[ExI] Chalmers

[Brent Allsop]

Yay, someone brought up the consciousness topic!!  Thanks You.

On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 8:01 PM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Yes, "consciousness is an illusion" is nonsense.  The word illusion
> presupposes an object of the illusion.  That object is the consciousness.
> Illusion is qualia!
>

Exactly, I couldn’t have said it better
<https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-coherent-argument-in-support-of-consciousness-being-an-illusion/answer/Brent-Allsop-1>.
Nobody can deny Qualia.  All good theories of consciousness must include
them, and there is growing evidence that all experts agree with this
in “Representational
Qualia Theory <https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Representational-Qualia/6>”.
No other theory has any significant amount of support.  Even Dennett’s
current “Predictive Bayesian Coding Theory
<https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Dennett-s-PBC-Theory/21>” is now a
supporting sub camp to “Representational Qualia Theory
<https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Representational-Qualia/6>”. This
defines consciousness is computationally bound elemental physical qualities
in the brain we are directly aware of like redness and greenness.  If you
are consciously aware of something, there must be something physical that
is that knowledge, and this knowledge must be computationally bound to the
rest of your current conscious knowledge.



Qualia are physical qualities, and they can “causally interact with
measuring devices”.  But since the physics that interact with our senses
aren’t anything like the target of perception, all forms of causal
perception require the correct qualitative interpretation to observe a
target’s physical quality.  You can’t know what the word “red” means,
without a physical definition.  We don’t “perceive” redness, rudeness is
the physical quality that is the final result of perception.  You can’t now
the physical quality of anything without experiencing it directly,
subjectively, in the brain.  The physical redness we experience directly is
the definition of the word “red”.  We need to distinguish between reality
and knowledge of reality.  Physicists can describe everything about
physics, they just can’t tell us the physical quality any of their
descriptions are describing.  Physics, today, is all qualia blind.  None of
it defines “redness”.



Stathis has praise for Chalmers’ Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing
Qualia <http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html> but in my opinion this “neural
substitution” argument (copied from Hans Moravec’s book “Mind Children”
published 8 years before this paper) has done as much damage to the
philosophy of mind as “Naive Realism”.  Once you understand that
consciousness is computationally bound elemental physical qualities,
the fallacy
in the argument
<https://canonizer.com/topic/79-Neural-Substtn-Fallacy/2#statement> becomes
obvious.



The bottom line is there is no “hard mind body problem” it’s just a color
problem.  We simply don’t yet know the qualitative color of anything, other
than the physics (whatever this physics may be from Functionalism
<https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Qualia-Emerge-from-Function/18>, to
Materialism <https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Qualia-are-Material-Qualities/7>,
to Quantum <https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Orch-OR/20>, to dualism
<https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Substance-Dualism/48>…) we directly
experience subjectively.  Once experimentalists stop being qualia blind,
they will finally be able to objectively discover which of all their
descriptions of physics are a description of redness, falsifying all be THE
ONE true theory.  Knowing the qualitative physical color of things will
close the last “god” (or ghosts) of the gaps.  We just need more people to
support “Representational Qualia Theory
<https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Representational-Qualia/6>”, or one of it’s
supporting sub camps (like signing a petition) so the experimentalists (and
all the “peer reviewers” who continue to reject any papers on this) will
finally get the message about “qualia blindness”.
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