[ExI] Digital Consciousness .

[John Clark]

 Gordon <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:

 > I think computer architectures will need to evolve a great deal to
> achieve what organic brains can do. They won't be recognizable as digital
> computers. They won't be digital software/hardware platforms.
>

That depends on what you mean. If a computer running Mathematica is solving
a difficult equation symbolically not numerically would you call that a
digital solution, and if is digital and a human solves the same equation
and gets the same answer would that still be a digital answer? And If a
digital computer is simulating a analog computer (and they can do so with
much much higher precision than a real analog computer can in a sense
simulate itself) is it still a purely digital platform?

> Euglena are remarkable in that they seem to know lightness from darkness.
> But do they really experience qualia? I think not.
>

If so then they know lightness and darkness but they don't know qualia thus
lightness and darkness are not qualia. And thus I don't know what qualia is
and I don't even know what "know" is.

> I think real consciousness is about knowing what one knows.
>

I don't believe that Euglena or human beings spend much time thinking about
thinking about something because there just isn't much profit in it,
instead most of the time we're thinking (conscious) of other people and
other things and of hypothetical future events and hypothetical actions
that could be made in response to those hypothetical future events that
could maximize the chances of reaching a goal.

> I think there is something going on here besides ordinary chemical
> reactions *as we currently understand them*. There is something happening
> in the biology/chemistry/physics of the brain
>

If experimental scientists are skilled enough to measure a thing as subtle
as a neutrino or dark matter or as profound as the mass of a star a billion
light years away or the expansion and acceleration of the very universe
itself why in hell are they unable to measure even a hint of a hint of
mysterious new physics going on in the brain even after enormous effort ?

 John K Clark
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