[ExI] Fwd: Fwd: Chalmers

[John Clark]

On Thu, Dec 19, 2019 at 9:17 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

Hi Brent:

*> I Completely agree with everything else you are saying including what
> you are saying about volition, choice…, You’ve even converted me to the
> camp that says the term AGI is bad.  Long live the term AI!*
>

So we true believers must band together and punish the AGI heretics who
deface the sacred name of AI and....sorry sorry.... I get a little carried
away sometimes.

>> “I don't see how such a neural ponytail could falsify solipsism”
>
>
>
> *> Are you saying that the left hemisphere of your brain does not know,
> absolutely, that it is NOT the only hemisphere in existence? *
>

Yes. Homo sapiens existed for at least a 100 thousand years before they
consciously knew the brain was important much less that the brain had
hemispheres; the ancient Egyptians carefully preserved every organ in the
body EXCEPT for the brain which they thought was just humdrum packing
material that did nothing but hinder the mummification process, so they
pulled the brain out of the head through the nostrils with an iron hook and
discarded the resulting mess. Alcor is somewhat more careful because we've
learned over the centuries but it hasn't been easy because the brain does
not come with any built in knowledge about the brain.

And unless your corpus callosum that connects your brain hemispheres has
been surgically severed your left hemispheres does not currently know what
it would be like to be a left hemisphere unconnected to the right hemisphere.



> > These twins
> <https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/the-hogan-twins-share-a-brain-and-see-out-of-each-others-eyes?fbclid=IwAR24WaZJuZFucfU41DRX3zgmuWwYhiYL2MfINsctVKgah4PFLoCtL_Zx4Fga2LwRIxXHI9-jg5bX7WvaHeuiloko3WZ-jfzl3i1Cdbxv3HfHZCNhyg>
> know, directly and absolutely that their twin’s brain and consciousness
> exist, don’t you think?
>

I don't know, it depends on how large the bandwidth between the 2 brains
is. I know a little (a very little) about how your brain works just by the
trickle of information that comes from your Emails, but if our brains were
linked by a fiber optic cable of huge capacity and we were close enough
that signal delays were not important and if every thought you had I had,
and every thought I had you had, it would be meaningless to say that you
and I were 2 seperate people. I don't know the details of the twin's case
but I doubt the bandwidth is that large.


> >> “you wouldn't be Brent Allsop anymore, you'd be John Clark.”
>
>
>
> *> When I’m talking about effing the ineffable, I’m only talking about at
> the elemental redness level,*
>

When I close my eyes I can remember what redness is like, when the
Clark/Allsop hybrid closes his eyes he remembers something called redness
but is he remembering Clark's redness or Allsop's redness or neither?
Perhaps he's remembering both, perhaps what Clark would call red Allsop
would call green, so when the Clark/Allsop hybrid is thinking about "red"
he is thinking about yellow.

> *It’s as simple as the abstract word red isn’t red.  You need a
> dictionary to know what red means. *
>

You can find out what the wavelength of red is from one but nobody learns
what the qualia "redness" means from a dictionary, they learn it from
examples. Before you learned how to read somebody pointed to a tomato and
said "red" then they pointed to a strawberry and said "red", you figured
out that the two things had something in common and learned what "redness"
signified.  A AI would also learn from examples not from a dictionary.
Dictionaries and definitions are just not fundamentally important, all
definitions in a dictionary are made of words that all have definitions
also made of words and round and round we go. The only thing that can break
out of that infinite loop and give meaning to language is examples,
somebody points to a tall green thing and says "tree" and you get the idea.


> > I can't see how Darwinian Evolution managed to come up with a conscious
>> creature like me
>>
>


> *> Darwinian evolution decided to run your consciousness directly on
> physical qualities,*
>

Why does Darwinian evolution care about consciousness or even know that
such a thing exists?


> * > because it is more efficient and it didn’t need the extra hardware
> required to make you substrate independent.*
>

So you think it would be difficult to make a super intelligent computer
that was NOT conscious but easier to make a super intelligent computer that
WAS conscious. So by Occam's razor if you ever run across a super
intelligent computer your default position should be that it is conscious,
and you'd better hope the AI feels the same way about you.

John K Clark
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