[ExI] Chalmers

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Tue, 17 Dec 2019 at 15:04, Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> 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.
>

Chalmers did not develop the neural substitution thought experiment, but in
the cited paper he assumed that neural substitution did not preserve
consciousness, as you also claim, and showed that if this were so it would
lead to absurdity.

> --
Stathis Papaioannou
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