[ExI] Molecular Materialism

Wed Jan 1 19:19:22 UTC 2020

No, that doesn’t seem to help.  It just shows me that some people have very
different ways of thinking about qualia.  There are both composite redness
and elemental redness.  Composite redness is made up of lots of different
physical things all computationally bound together.  For example, the name
“red”, your knowledge of you being a subjective observer and aware of
redness, that redness is a warm color, knowledge that strawberries of that
color are ripe, blood…..  For every single piece of information, there must
be something physical that is that particular piece of information.  And
for every relationship, there must be some computational binding machinery
that is that relationship knowledge.  Elemental redness is just one of
these elemental pieces that is computationally bound into everything else
that makes up the composite redness experience.  You can tell by the way
many people talk, that they think a redness quale is everything but the
elemental redness quality.  (they think red is only a property of the
strawberry).  I see evidence from what you are saying here that you are
thinking of qualia in a very different way than what all the
supporters of “Representational
Qualia Theory <https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Representational-Qualia/6>”
think elemental redness is.

“I realize that. It will take a book to explain properly.”

In my experience this isn’t a good sign.  In my experience, people that
think they need to write huge books to explain their ideas are just lost
down some rat holes and confusion.  For example Dennett’s huge book
“Consciousness Explained” can be summed up in one sentence. “We don’t have
qualia, it just seems like we do.”  Having redness and greenness
computationally bound into composite experiences including things like
“names” and other pieces of information isn’t that complex of an idea.  And
knowing what qualitative colorness something is is even simpler.

If you can’t concisely state the way you are thinking about things,
especially in reference to how your ideas differ from competing ways of
thinking about things (like concisely stated Representational Qualia Theory
<https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Representational-Qualia/6>)  And if you
can’t point to other people that are thinking the same way. (There are more
than 40 people of the total 60 participants that are convinced and
supporting Representational Qualia Theory
<https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Representational-Qualia/6>.) then to me
that is strong evidence that your ideas aren’t of much theoretical benefit
to experimentalists.

The best theories are falsifiable theories.  Representational Qualia Theory
<https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Representational-Qualia/6> is the first
theory to provide information on how to falsify all the competing sub camps
predicting the nature of qualia supporting it.

“Your brain is matter that is so complex that it has sufficient surplus
qubits to compute your mind.”

How can any neuro experimentalist do anything with this?  Does anything you
are saying provide any way to bridge the explanatory gap or eff the
ineffable nature of qualia?  (The only real hard problem).  How might any
of this be falsified or objectively observable?  How might one reproduce,
engineer, or expand this kind of "compute your mind"?

On Wed, Jan 1, 2020 at 6:42 AM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Quoting Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com>:
>
>
> >>
> >> Don't back-pedal on me here, Brent. If "redness" is not correlated
> >> with red light, then "redness" is a misnomer.
> >
> >
> > But who's redness?  Remember there is a good chance that your redness is
> > what most people represent green with.  So who's redness would be
> > correlated with red light?
> >
> Empirically everybody who successfully commutes through a city on a
> daily basis for starters. Whatever way it is like to see red light for
> whomever's freaky brain is redness to that person. The fact that
> traffic-lights at intersections work rather successfully for traffic
> control suggests that for most people redness is correlated with red
> light. So I suppose most people correlate redness with red light. It
> worries me that I have to explain that to you.
>
> >
> >> If glutamate is
> >> associated with red strawberries in humans and the ultraviolet
> >> signature of flowers burgeoning with nectar in honeybees, then the
> >> glutamate molecule cannot be said to have the redness quale as a
> >> property.
> >
> >
> > This doesn't follow at all.  Why couldn't a bee use my redness to
> represent
> > knowledge of something, different, entirely?
>
> Because it is by your own definition, "your" redness. Brent-redness is
> not bee-redness even if bee-redness were a thing, which it is not. You
> shaped Brent-redness out of the chaos of sensation when you were an
> infant. It is as unique to you as your fingerprints.
>
> >> Instead, the best one could say is that glutamate is a
> >> component of some systems that have the redness quale as a property in
> >> the context of red light and yet others that have the "yummy flower"
> >> quale as property in the context of ultraviolet light. That would mean
> >> that qualia are mental constructs instead of physical properties.
> >>
> >
> > I'm having troubles understanding the way you think about consciousness
> or
> > what you are trying to say here.
> > Any "mental construct" must be physical, right?
>
> Mental constructs up to and including mind are physical in the sense
> that energy or information is physical, but not physical in the sense
> of matter composed of particles. Very little of you is composed of
> particles, most of you is composed of information. That being said
> particles are necessary for you to exist. You could think of these
> particles as your boundary, they are necessary but not sufficient for
> you. They are a but a small percentage of you. Most of you is
> intangible energy and information. That information can be represented
> in a  carbon-gel cell-matrix like your body or any sufficiently
> complex medium. Perhaps you could even be run on a gigantic abacus
> operated by the entire population of China as Chalmers suggests.
>
> > You would then be forced to admit you have an abstract soul
> >> constructed of math and numbers, poor thing. But, take heart for so do
> >> the honeybees, and you have it so much better than they do.
> >>
> >
> > How does thinking redness is just a colorness property of something like
> > glutamate, and that glutamate can be engineered to represent anything
> > knowledge lead one to we have a "soul constructed of numbers"?
>
> Because when you have something that is able to represent something
> else entirely, that is where symbolism arises. This is where
> information processing begins and thus mind and soul spring forth. One
> can think of the genetic code that shaped life on Earth through
> evolution by natural selection as a rudimentary mind running an
> algorithm based on symbolism.
>
> >> Bat?s use echolocation instead of light.  Their echolocation can detect
> >>> objects in the air.  I'd predict that a bat's brain uses the same
> >>> redness/glutamate to highlight whatever echolocated data was is
> important
> >>> to the bat.
> >>
> >> Yes. Now you get it, glutamate is a symbol whose meaning is purely
> >> subjective. Congratulations, you are finally qualia blind. :-)
> >>
> >
> > The word "red" is an abstract symbol, we can define it any way we want.
> > Physical redness is a set of physics which can also be a symbol we can
> use
> > to represent anything we want.
>
> Yeah . . . so?
>
> > We can define redness to represent red light, or green light, or
> knowledge
> > of echolocated bugs flying through the air, just as we can do with the
> word
> > "red"  But there is nothing the word red is like, while redness is
> physical
> > redness.
>
> You are starting to sound like Newspeak from 1984 with your "redness
> is green-light" nonsense. Redness is not physical in the sense that
> you think it is. You need new physics to understand it. Redness is an
> emergent property of neural activity in your brain. Redness exists
> between molecules in your brain not within them.
>
> > This model is the opposite of a qualia blind model, so I don't understand
> > what you are trying to say or describe.
>
> I realize that. It will take a book to explain properly. But in a
> nutshell, I have discovered a way to mathematically describe how
> emergent properties arise in complex systems through synergy. It is
> unobserved quantum information being used to perform computation
> giving rise to higher order phenomena.
>
> In other words, any sufficiently complex physical system is a quantum
> computer constantly performing computations all of the time. For
> example, when a bunch of water molecules get together, all of the
> quantum information that you forgo measuring, like the quantum states
> of all the individual water molecules, are thereby qubits available to
> perform a computation the result of which is the wetness property of
> bulk water or the coldness of ice, depending on inputs from the
> environment like temperature.
>
> Your brain is matter that is so complex that it has sufficient surplus
> qubits to compute your mind.
>
> Does that help?
>
> Stuart LaForge
>
>
>
>
>
>
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