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

Fri Mar 24 19:01:14 UTC 2017

Hi Ben,

I apologize for not responding to some of your questions, I need to try to
be more diligent in this.  I appreciate your patience, and I hope if I’m
failing to answer any questions, you’ll repeat it till I do.  But you
should have heard me trying to describe this stuff 10 or 20 years ago, I
think I’ve improved lots, thanks to patient help from people like all of
you.  In the past, most people just dismissed what I was trying to say,
rather than trying to understand it enough to ask more questions.  So at
least I’ve gotten a few people understanding enough to ask more questions
till they understand it fully.  It seems that communication of this stuff
is harder than the subject, itself.  It seems harder than trying to eff
what people falsely think is ineffable.

I think you have it right, about what is the crux of the matter.  What
internal operations are important to include as necessary for qualitative
experience behavior, and what is not?  I think we would all agree that
inverted or diversity of qualia is possible.  In other words, two people
behaving the same, saying something is “red” could be modified to be
inverted from each other.  One’s person’s redness could be engineered to be
more like another’s greenness.

So, it’s critical to try to find effing of the ineffable ways to know what
is really going on qualitative experience wise, in people’s brains,
compared to our own.

For example, with a large flat panel TV display, much of what that is, and
how it functions, doesn’t matter.  You can have a metal back plate, or a
glass back plate…    You could be using plasma pixel elements, or LCD pixel
elements, or for that matter, you could be using oil paints – all producing
the same set of what is required to build a color picture we can have
unified composite qualitative knowledge of.

The important thing to keep in mind with a picture compared to knowledge of
a picture, is how the knowledge is all bound together so we can be aware of
it, qualitatively, all at once, as a composite qualitative experience.  And
there is much more semantic info bound into the knowledge than just the
colored pixel elements.  You can recognize people, fruit, mountains, and
lots of information about what is going on.  All this is bound together so
all of it is interacting with all the rest.  This kind of large scale
interaction is what makes us so intelligent, and why evolution uses it over
isolated, easily swappable, bits which can be neuro substituted in
incorrect ways.

The large screen TV picture pixels are very different.  One pixel has no
relation to any other pixels at all.  Let alone the most lower left pixel
being related to the upper right most pixel.  But with us, all that stuff
is related, and bound together, so that when one pixel changes, or becomes
broken or black, it sticks out in comparison with all the others, like a
sore thumb.  To the TV, when one pixel dies, it has no effect on the rest
of the TV.

With a simplistic system that we normally think of neuro substituting, no
matter what or how you do it, you can reproduce large flat screen TV like
functionality.  But, if you do it incorrectly, you can lose the ability for
the lower left most pixel to interact with the upper right most pixel, so
that you can tell if any of them are miss behaving or broken.

That’s why I try to use the simplistic qualitative world, where the pixels
can be represented with something simple, like glutamate, and glycine, and
the binding mechanism can be a single neuron that connects to every single
pixel.  Objectively, it is something that works like a key, in a lock,
knowing that when something is broken, or not the right color, the lock is
failing, compared to all the other thousands of qualitative keys in
qualitative locks which are working and distinguishing from each other.

This kind of simplistic system includes the necessary functionality.  Multiple
pixels that can take on divers qualities, and something that binds them all
together (a single neuron in the simplistic case), enabling the system to
detect, and be aware of incorrect changes in any of them.

Stathis, and so many other brilliant people, can’t get beyond: “But you
*cannot* substitute a component preserving its interactions with its
neighbors and end up changing the qualitative experience of redness and
greenness”.  But it is easy to do this kind of neuro substitution in an
insufficient system, in an incorrect way, where you remove the critical
functionality of distinguishing between anything like redness and greenness
or glycine and glutamate, or for that matter any possible “redness
function” compared to a “greenness function” – again, if done correctly

You must do the neuro substitution on some type of system or some type of
theory, like my simplistic theory, that includes the required ability to
distinguish between physical things like glutamate and glycine (in an
objective sense) or redness and greenness (in a subjective sense).  If you
do a neuro substitution on a sufficient system, that can distinguish things
on a large scale like this, then it becomes obvious how you can easily do a
nero substitution on an inadequate system, in a way that makes you think
there are “hard problems” and that there are no qualia, including
“functional qualia” anywhere in the system that you are neuro substituting.
And you can also see, with the neuro substitution on an adequate system,
how it can be done, resulting in necessary things like inverted qualia
equivalent appearing behavior – and it also includes in your sufficient
theory or testable system, ways to “eff the ineffable” in various week and
strong ways, the way our left hemisphere surely does with our right.

Please tell me again, what other questions you have, or if I haven’t
answered any of them with this attempt.

Thanks,

Brent

On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 3:36 PM, Ben <bbenzai at yahoo.com> wrote:

> John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Am I correct in saying you are arguing if the internal operation of a
> neuron has changed then that counts as a change in behaviour even if the
> neuron as a whole behaves the same way with other external neurons, and
> even if the person as a whole behaves the same way with other external
> people?
>
> I suspect that this is the crux of the matter. That Brent thinks it makes
> a difference what goes on inside a black box, so that two different black
> boxes with different internal processing but the same interfaces, are
> somehow producing different behaviour, even though that is demonstrably
> false.
>
> > I sometimes have trouble following you ...
> You and me both. I await his response to your question with interest. He
> seems to show no inclination to respond to my questions, but perhaps you'll
> have better luck.
>
> Ben Zaiboc
>
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