[extropy-chat] Qualia Bet.

[John K Clark]

"Brent Allsop" <allsop at extropy.org>

> with this theory - someone will start looking in the right
> place and finally discover them (i.e. be able to reliably
> predict when people are experiencing red and cause people
> to experience red when they throw the switch.)

But how will you know if your theory is correct, how do you test it? You can
listen to the noises people make with mouth but that is not qualia, you can
read the squiggles they draw with their hand, but that's not qualia either.
And if you can't test it then it's not science.

> It will finally solve the "problem of other minds", make
> the ineffable effable, tell us what spirits are
> (and are not) make Turing (and all others) seem
> stupid for coming up with the Turing test as the
> best way to know if something else is conscious

Even you admit that we don't have such a theory now and you say the Turing
Test is stupid, so I have an important question for you:

Do you think I'm conscious?

> Someone will realize there must be phenomenal properties
> in nature in  addition to causal properties.

If qualia is non causal that would explain why the Turing Test can't detect
it, but now we have a much more serious problem, natural selection can't
detect it either. If qualia is not an inevitable byproduct of intelligence
as I believe then why did evolution invent the thing? It will not be of one
bit of help getting a gene into the next generation.

And why does everybody think that qualia and emotions are harder to
manufacture than general problem solving intelligence when evolution found
the opposite to be true? Animals have behaved like they had emotions for
hundreds of millions of years, and some of our strongest emotions, like fear
and sex and hate come from the oldest reptilian part of our brain. Our big
cerebral cortex, the part of our brain most responsible for the sort of
intelligence we are proud of is a much more recent invention and is only
about a million years old.

I believe you could make a stronger case that computers could be conscious
but they can never be intelligent rather than the other way round.

   John K Clark