[ExI] Digital Consciousness .

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Bryan, Haven't heard from you in a while.

I have a question for you.  Are you saying a redness quality is a 
quality of the strawberry?  Or, worse, that a redness quality doesn't 
exist?  You seem to be saying that there is no evidence that things like 
a redness quality exist?

We know that we have things like a redness quale, a greenness quale that 
we experience, and we know, more surely than we know anything, the 
qualitative difference between them.  The expert consensus nearly 
unanimously (Notice that even Dennett's new camp now supports this 
prediction: http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/21) agrees that these 
qualities are qualities of something in our brain or qualities of the 
final result of the perception process, not the initial cause.  These 
qualities suffer from the quale interpretation problem, which is why 
they are blind to any non grounded, abstracting or cause and effect 
based observation. (see: http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/19 ).

The only remaining significant disagreement seems to be about the nature 
of the relationship between qualities like redness and greenness we can 
experience, and the underlying neural correlates.  Some people predict 
it is a functional relationship, other say it is a particular material 
(i.e. without the right stuff, no redness quale), others predict it is 
quantum based, and so on.  Obviously, all these are very testable, so it 
is only a matter of time till science forces everyone into the same 
camp, where everyone can use the resulting maps to correctly predict the 
relationship between all elemental qualia our brain 'paints' our 
conscious knowledge with, and the underlying causal properties of such.

When someone that represents 'red' with a quale you've never experienced 
before in your life, effs to you, for the first time, what that quale is 
like, and you say: "Oh wow, what a wonderful quality.  I've never 
experienced anything like that before."  as is being predicted by the 
leading theories, It'll obviously be quite convincing, or falsifying, of 
many naive working hypotheses, right?

Brent Allsop




On 4/27/2013 1:11 PM, Bryan Bishop wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 2:56 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
>> You know, the theory that consciousness is caused by little green gnomes is
>> also testable and falsifiable, and neuroscience has not yet found any
>> evidence contradicting it.
> Has neuroscience found any evidence whatsoever of consciousness? Until
> then, I prefer to not believe in it.
>
> - Bryan
> http://heybryan.org/
> 1 512 203 0507
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