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

Fri Mar 31 19:49:19 UTC 2017

I think it is a brute fact that consciousness is the way data feels when it
is being processed.

  John K Clark

Two things:  define 'feel'.  If you are conscious you can feel it; you can
feel it if you're conscious.  Round and round.  Conscious = feeling???
Data processing can be verified objectively for man and machine.  Is
feeling something that goes along with this (epiphenomenon?) , or it IS
this?

Dreams are still unaccounted for.  A limited form of consciousness, maybe.
Outside data get ignored; inside data get processed.

bill w

On Fri, Mar 31, 2017 at 10:19 AM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 4:11 PM, Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > 
>> Part of our consciousness is a real detection system 
>>
>
> 
> I've asked this more than once before but I'll ask it again because it is
> the key to the entire matter, WHAT'S WITH THIS "*OUR*" BUSINESS? You have
> direct evidence of the existence of one conscious being in the universe,
> and that's it. Nothing more. After that all you can do is use a theory to
> infer consciousness from behavior.  Even if there is no proof I think it is
> a very reasonable assumption the theory is true, but it would be
> inconsistent to invoke it only when the being in question has a soft
> squishy brain and ignore it if the brain is hard and metallic.
>
>
>>
>> > 
>> of whatever is the neural correlate of redness.  So, if we are talking
>> about qualia, we are talking about consciously detecting the real thing,
>> and distinguishing it from greenness.
>>
>
> 
> What evidence do
>  
> you have that you can do this but a computer with a hard metallic brain
> can not
> ?
>
> And w
> hat evidence do you have that you can do this and I
> ,
> a human with a soft squishy brain
> ,
> can too
> ?
>
>
>> > 
>> That's what consciousness is, it is a detector of qualities of nature of
>> something in our brain.  If you neurosubstitute out this ability to do this
>> detection (either subjectively or objectively), your argument becomes
>> invalid.
>>
>
> Your thought experiment is invalid. Good thought experiments like
> Einstein's show things, but you're not showing that one system experiences
> qualia and the other doesn't, you're just stated that one does and one
> doesn't. You've ruled out behavior for some reason I don't understand, so
> until you can find some other way to tell when the system is detecting
> qualia and when it is not we can learn nothing from your thought experiment.
>
>
>> > 
>> and there is a real part of nature that has a redness quality, without it
>> being some kind of: "A miracle happens here."
>>
>
> OK, suppose someday we find
> a real part of nature that has a redness quality
> , the next obvious question would be, "what gives this real part on
> nature the redness quality?".  For anything, not just consciousness, the
> chain of "why did that happen?" questions can only have 2 possible outcomes:
>
> 1)
> The chain of questions goes on forever
> like an infinitely large
> matryoshka
> 
> doll
>  with one question always lurking inside another.
>
> 2) The chain of questions eventually terminates in a brute fact. At that
> point if you want you could indeed say "a
> miracle happens here
> "; or you could be less dramatic and say 
> there are just no more whys in the why bag.
>
> I think it is a brute fact that consciousness is the way data feels when
> it is being processed.
>
>
>   John K Clark
>  
>
>
>
>>
>
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