[ExI] ai emotions

Fri Jun 28 19:41:06 UTC 2019

Thanks, Henry.  I too, could have been more cordial in my responses to
Stuart.

On Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 1:02 PM Henry Rivera <hrivera at alumni.virginia.edu>
wrote:

> Stuart,
> What’s with all the hostility directed at Brent, who has been trying to
> clarify discussions around consciousness for years steadfastly? I didn’t
> read such hostility and sarcasm in his response to you. I don’t get the
> sense that he is trying to threaten your worldview or insult your
> intelligence. I admire the calmness, patience, and precision I have
> witnessed in Brent’s dialogs all over the net for well over ten years.
> He’ll likely try to respond to all your points, a task which many would
> abandon by this point in an email string. I see no value or virtue
> aggressive or defensive retorts. Let’s try to keep it civil here in our Exl
> realm please. We have a pretty unique thing here. Not trying to speak for
> Spike or anything, but I’d like to think he’d agree.
> Respectfully,
> -Henry
>
> > On Jun 28, 2019, at 2:55 AM, Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Quoting Brent Allsop:
> >
> >
> >>> ?Consciousness is not magic, it is math.?
> >>
> >> How do you get a specific, qualitative definition of the word ?red? from
> >> any math?
> >
> > Red is a subset of the set of colors an unaugmented human can see. There
> I just defined it for you mathematically. In math symbols, it looks
> something very much like {red} C {red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo,
> violet}. If you were a lucky mutant (or AI) that could perceive grue, then
> the math would look like {red} C {red, orange, yellow, green, grue, blue,
> indigo, violet}
> >
> > Whatever unique qualia your brain may have assigned to it is your
> business and your business alone since you cannot express red to me except
> by quantitative measure (650 nm wavelength electromagnetic wave) or
> qualitative example (the color of ripe strawberries). Any other description
> of red only means anything to YOU (Perhaps it makes your dick hard, I have
> no clue, don't really care.)
> >
> >
> > In other words, you can't give me any better a qualitative description
> of red then I can give you. Prove me wrong: What is red, oh privileged seer
> of qualia?  (Yes, that was sarcasm.)
> >
> >>
> >> ?I don't think that substrate-specific details matter that much.?
> >>
> >> Then you are not talking about consciousness, at all.  You are just
> talking
> >> about intelligence.  Consciousness is computationally bound elemental
> >> qualities, for which there is something, qualitative, for which it is
> like.
> >
> > Intelligence and consciousness differ by degree, not by type. Both are
> emergent properties of some configurations of matter. If I were to
> quantitatively rank emergent properties by their PHI value, then I would
> have a distribution as follows: reactivity <= life <= intelligence <=
> consciousness <= civilization
> >
> >>> ?It is irrelevant that I perceive red as green.?
> >
> >> Can you not see how sloppy language like this is?  I?m going to
> describe at
> >> least two very different possible interpretations of this statement.  If
> >> you can?t distinguish between them, with your language, then again, you
> are
> >> not talking about consciousness:
> >
> > You pull a single sentence of mine out of context and then use it to
> accuse me of sloppy language? Here is my precise and unequivocal retort:
> NO! I challenge you to take that out of context.
> >
> >> 1.       One person is color blind, and represents both red things and
> >> green things with knowledge that has the same physical redness
> quality.  In
> >> other words, he is red green color blind.
> >>
> >> 2.       One person is qualitatively inverted from the other.  He uses
> the
> >> other?s greenness to represent red with and visa versa for green things.
> >
> > When you said, "Are you talking about your redness, or my redness which
> is like your [sic] grenness?" I meant whichever you meant by the quoted
> statement. My argument holds either way. Unless you believe that
> color-blind people are not really conscious. In which case you should be
> enslaving the colorblind and tithing me 10% of the proceeds.
> >
> >>
> >> You can?t tell which one you?re statement is talking about.  Again,
> you?re
> >> not talking about consciousness, if you can?t distinguish between these
> >> types of things with your models and language.
> >
> > Again, my statement reflects yours with the exact same scope. So you
> tell me what I meant.
> >
> >> Sure, before Galileo, it didn?t matter if you used a geocentric model of
> >> the solar system or a heliocentric.  But now that we?re flying up in the
> >> heavens, one works, and one does not.  Similarly, now, you can claim
> that
> >> the qualitative nature doesn?t matter, but as soon as you start hacking
> the
> >> brain, amplifying intelligence, connecting multiple brains (like two
> brain
> >> hemispheres can be connect) or even religiously predicting what
> ?spirits?
> >> and future consciousness will be possible.  One model works, the other
> does
> >> not.
> >
> > I don't see how your model predicts anything except for your ignorance
> of what consciousness is. You say that every consciousness is a unique
> snowflake of amassed qualia, I say that every machine-learning algorithm
> starts out with a random set of parameters and through learning its
> training data, either supervised or unsupervised, converges on an
> approximation of the truth
> >
> > Every deep learning neural network is a unique snowflake that gets
> optimized for a specific purpose. Some neural networks train very quickly,
> others never quite get what you are trying to teach it. There is very much
> a ghost in the machine and each time you run the algorithm, you get a
> different ghost. If you don't believe me, then download Simbrain, watch the
> turtorial video on Youtube, and I will send you a copy my tiny brain to
> play with. Be the qualitative judge of my tiny brain, I dare you.
> >
> > Do you not understand the implications of me creating a 55 neuron brain
> and teaching it to count to five? Do you not understand the implication of
> my tiny brain being able to distinguish ALL three-bit patterns after only
> being trained on SOME three-bit patterns? Do you not see the
> conceptualization of threeness that was occurring?
> >
> >> In fact, my prediction is the reason we can?t better understand how
> >> we subjectively represent visual knowledge, is precisely because
> everyone
> >> is like you, qualia blind, and doesn?t care that some people may have
> >> qualitatively very different physical representations of red and green.
> >
> > Quit calling me "qualia blind". I am not sure what you mean by it, by it
> sounds vaguely insulting like you are accusing me of being a philosophic
> zombie or something. I assure you there is something that it is
> qualitatively like to be me, even if I can't succinctly describe it to you
> in monkey mouth noises. I could just as easily accuse you of being
> innumerate and a mathphobe, so either explain what you mean or knock it off.
> >
> >>
> >> If you only care about if a brain can pick strawberries, and don?t care
> >> what it is qualitatively like, then you can?t make the critically
> important
> >> distinctions between these 3 robots
> >> <
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YnTMoU2LKER78bjVJsGkxMsSwvhpPBJZvp9e2oJX9GA/edit?usp=sharing
> >
> >> that are functionally the same but qualitatively very different, one
> being
> >> not conscious at all.
> >
> > No being can be deemed conscious without some manner of inputs from the
> real world. That is the nature of perception. A robot without sensors
> cannot be conscious. If that is what you mean by an "abstract robot" than I
> agree that it is not conscious. On the other hand, a keyboard is a sensor.
> A very limited sensor but a sensor nonetheless.
> >
> >>> ?Nothing in the universe can objectively observe anything else.?
> >
> >> All information that comes to our senses is ?objectively? observed and
> >> devoid of any physical qualitative information, it is all only abstract
> >> mathematical information.  Descartes, the ultimate septic, realized
> that he
> >> must doubt all objectively observed information.
> >
> > You are in no way an objective observer. Any information that may have
> been objective before you observed it became biased the moment you
> perceived it. That is because your brain filters out and flat out ignores
> out any information that does not have relevance to Brent. Why else could
> you not see the color grue unless it had no survival advantage to you or
> your ancestors? Even now, your inborn Brentward bias is seething with the
> need to disagree with me: your primal and naked need to impose Brent upon
> me and the rest of the world. Can't you feel it?
> >
> >> But he also realized: ?I
> >> think therefore I am?. This includes the knowledge of the qualities of
> our
> >> consciousness.
> >
> > No it doesn't. Thinking pertains to logic and abstracts and not to
> qualia which are in the realm of that what you perceive and feel. Descartes
> said that his ability to make logical inferences entailed that he existed.
> If intelligence is, as you claim, separable from consciousness, then
> Descartes did little more than make a good case that he was intelligent. In
> fact he made it point to explicitly assume that all his perceived qualia
> were the work of some kind of malicious demon trying to mislead him about
> his existence through his senses or something similarly paranoid. In any
> case, if anyone was "qualia blind" it was your man Descartes, who used
> imagined demons to come up with a definition of himself that did not
> incorporate sensory information. Nonetheless, I don't think Descartes was a
> philosophic zombie.
> >
> >> We know, absolutely, in a way that cannot be doubted, what
> >> physical redness is like, and how it is different than greenness.
> While it
> >> is true that we may be a brain, in a vat.  We know, absolutely, that the
> >> physics, in the brain, in that vat exist, and we know, absolutely and
> >> qualitatively, what that physics (in both hemispheres) is like.
> >
> > How could we know for sure what what the physical redness of ripe
> strawberries looks like when they would look different in the light and the
> shadow?
> >
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion
> >
> >> Let?s say you did objectively detect some new ?perceptronium?.  All you
> >> would have, describing that perceptronium, is mathematical models and
> >> descriptions of such.  These mathematical descriptions of perceptronium
> >> would all be completely devoid of any qualitative meaning.  Until you
> >> experienced a particular type of perceptronium, directly, you would not
> >> know, qualitatively, how to interpret any of your mathematical objective
> >> descriptions of such.
> >
> > Perceptronium is Tegmark's notion and not mine. I am not sure that as a
> concept it adds much to the understanding of consciousness.
> >
> >> Again, everything you are talking about is what Chalmers, and everyone
> >> would call ?easy? problems.  Discovering and objectively observing any
> kind
> >> of ?perceptronium? is an easy problem.  We already know how to do this.
> >> Knowing, qualitatively, what that perceptronium is qualitatively like,
> if
> >> you experienced it, directly, is what makes it hard.
> >
> > Being Brent is necessarily like being Brent. And if I were born in your
> stead, then I would necessarily be Brent. Moreover, you are being of finite
> information in that your entire history, your every thought, and your every
> deed can be described by a very large yet nonetheless finite number of
> true/false or yes/no questions and their answers. The smallest number of
> such yes/no questions and answers would equal your Shannon entropy.
> >
> > That means that there is a unique bitstring that describes you. The sum
> total of every discernible thing about you can be expressed as a very large
> integer. It would be the most compressed form of you that it is possible to
> express.
> >
> >> The only ?hard? part of consciousness is the ?Explanatory Ga
> >> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap>p?, or how do you eff
> the
> >> ineffable nature of qualia.
> >
> > There is no "explanatory gap" because it is filled in by natural
> selection quite nicely. There are some qualia invariants that can be
> identified and experienced quite universally. For example, I know what your
> pain feels like. It feels unpleasant. I know that because our ancestors
> evolved to feel pain so they would try to avoid dangerously unhealthy
> environments and behaviors.
> >
> >> Everything else is just easy problems.  We
> >> already know, mathematically what it is like to be a bat.  But that
> tells
> >> you nothing, qualitatively about what being a bat is like.
> >
> > You are right, that's where technology can help. If you go hang-gliding
> on a moonless night while wearing a pair of these sonar glasses, you might
> come close to knowing what it is like to be a bat.
> >
> > http://sonarglasses.com/
> >
> > Alternatively, since you are what you eat, you could just eat a bat and
> describe how it makes you feel. ;-)
> >
> >
> > Stuart LaForge
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > extropy-chat mailing list
> > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20190628/5619dd7f/attachment.htm>