[ExI] Digital Consciousness .

[spike]

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From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of spike

-----Original Message-----
 [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Brent Allsop

>>...Thanks for putting so much effort towards this, and I apologize that 
>I still, despite significant progress thanks to everyone's help, have so
much difficulty communicating...  Brent Allsop


>...Brent there is nothing wrong with your communication skills.  Qualia is
(are?) a difficult concept.  I have pondered the hell out of it and still
don't feel like I have even suck at it.  I would need to vastly improve and
get a number of breakthrough insights on qualia to just suck.  It isn't your
fault: your favorite topic is just hard to grok.  spike
_______________________________________________


I have been pondering why it is that qualia is (are?) difficult to
understand, and I now have the insight: it is because there are no
equations.

The classic figurative notion for a complicated concept is "rocket science."
But I would argue that rocket science is not hard to understand at all: it
is so completely mapped out with equations, every bit of it, end to end,
that it is extremely understandable.  All you need to do is get those
equations, and now we have our astonishingly powerful mathematical toolkit
to bear on it: we can completely understand rocket science well enough to
fire a rocket and know right where it is going to land on a planet millions
of km away months from now.  Rocket science is not at all mysterious, not
even so much as what is causing our honeybees to decline.  We have equations
to describe it all.

Qualia has (have?) no equations, so I just stand here on the ground flapping
my arms.  If qualia get (gets?) mathematized, we rocket scientists will
mount up on wings as eagles, soar with the winds on that topic.  Until then,
just useless arm flapping.

spike