[ExI] Mental Phenomena

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Fri, 14 Feb 2020 at 10:39, Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Hi Dylan,
> All of that may be true, but you are still focusing only on what doesn't
> matter, and ignoring what does matter, as if you are completely afraid of
> accepting the truth or something.
> What you say doesn't change the fact that substrate independence takes a
> lot more dictionaries, otherwise, you cant get the word red from all the
> different substrates.  Where just always using redness only requires one
> dictionary.
> And if all you need to know is that your knowledge of yourself needs to
> get away from your knowledge of the tiger chasing you.  You don't need any
> dictionaries at all.  In fact you don't even need knowledge that your
> knowledge is different than reality.  But, if you want to understand and
> hack consciousness, and know what it is going to be like to be uploaded,
> you need a little more sophisticated model of reality.
>

How are you going to upload redness without glutamate inside the computer?


> On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 4:26 PM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> I'm not going to touch on the other things I snipped yet because I do
>> need to give it more thought, but I would question that evolution ends up
>> with the simplest possible machinery.  Evolution is a chain of events
>> dependent on a limited tree of possibilities (driven by the limitations of
>> biophysics and potentially how far down a branch of evolutionary
>> possibilities it has moved).  It frequently does not end up with the most
>> elegant solution or the simplest possible machinery.
>>
>> I think you're making a big presumption to assume that implementing
>> substrate specific consciousness is efficiently survivable compared to
>> other possibilities on an evolutionary decision tree.  There may have been
>> trade offs in the genes used or physical implementation in the brain that
>> end up in a different implementation thriving.
>>
>>  As I mentioned, it seems just as arguable at this point that
>> consciousness came about as a second order effect that turned into a huge
>> advantage for human beings.   Evolution arguably only cares about what
>> spreads the most genes, and for most of the biosphere, human level
>> consciousness doesn't seem to be an advantage or is an extremely rare
>> evolutionary trait, or I would imagine we would have seen it evolve in
>> other species that have highly complex nervous systems.
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 6:13 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> And of course, evolution doesn't need a simple way to design things, it
>>> just needs the simplest possible machinery, so it implements consciousness
>>> directly on physical qualities, because that is more efficiently survivable.
>>>
>>>
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-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
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