[ExI] Possible seat of consciousness found

[Dylan Distasio]

I still have not heard convincing evidence for why your qualia are not at
the level of neuronal processing negating the need for some fundamental
physical quale of redness that we have yet to find when cracking open a
skull.

On Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 11:29 AM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> SR, very interesting story about your grandfather.
>
> I first realized it was important to distinguish between reality and
> knowledge of reality in an AI class as an undergraduate.  We were trying to
> program a vision system for a robot that could manipulate blocks on a table.
>
> They were instructing us how to build 3D models of the blocks from 2D
> camera data.  I was thinking this had to be the wrong way to do things,
> since I was naively thinking we didn't need to do all that extra work since
> we were just "directly aware of the blocks on the table.'. Does that sound
> in any way similar to thinking things don't have colors?  Then it suddenly
> hit me like a ton of bricks.  This was one of the most profound life
> changing (conversion from a "Naive realist" to a "Reprisentationalist")
> religious experiences of my life.
>
> Before that I had no knowledge of "weird" things like the color brown,
> phantom limb pain, synesthesia, blind sight (both real and hysterical) out
> of body experiences, and lots of other things most people have a hard time
> understanding, correctly.  At that one instant I knew all such was a real
> possibility.  As I learned of each of them, they were all confirmation of
> the predictions made by representationalism.
>
> As Representational Qualia theory defines: "Consiosness as computationally
> bound elemental subjective qualities like redness and greenness."
>
> John, this predicts there are two types of seeing.  The kind that is done
> by robots, our subconscious, and blind sight, where there is no conscios
> computational binding, and the conscious kind where there is binding.
> Again, I knew all these were possible, before I knew they existed.
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 7:07 AM SR Ballard via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> My grandfather has “hysterical blindness” from a near death accident
>> where his head was trapped in the blades of a peanut thrasher for three
>> days before he was found. The blade of the machine stopped about an inch
>> from his eye, while another part had stopped the machine because it
>> couldn’t crush his skull.
>>
>> Afterwards, he was in a coma 1-2 weeks, and doctors wrote him off. His
>> mom drip fed his sugar water because he was her “baby”.
>>
>> After this point, he has reported total blindness in this eye. However,
>> he was recently diagnosed with, basically, a 100% cataract in his other
>> eye. He cannot read with his “blind” eye, but it keeps him from running
>> into walls and other similar things. He doesn’t seem to be able to see the
>> TV, but does recognize objects and people (as much as you can expect from a
>> 92 yo man).
>>
>> There is not actual blindness in the eye, but the brain, in a
>> post-traumatic response, blocks conscious knowledge of what is seen.
>>
>> SR Ballard
>>
>> On Feb 15, 2020, at 7:37 AM, John Clark via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 14, 2020 at 12:36 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>> >*people suffering from "blind sight" can catch a ball, even though
>>> there is no visual conscious awareness of that ball.*
>>
>>
>> People with that condition display contradictory behavior. Catching the
>> ball indicates the ball has been seen. Making a noise with the mouth that
>> sounds like "I don't see the ball" indicates something *might* not have
>> seen the ball. You can lie about what you say but not what you do, you've
>> either caught the ball or you haven't. So clearly something must have seen
>> the ball, although not necessarily the same thing that controls the vocal
>> cords.
>>
>>  John K Clark
>>
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