[ExI] you asked for it -here it is

Sat Dec 28 05:26:43 UTC 2019

Augh oh.  Bill said:

“There are numerous reports of conscious experience even when what we know
as "neural activity" has stopped (i.e. near death experience.)”

You’re not going all hooga booga on us are you? ;)

Not that, that is bad.  Some of my best friends and family are like this.

You are a "materialist" right?  All the stuff Chopra and all the other
hooga booga folk talk about like: “Without consciousness, the universe
would vanish in a puff of smoke” and “The universe and the observer exist
as a pair. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of the universe that
ignores consciousness,” and on and on ad infinitum, is just them conflating
their subjective knowledge of the universe with the universe.

The huge gap in our science that fails to account for qualia (really just
physical qualities or color) frees these religious folk to get so much
traction with all this kind of, in my opinion, anti scientific and
"unfalsifiable" ("unfalsifiable is their term) “crap in the gap.”

If secularists (and Spike) would just stop thinking sloppily about the
epistemology of color (as in notice the obvious: that the word red isn’t
physically red), instead of just “quining” or ignoring this explanatory
gap, they could once and for all close this last remaining gap full of crap
by simply telling us which of all our physical descriptions are a
description of redness.

Bill also said: “What about chemicals that participate in qualia in the
brain and then go to a different part of the body?”

"*participate *in qualia"?  Why does everyone insist on using words that
seperate qualia from physical reality?  We should be more interested in
physical redness, not just what physics "participates" with it.  Yet
another word to add to the continuously growing list of terms people seem
to be compelled to use which separate qualia from physical reality:

• Generates
• Causes
• Associated with
• Correlates with
• Arises from
• Supervenes on
• Intervenes on
• Participate in

[image: image.png]

It’s as simple as the fact that the above is a pile of glutamate.  We say
it *IS* white, because it reflects white light.  We don't say it
"participates in white."  But it’s actual physical quality or colorness we
can be directly aware of *IS* redness.  Its colorness could be redness,
even when it is sitting in a pile like that.  We don't doubt that red paint
stops being red when it stops 'participating' in a painting, or when there
is no light to reflect off of it.  Just like a painter collects chemicals
that reflect the right kind of light out of which to paint a painting, we
need to take the right kind of chemicals that have the right colorness, and
computationally bind them together to build any kind of composite
qualitative experience of knowledge you want.  Everything from love, to
free will, and everything else that the hooga booga types like to think is
more than just an artificially constructed virtual reality seeming we think
of as reality.

Again, there is no “hard mind problem” it’s just a color problem.  And to
solve that problem all we need to do is stop being qualia blind by not
conflating reality with our knowledge of reality.

On Fri, Dec 27, 2019 at 8:49 PM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> What is the absence of matter?  There are absences of matter all around
> us, including ones in the brain, that consciousness seems to have no
> problem 'traveling' across.  Does consciousness exists as it goes between
> points, or can it be frozen in time?  Is it located in points or between
> them, or both?  Is it fundamentally relational and not the same kind of
> physical property that can exist in a single state, like charge for
> example?  Qualia seem very acute but it seems like the traditional view is
> that brain consciousness is related to the movement of electricity,
> chemicals, and proteins.  But it does seem like 'redness' being one evident
> thing should mean it can be represented by one clear state.
>
> This thought experiment (can consciousness be 'frozen'?) gives me a lot of
> confusion.  Qualia are acute, but *comprehending* a quale requires time!
> What the fuck is up with that?
>
> Which leads me to ask, is there consciousness in the brain even when there
> is no motion?  There are numerous reports of conscious experience even when
> what we know as "neural activity" has stopped (i.e. near death
> experience.)  An easy solution to this is to simply accept that it is not
> only the electricity of the brain, but the entire molecular/atomic
> composition which is integrated and experiencing consciousness somehow.  I
> think this is much more parsimonious.  Why should only electrochemical
> signaling cause consciousness?  You would certainly not be conscious if I
> removed your glia, or astrocytes, or CSF.  Just because we understand them
> less shouldn't mean they are any less consciousness-associated.
>
> What about chemicals that participate in qualia in the brain and then go
> to a different part of the body?  Or the blood that is in the brain during
> the experience of a certain quale?  I don't understand how these can be
> fundamentally separated from the experience.  They are absolutely necessary
> for the experience.  Maybe they don't 'live' in the brain, but is that the
> criterion?  The brain is fluid anyway.
>
> And all space was originally one, and all matter/energy was originally
> connected, so in the end I have a hard time separating my consciousness
> from the rest of everything (Sagan's apple pie thing which I think a lot of
> people don't understand or just take as some trite "wow the universe is
> big" science deal.)
>
> On Fri, Dec 27, 2019 at 6:56 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> https://dailygalaxy.com/2019/12/the-ultimate-mystery-consciousness-may-exist-in-the-absence-of-matter-2019-most-popular/
>>
>> The cosmos itself is conscious and more, including a theory by Deepak
>> Chopra, who can be counted on to have some strange, unproveable idea about
>> anything.
>>
>> bill w
>> _______________________________________________
>> extropy-chat mailing list
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>>
> _______________________________________________
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