[ExI] Fwd: Mental Phenomena

Dylan Distasio interzone at gmail.com
Sat Feb 15 20:31:52 UTC 2020


Brent-

I truly appreciate your thoughtful replies despite my persistence.   I will
try to digest more of the content behind the trailheads you've provided
before grilling you further, but I guess I remain in the Functionalism camp
at the moment.

I believe I have the gist of your mapping argument at this point, but am
still very suspect of the idea that substrate matters.

I'm not afraid of changing my view or the implications (I don't expect to
live to see uploading even if it is possible) so that is not where my
digging in is coming from.


On Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 3:21 PM Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Dylan,
>
>
> This is so frustrating.  No matter how I try to say things so they won’t
> be misunderstood, people always map what I’m trying to say, onto their
> model, and it becomes something nothing like what I’m trying to say.
>
> On Sat, Feb 15, 2020 at 12:29 PM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> I appreciate your passion, but how can you be so sure your hypothesis is
>> correct when there doesn't seem to be any more experimental evidence for it
>> than any other theory of consciousness.
>>
>
> You've missed most of what I've been saying.  Representational Qualia
> Theory <https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Representational-Qualia/6> is not
> a real theory.  It is just a set of facts about consciousness that everyone
> else, and all their theories agree on (they are all supporting sub camps to
> RQT).  All RQT is saying, is that we have qualia, and that we should
> distinguish between reality and knowledge of reality  (use more than one
> word for all things red).  Even Dennett's unique "Predictive Bayesian
> Coding Theory <https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Dennett-s-PBC-Theory/21>"
> agrees with the facts which nobody can deny: we have qualia.  All the sub
> camps of RQT are the many diverse predictions about what qualia are.  Some
> predict qualia are a dual substance
> <https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Substance-Dualism/48> separate from
> physical reality, others predict qualia are down at the "quantum level
> <https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Orch-OR/20>" .  The current popular
> consensus, as a result of the substitution argument, is what Stathis
> espouses: "Functionalism
> <https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Qualia-Emerge-from-Function/18>".
>  Currently, because of this popular belief, everyone thinks there is a
> "hard mind body problem", and an "explanatory gap
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap>" resulting in has having
> no idea how to approach color, and basically, nobody can conceive of a way
> to falsify any of these theories.  All that RQT does, is acknowledge what
> everyone must agree on, that we have qualia.  Then it points out how to
> think about color in a more rigorous way, by not being 'qualia blind'.  If
> we do experimental methods that use more than one word for all things
> 'red', and stop 'correcting' for any physical differences we observe in
> different brains, labeling it all as the same 'red'.  (This is what ALL
> experimentalists currently do) we will finally have a way to discover what
> it is that really has a redness quality.  This is the experimental method
> that will finally provide the "experimental evidence" you are asking for so
> we can falsify all but THE ONE.
>
> RQT makes no predictions about the nature of qualia.  It just proposes a
> way to of thinking about the facts we know about color in a more rigorous
> way, which accounts for all the facts we know.  All RQT is doing is
> providing an experimental method which finally has the ability to bridge
> the explanatory gap and there by discover which of all the many sub camp
> theories is THE ONE, so we can discover which of alll our descriptions of
> stuff in the brain is the description of redness.  Again, it could be
> dualism, functionalism, quantum....   RQT is just describing the
> experimental method required (not being qualia blind) to be able to start
> falsifying all but THE ONE.
>
> If we get to a point where a mouse connectome is fully elucidated and
>> simulated with enough fidelity in a computer, and the resulting entity
>> seems to act/react like a mouse, will this give you pause?
>>
>
> Again, you have missed most of what I've been saying.  The 3 robots that
> are functionally the same, but qualitatively very different
> <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YnTMoU2LKER78bjVJsGkxMsSwvhpPBJZvp9e2oJX9GA/edit?usp=sharing>
> paper is meant to illustrate exactly the problem with what you are saying
> here.  Each of these robots are 3 different versions of your mouse, all of
> which can pick the strawberry (seems to act/react like a mouse), yet their
> knowledge enabling them to pick the strawberry is qualitatively very
> different.  It is THAT colored difference in their knowledge that is
> important.
>
> Do you consider animals automata? If not, why do you assume there are
>> special qualia related to human consciousness the location of which cannot
>> be identified in the brain, and that are unique to human consciousness.
>>
>
> Hopefully you can see from the above, that I am saying nothing even
> remotely close to any of this.
>
>
>
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