[ExI] Possible seat of consciousness found

[Stuart LaForge]

Quoting Brent Allsop:

> Our eyes, and everything else need to do lots of tricks (such as the 60 HZ
> saccades your are describing) so that we can have accurate and
> consistent knowledge.

But we don't have accurate and consistent knowledge due to those  
tricks. We have a hastily constructed Umvelt of convenience that is  
biased, self-serving, and sometimes even in direct conflict with the  
actual underlying physical reality. Without specialized  
instrumentation, we can perceive maybe 1% of reality. Without our  
technology, we really are looking at shadows in Plato's cave.

For example the ongoing continuity of the present moment that you  
sense is a construct of your brain. Everything that you see happening  
around you has already happened several microseconds in the past. Your  
sight and hearing are bounded from both below and above by the minimum  
and maximum frequencies that you can sense. And you are prone to  
zoning out on the occasional sexual fantasy. Half the cells in your  
body are a diverse ecosystem of microorganisms that you are for the  
most part blissfully unaware of until they wander into the wrong areas  
cause you to feel ill.

> If our conscious knowledge of such, fades, because we are overriding the
> tricks our eyes are attempting to do, this change or fading in our
> awareness of what we are seeing is what we are talking about, which you
> seem to be completely ignoring.

I am not sure what your point is here. Qualia fade when you stop  
tickling the sensory apparatus that activates them. Or are you talking  
about attenuation or the Ganzfield effect? The Ganzfield effect is  
such that you stare at uniform color field like red with no detail of  
distinguishing feature, for example, after a few minutes you will stop  
seeing red and your vision will just go black.

> You just continue to map everything I say into  a world where this changing
> conscious awareness isn't real or something.

Your changing conscious awareness is real, it is still however a  
mental construct, just as thoughts are real but nonetheless mental  
constructs. Your constructed awareness is meant to model those aspects  
of the world important to your genes and to a lesser extent you  
yourself. The problem is not that your conscious awareness is not  
real; the problem is that without compensatory technology, it is very  
limited and rather inaccurate.

For what it's worth, I checked out your video and some of your more  
recent content on your site, and I noticed that you didn't mention  
glutamate or reference material qualia at all and it actually made  
your argument much more credible. Good job. The animation and graphics  
are pretty slick as well.

Incidentally, I think you might have been too reductionist in your  
search for the material correlates of color. Material redness is not a  
molecule, material redness is the L-cone cell in your retina that  
fires more strongly in response to red light than green light. M-cone  
cells conversely fire more strongly in response to green light than  
red. if you could somehow switch the wiring of the two types of one  
cells between the retina and the visual cortex, you might be able to  
achieve your inverted qualia or whatever you call it.

Stuart LaForge