[extropy-chat] Qualia Bet.

[John K Clark]

"Robin Hanson" <rhanson at gmu.edu>

> How does one part of your brain know what the other parts of your brain
> feel.

Signals of some sort but other than that I have no idea, if I did I'd know
enough to make a brain.

> How do you today know what you felt yesterday?

Memory.

> You may draw conclusions about such things, and they may feel direct

They do indeed.

> but that directness is an illusion.

You almost make that sound like a bad thing. Illusion is a perfectly
respectable subjective phenomenon and subjectivity is what we're talking
about. Yes it's an illusion, when I experience an emotion, intense joy for
example, all that happens is that trillions of neurons in my head go into a
certain state, but the illusion doesn't look anything like a neuron and
seems to be one very powerful thing not trillions of little things. That
illusion is by far the most important part of me and is the part I want to
continue.

> To draw reasonable inferences, you would have to depend
> on signals sent between parts of your brain, and recordings
> stored in your brain.  But then if we can watch those signals
> and look at those recordings, we will have all the data that
> you have to make those inferences

So if your inference after examining my brain is that I feel sad and my
rating on the sadness scale is 2.682942 you now know what it's like for me
to feel sad? Well....  rather than say if I agree or disagree with that the
prudent and reasonable thing for me to do is to analyze my brain with my
brain machine and it will tell me if I agree or disagree with you; assuming
of course that I read it correctly, but I can always ask the machine about
that too.

    John K Clark