[ExI] Quantum consciousness, quantum mysticism, and transhumanist engineering

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Stathis and John,



It seems to me that there is a clear reason you guys are struggling with
all this, and I can’t understand why you guys can’t see (or at least you
don’t show any evidence of understanding) what seems so obvious to me.



A critical part of consciousness intelligence is the ability to be
simultaneously aware of lots of diverse qualitative experiences.  In
addition to redness and greenness, we are also aware of lots of other
qualitative pieces of information, such as sweet good tasting strawberries
are red(the ones we want to pick), and green ones are bitter/not yet ripe
(the ones we don’t want)…  The only way to do equivalent things with not
bound together discretely binary components is to have large inefficient
rapid search mechanisms that can do the same kind of functionality through
lots of isolated digital data, to perform the same kind of intelligent
behavior.  Not only is the way we consciously do it, by being aware of all
of it at once, much more efficient, it’s easy to see why evolution used
this much more efficiently intelligent system that is aware of everything
bound together instead of large searches over large sets of discretely
isolated data representations, the way we need to inefficiently do it with
current computers..



Again, as I’ve been saying, a minimal example of this kind of efficiently
powerfully intelligent qualitative conscious functionally is something that
is doing a redness function, something that is doing a greenness function,
and something that is able to functionally bind these two (and lots of
other stuff) so we can be aware of both of them at the same time.  And if
you provide any such minimal set of functionality in any proposed
theoretical system, whether the theoretical redness experience is substrate
independent or not, how to do all three types of week, strung and strongest
forms of effing of the ineffable, will also be obvious.  (John, I know
you’ll object to this so see below)  And also, if you provide such minimal
necessary qualitative functionality in your theory, how you can do neural
substitution in such a way that you can swap out the redness, for
greenness, or redness for abstracted representations of the same (i.e. a
qualia less abstracted computer that only falsely claims it knows what red
is, as can be proven to all by effing the ineffable.  Stathis, I don’t see
any evidence that you understand any of this, nor the implications it has
on the how it is possible to do neural substitution in an incorrect way
(resulting all the “hard problems” some of which you and John are
struggling with), and how you can do it in a correct way, where there are
no hard problems and everything is expected, understandable, sufficiently
accounted for, effable and provable, and no hard problems.



Oh, and John, I anticipate that you are going to still object to any kind
of “effing the ineffable”, but this doesn’t work for me.  Because even if
your theory doesn’t have any type of elemental levels of qualitative
experience that would be “easy” to eff as I predict, you will still be able
to “eff the ineffable” by binding two brains together in a kind of meta
conscious system that is bound together (similar to the way your right and
left hemispheres are bound) that can both fully experience “Johns redness”,
and “Brent’s redness” in the same kind of bound together way so you can
qualitatively completely compare the two, in a way allowing you to know
which parts of the qualitative experiences are similar, and which parts are
not.



Brent




On Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 9:46 AM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Fri., 10 Mar. 2017 at 12:56 pm, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Mar 9, 2017  Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >  The point I was making is that the implausible idea that evolution
> chanced upon the only way to produce consciousness
>
>
> Even
> ​
> if Evolution just got lucky and came up with a consciousness gene by
> ​
> accident it wouldn't have been able to keep it for long
> ​
> if consciousness is not a byproduct of intelligence;
> ​
> it would be lost by genetic drift. All genes experience mutation but if
> the gene is vital and the mutation renders it inoperative then
> ​
> that nonfunctional gene
> ​
> will not be passed
> ​
> on
> ​
> into the next generation
> ​;
> but the
> ​​
> consciousness gene has no effect o
> ​n​
> behavior
> ​
> so there would be no way for natural selection to even notice it was
> missing
> ​ much less select against it​
> . So in just a few generations humans would be a race of zombies
> ​
> with a mutated consciousness gene that no longer worked
> ​.​
>  And yet I know for a fact that I am conscious.
>
> There are only 3 ways out of this contradiction:
>
> 1) Darwin was dead wrong.
> 2) I am unique, I am the last conscious being in the universe
> 3)
> ​
> Consciousness is the unavoidable byproduct of intelligence because
> consciousness is just the way data feel when it is being processed.
>
> ​I don't think Darwin was wrong so it's got to be #2 or 3.​
>
>
> I think it's 3, but the other possibility is that consciousness is tied to
> organic chemistry, and if evolution had electric circuits to play with, for
> example, then the world would have been filled with zombie robots instead
> of conscious animals. On the face of it this is implausible but not absurd;
> but if true it leads to absurdity, as below.
>
> >   leads to the even more implausible idea that consciousness is
> independent of brain function.
>
>
> A change in the physical chemistry
> ​of my brain ​
> leads to a change
> ​in my​
>  consciousness, and
> ​my​
>  conscious experience, such as a itch, leads to a change in a physical
> object, such as
> ​my​
>  hand scratching
> ​my​
>  nose. I just don't understand what more evidence the skeptics of a
> physics-consciousness link need.
>
>
> The proponents of the idea that consciousness is tied to organic chemistry
> would say that swapping biological parts for non-biological functionally
> equivalent parts would lead to zombies, or at least differently conscious
> beings. At first glance, that seems to be correct. But with a little
> further thought it becomes evident that this would mean either that
> consciousness and behaviour are decoupled, or that it would be possible to
> have an arbitrarily large change in your consciousness and not notice.
> these bizarre situations can be avoided if consciousness is, as you say, a
> necessary side-effect of intelligent behaviour, regardless of how it is
> generated.
>
> --
> Stathis Papaioannou
>
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