[ExI] Causal Properties of redness (Was Re: Do digital computers feel)

[Brent Allsop]

On 12/19/2016 8:41 PM, John Clark wrote:
> it seems to me that subjectivity, like experiencing a red or green 
> quale, would require some minimum amount of complexity, and a molecule 
> is just too simple for that.   ​
>
and
On 12/19/2016 8:41 PM, John Clark wrote:
> I conclude consciousness must be a byproduct of intelligence ​just as 
> a spandrel is the byproduct of an arch.

With these, and other things you've said, I think I'm starting to 
understand more about your theory, and how to test for it, unless... 
(see below)  Let me see if I can restate it?

So if your theory is proven true, you will be able to take a 
sufficiently complex set of bits and organize them in the right way, put 
them in the right (red) context and wala, a redness quality will be 
experienced by you.  And potentially all you need to do to change this 
same set of bits into your greenness qualia, is put them in your 
different (green) context?

But what do you mean by "byproduct of"?  Certainly that at least implies 
a causal relationship from the physics to the qualia - but are you 
saying the reverse isn't true? - that the quality of your experience 
that is the byproduct of physics has no detectable causal effect on 
physical reality?  (This is why I stated, unless - above)

Certainly, when I'm picking strawberries, it can be said that the 
initial cause of me picking a strawberry (and avoiding the green things) 
is the causal properties of a redness quality of my knowledge of the 
strawberry.  If you observe or represent this physical process with 
abstracted data, it will look like the causal properties of the neural 
correlate.  In my case, you would observe that the causal property 
causing me to pick the strawberry would be simply the causal properties 
of glutamate since they are the same causal properties of the redness I 
can experience.  In your case the initial causal property causing you to 
pick the strawberry would be be the correctly organized set of bits put 
in the red context. Certainly, this could be considered the neural 
correlate of your theory - that can be considered the initial cause of 
you picking the strawberry?  And if this is true, you could detect your 
neural correlates for red and green (based on whether they were in the 
red or green context?), and know or be able to detect if someone else 
had inverted qualia - or not - from you right? - because the other 
person's set of bits representing "red" were in the different context 
which you reliably experience as greenness.?


On 12/19/2016 8:41 PM, John Clark wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 18, 2016 at 8:23 PM, Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com 
> <mailto:brent.allsop at gmail.com>>wrote:
>
>     ​> ​
>     The behavior of the neural correlate and it's quality are one and
>     the same.
>
>
> ​I'm not certain what you mean by that. Behavior and qualia are not 
> the same but if Darwin was right then one is the 
> inevitable consequence of the other.​

Again, are you implying that your redness quality has no physical causal 
properties?

I'm predicting that my redness quality must have detectable physical 
causal properties (Else, what would be the initial cause of me picking 
the strawberry?).  And if my theory is proven true, these would be one 
and the same as the the causal properties of glutamate.  If your theory 
is proven true, wouldn't the causal properties causing you to pick the 
strawberry be one and the same as the causal properties of the correct 
set of bits in the right context that is your redness?


On 12/20/2016 7:05 PM, John Clark wrote:
> The ASCII sequence "red" can not differentiate between red light and 
> green light even if it has access to testing equipment, but a suitably 
> written program stored in a digital computer can.  ​

Aren't you saying that "a suitably written program stored in a digital 
computer"
does have something for which to interpret the abstracted word "red" as 
- which is the neural correlate of your redness?  With all current 
computers that I know of nobody has done anything to represent red with 
the correct set of organized bits in the right context (i.e what you 
mean by suitably written?).  If your theory turns out to be true, we 
will be able to organize computers that do represent "red" with the 
correct set of bits, in the red context, so we can predict that they do 
represent redness like you do.  But, as I said, this would be very 
different than one of today's simple digital computers which are not in 
any way what you call "suitably written"  - The initial cause of you 
picking that strawberry is the right set of bits in a red context - 
while the initial cause of a simple digital computer picking the 
strawberry is just any physical representation some piece of hardware is 
interpreting or transduceing to the next downstream representation or 
motor neuron, as if it was the word "red" - without anything like the 
right set of bits in your red context.

Brent Allsop


P.S.  John, thank you so much for sticking with all this for so long!!  
You are the first person that thinks anything like you that has 
persisted with me for anything like this long.





-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20161220/88c874e1/attachment.html>