[ExI] ai emotions

Stuart LaForge avant at sollegro.com
Mon Jul 1 07:14:39 UTC 2019


There is no such thing as qualia blindness. We can use as many words  
for red as you want. We can both look at a fire truck and I might see  
scarlet or crimson while you might see maroon or candy-apple . . . how  
does that matter? Does that explain anything at all about either  
consciousness or intelligence? Even if my red quale was more similar  
to your green quale, how does it matter? What difference does it make?  
If it makes no difference, then it is not informative.

Also you have a tendency to mistake people who disagree with you for  
people who don't understand you and that is a rude supposition. One  
that is not very enlightened and does little but alienate others.

You can't detect those qualitative differences by any known science  
because qualitative differences are decided by minds and don't  
actually exist in nature. There is no natural cutoff between red and  
orange. You decide if something is red or orange. Early on in your  
development your brain decided on a "filehandle" for the color red and  
has been using it every since. That "filehandle" has no physical  
significance outside of your skull. To call someone or something  
"qualia blind" is like calling them "fairy blind" or "unicorn blind"  
in that it is absurd.

And your assertion that I have not read your paper "Objectively,We are  
Blind to Physical Qualities” is incorrect. I have read it several  
times and every time I read it, it makes me doubt you understand the  
definition of the words "objective" and "quality". Qualities are only  
physical in the sense that information is physical. In any system of  
particles there is much more information in the relationships between  
particles then there are in the particles themselves. You are hung up  
looking for redness in particles of glutamate and greenness in  
particles of glycine but really qualia don't exist in particles,  
qualia exist in how those particles interact in the context of your  
nervous system.


Also you have been saying the same thing for over ten years whereas my  
views have evolved and changed over the years. So quit acting like  
your oversimplified model of color perception is some brilliant  
philosophical insight that is too subtle for people like me to  
understand.

Stuart LaForge



Quoting Brent Allsop:

> Once you figure out what “qualia blindness” means, you will look  
> back on these conversations and, like all people that do now  
> comprehend qualia blindness (including some on this list), you will  
> wonder how you could have missed what should be obvious, for so  
> long.  At least you are still persisting.  Many people give up  
> before they get this far.  Many people that finally get it  
> experience this.  In order to not be qualia blind,you need to use  
> more than just one word “red” when talking about the perception of  
> color and mind reading.  If you only have one word for “red” you  
> can’t model when someone is representing red information, with  
> something physically different like your greenness.
> Obviously, Both Galant and Nemrodovet al, are doing mind reading.   
> What youare completely missing is how both of these guys and  
> everyone doing this kindof mind reading is doing it in a qualia  
> blind way.  The spatiotemporal EEG information theyare getting is  
> just abstract information, completely devoid of any colorquality  
> information.  In order to display mind read colors on the screen,  
> from the abstract data, they need some additional informationto tell  
> them when to display what color.  If they are qualitatively  
> interpreting thedata at all (gallant does this - displaying colored  
> images, Nemrodov isn’t – he displays no color intheir resulting face  
> recognition images) they are doing it in a way that blindsthem to  
> any physical qualitative differences they may be detecting.
> Jack Gallant uses the
> color map in the movie he shows to know how to  
> qualitativelyinterpret his spatiotemporal EEG information, which is  
> effectivelyinterpreting it according to the properties of the  
> initial cause of perception(the physical properties of the  
> strawberry out there), not the physicalqualities of what they are  
> observing (knowledge of the strawberry, in thebrain).  Their deep  
> learning neuralnetwork algorithms have unique models for each  
> person.  These models “correct” for any physical differences they  
> detect in individual brains, so theyonly see “red”, when in realty  
> they may be detecting greenness, and correctingfor this difference  
> making their mind reading qualia blind.

> You obviously haven’t yet red the “Objectively,We are Blind to  
> Physical Qualities” paper which describes exactly this in more detail.
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jun 29, 2019 at 7:57 PM Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:
>
>
> Quoting Brent Allsop:
>
>
>> There are ?week?, ?stronger? and ?strongest? forms predicting how we will
>> be able to eff the ineffable nature of the physical quality of the redness
>> someone can directly experience to other people in this ?Objectively, We
>> are Blind to Physical Qualities
>> <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uWUm3LzWVlY0ao5D9BFg4EQXGSopVDGPi-lVtCoJzzM/edit?usp=sharing>?
>> paper.
>
> Your paper references Jack Gallant's work but what you call "effing" 
> technology is more popularly called "mind-reading technology" you 
> should see what they have accomplished with fMRI and deep-learning 
> algorthms these days. One of the pioneers in the field is now able to 
> use your EEG(!) fed into a deep learning neural network to reconstruct 
> the faces you are seeing during the experiment.
>
> http://www.eneuro.org/content/5/1/ENEURO.0358-17.2018/tab-figures-data
>
>> You are basically making the falsifiable prediction that consciousness or
>> qualia arise from mathematics or functionality.  This kind of functionalism
>> is currently leading in supporting sub camps to representational qualia
>> theory, there being multiple functionalists? sub camps, with more
>> supporters than the materialist sub camps.
>
> So the question now becomes can an algorithm reconstruct your qualia 
> from your brain-wave data without itself experiencing them?
>
>> So, let?s take a simplistic falsifiable mathematical theory as an example,
>> the way we use glutamate as a simplified falsifiable materialist example.
>> Say if you predict that it is the square root of 9 that has a redness
>> quality and you predict that it is the square root of 16 that has a
>> greenness quality.   In other words, this could be verified if no
>> experimentalists could produce a redness, without doing that particular
>> necessary and sufficient mathematical function that was the square root of
>> 9.
>> But, if the prediction that it is glutamate that has the redness physical
>> quality that can?t be falsified, and nobody is ever able to reproduce a
>> redness experience (no matter what kind of mathematics you do) without
>> physical glutamate, this would falsify functionalist and mathematical
>> theories of qualia or consciousness.
>
> If hooking EEG electrodes to your head allows a machine to show me red 
> whenever you are looking at red, then which does that falsify?
>
> Stuart LaForge




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