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

[Ben]

Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com> wrote:

 >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

And the answer to that is 'none'. Internal operations are irrelevant, as 
long as external behaviour remains the same.


 > two people behaving the same, saying something is 'red' could be 
modified to be inverted from each other.  One person's redness could be 
engineered to be more like another's greenness.

Perhaps, but the point is that we could never know if this was the case, 
not even in principle. And neither could the subjects of this experiment.


 > 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.

That sentence makes no sense. "What is really going on" and "Qualitative 
experience" are different kinds of thing. And that's why this 'possing 
the impossible' is not possible.


 > 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.

Yes, indeed. What you're describing is an incomplete substitution that 
doesn't actually give the same outputs for the same inputs. You talk 
about connections, but nobody is suggesting breaking any connections, so 
there's no reason why the same associations would not occur. The only 
reason that interactions would be lost is if the interface of the new 
part was different to the old. And all along, we're talking about 
systems that preserve this interface exactly. So as long as that 
cortical column preserves all its connections with the rest of the 
brain, and implements exactly the same behaviour in terms of 
inputs/outputs, then it must be a 'correct' substitution.

Think of it this way: How many different ways could you write a function 
that calculated the number of bricks needed to build a house, given a 
standard set of inputs such as size of house, size of bricks, etc.?
If you were a builder, and wanted to use such a function, would you care 
in the slightest how it works, as long as it gives the correct answer? 
Would you prefer one over the other, if they all produced exactly the 
same result, were exactly as easy to use, and took exactly the same time 
to run, cost the same, ran on the same computers, etc.?

I suspect you wouldn't.


 > 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"

Do you think there might be a good reason for this?


Ben Zaiboc