body in a way that has continuity experience (being aware of their knowledge of their spirit as it moves between knowledge of bodies, all in the computationally bound brains of the two bodies, and how they will know they are the same person, in that new body, and all that. We want to religiously inspire people to change their lives, and seek after that stuff, instead of fearing and fighting it.> When I use the term color qualia I mean the intersection of the patterns in the human brain that are present when people look at or imagine light of particular wavelengths and not present otherwise.Then all you've done is redefined the word "qualia" in a way that is entirely different from what Brent and I and just about everybody else means by the word. That is not progress and can only lead to confusion, and this topic already has enough of that.Yea, I'm with John on this one. I just don't get the functionalists, or "it from bit" views. It seems to me they are just redefining things so that it makes no sense to me. The quality of your knowledge of red is just a physical fact. That physical fact, like any physical fact, can represent information like the sugar content of a ripe strawberry (if you have a transducing dictionary, to get that piece of information from that particular physical fact). If you just redefine the word information to be something physical, and redefine physical redness to be information, that just makes it impossible to communicate.> Maybe a particular pattern is only present in myself when I see red light and the same pattern is only present in you when you see blue light. It would be useful to say that my red is like your blue because similar brain patterns imply greater likelihood of similar behavior.If red and blue qualias were exchanged then it would not lead to similar behavior, it would lead to IDENTICAL behavior, so there would be no way to even determine that a change had actually been made.Why does everyone talk about everything but the topic of discussion? A physical redness quality will always be the same, no matter where it is, no matter what time it is, no matter what brain it is in, no matter what you call it. How hard it is to prove something like that doesn't change those facts.
> unless a term is well defined enough to be testable then it really isn’t very useful,All definitions ultimately come from examples, and nothing is more poorly defined than "consciousness", except perhaps "free will".Again, there is a majority of consensus supporting the "Representational Qualai Theory" camp. All those supporters agree on this definition of consciousness as specified in that camp:"Computationally bound elemental intrinsic qualities like redness, greenness, warmth..."If you wouldn't ignore that fact, we wouldn't have to bleat this kind of stuff back and forth, over and over and over, forever.
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