[extropy-chat] qualia

[Emlyn]

On 26/11/05, gts <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I don't see the "qualia" and "God" concepts as in the same category here.
> Few people claim to have seen God but almost everyone will acknowledge
> seeing qualia. Qualia are the object of our inquiry here, not an answer to
> it.
>
> Religion/God/Mysticism/Cartesian-Dualism is one answer to the question of
> qualia, but one that most extropians and transhumanists would probably
> prefer to reject. The need for divine intervention would make the
> extropian dream of strong AI enormously more difficult and intimidating.
> How would we persuade or force God to inject souls into our machines?
>

Oh I don't know. God, if she's out there, has been so careful to be
consistent across the universe, that she's hardly likely to let
something as bleedingly obvious as qualia catch her out. This devious
"proof denies faith" God would need to have made these qualia attach
to everything that could be conscious, in order not to give the game
away.

So, if there is a God out there, injecting souls into the intelligent
critters of the universe, I expect that our AIs will turn out to have
an indistinguishable ability to report that they have qualia, the same
way we do, if they are architected in a similar way to the human
brain. There may also be AIs we make that don't know what this qualia
stuff is, but that'll probably be due to architectural limitations in
the design of their minds. Poor AIs.

The real cosmic joke on us of course is that this evidence would also
directly support the materialist theory, that reports of our qualia
have be greatly exaggerated. That qualia are just a figment of our
mental architecture. Danged godless heathens! They find a way to get
around everything!

--
Emlyn

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