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

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Sat., 25 Mar. 2017 at 9:07 am, Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> Hi Status,
>
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 2:50 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> I think you imagine that if glutamate is changed and glutamate is
> responsible for red qualia, then distal parts of the system (such as those
> reporting red qualia) will change even if all the physical interactions of
> the glutamate substitute are the same. But that is impossible.
>
>
>
> Ha, with this I think I’ve caught you in another clear example of the
> isolationist mistake you are making.
>
>
>
> If glutamate was redness, then the one neuron representing the one voxel
> element representing the one spot on the surface of the strawberry, would
> be firing on all of its many, maybe even tens of thousands of its
> downstream synapses with glutamate.  And if you changed glutamate, with
> glycene in any one of those synapses, the entire system would be screaming:
> “Wait, back up, that glycine isn’t anything like it’s neighboring redness
> glutamate, until you replace that incorrect glycine in that one synapse,
> and interpreted it qualitatively correctly, by interpreting it back to real
> redness, um I mean real glutamate.  Then you would have to repeat this
> same problem, until you replace all the glutamate, um a mean redness
> detectors in the entire brain, all in one big substitution step, and only
> then replace the entire comparison system, including all memory of
> glutamate, I mean redness, with glycine.  And only then, with that
> massive substitution (it sucks how this massive substitution requirement
> always gets left out of your simplistic example), would you finally be able
> to have it substituted to be a qualia (or oneness and zeroness) invert
> where greenness, and all memory of such, has been replaced with redness,
> (or oneness) and visa versa.
>

If you replace glutamate with glycine then yes, the whole system would be
screaming that something was terribly wrong,  because glycine will have no
effect on glutamate receptors. Not only will any redness detection function
fail, but the whole brain will probably stop working and the subject will
die. That is why you have to do a more elaborate replacement: glutamate
with glycine, glutamate receptors with glycine receptors (simplistically -
you have to also make sure that the glycine receptors operate the same ion
channels etc. as the glutamate receptors). Once you do this, the whole
brain will work in the same way as before the substitution. It cannot
possibly say "wait, back up, that glycine isn't anything like its
neighbouring redness glutamate", because the neurons controlling speech
will all be firing in exactly the same way as before.
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