Spirits (was RE: [extropy-chat] Qualia Bet.)

[gts]

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005 00:37:37 -0500, The Avantguardian  
<avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> To be honest though, anything that truly has no external
> measure [like qualia] is not amenable to scientific explanation  and  
> must be relegated to the philosophers.

This seems true to me, and explains why I find Brent's idea so  
interesting. At the moment the idea of qualia seems like just another  
untestable idea for philosophers to talk about in their ivory towers.  
However if we consider effing technology feasible then we have to agree  
that qualia will someday become amenable to something like scientific  
explanation.

> Of course there might be a yet unknown external measure of qualia...
> There is some folklore that contends that the pupils
> of people viewing something that interests them dilate...

Still just objective science. I can infer that you experience the heat  
qualia when you pull your hand away from my blowtorch. But still I will  
have no knowledge of your experiential knowledge of that heat. For all I  
really know, intense heat feels to you like intense cold feels to me.

> I hate to dredge up old unpopular references but I
> still am intrigued by MacDougal's "soul weight"
> experiment aka "21 grams".

I think one can say consiousness has mass, but that the mass of  
consiousness must be exactly equal to the mass of the matter in the brain  
required to reflect on experience. Tiny brains with little mass probably  
don't have that mass or that ability. Larger more massive brains like ours  
have it. Might be about 21 grams worth of mass. When it happened, mother  
nature got a blackjack. :)

-gts