[ExI] Mental Phenomena

Mon Jan 6 16:07:31 UTC 2020

Oh wow.  Ever more scientific evidence continues to come out very nearly
identical to what “Representational Qualia Theory
<https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Representational-Qualia/6>” has been
predicting.  Last month there was this “*Distinct Laminar Processing of
Local and Global Context
<https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(18)30723-2>” *describing
how the brain is able to get the strawberry from a cortical column pixel,
um I man a “forest from the tree”.

We’ve been instructing the animators working on our video to hypothetically
place the binding neuron in the outer most layer of the cortex,
computationally binding these cortical columns.  And this “*Distinct
Laminar Processing of Local and Global Context
<https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(18)30723-2>”* just came
out this morning.  It looks to me like this new discovery could be exactly
describing neural logic with multiple inputs that could react differently,
based on the diverse physical qualities of the many inputs, in the outer
most layer of the cortex.

Again, this is all exactly as we’ve portrayed knowledge of a strawberry
<https://canonizer.com/videos/consciousness/> laid out in the visual cortex:
[image: image.png]

<https://drive.google.com/file/d/16f0my54ba7m7SliUDkGdvcxdfOJmfZiI/view?usp=sharing>

With the Deep “Longitudinal Fissure” between the two hemispheres, and the
“Transverse occipital sulcus” splitting the visual cortex, yet again, into
4 sections, from top to bottom making room so the cortex can scrunch down
in this cross of folds in the center of vision, to make room for the higher
resolution of pixels at the center of the field of vision.

Oh, and John asked:

*“Suppose we merged our brains Avatar like as you suggest, the resulting
creature, Brent Clark,  would have to be consistent in its use of qualia
just as we are and that includes the memories that both of us have. For the
sake of argument let's suppose our red and green qualia really are
reversed, if so what would Brent Clark experience when he looked at a ripe
tomato?”*

Again, you are talking about composite functionality, while I’m talking
elemental physics, out of which such composite functionality is composed.
In your brain the definition of redness is wired to glutamate.  In your
partner's brain, the definition of redness is wired to glycine.  You could
bind things at different levels of functionality.  But just as you point
out, the higher you go in your binding, things become exponentially more
complex.  But you could still find creative ways to do things, or just
simply bind it at the elemental level.

You of course would want to keep some of your memories bound to particular
sensations private, and not share things like that.  Though it would be
hard to include the binding of the same name to different physical
qualities, you could find ways to enable such in a more complex
computationally bound way.

So, you are facing your partner with both of your visual cortexes
computationally bound.  Your visual cortex has knowledge of what is in
front of you.  Your partners visual cortex has knowledge of what is behind
you.  You are looking at a strawberry, above and behind the head of your
partner.  Assuming you were doing the computational binding at the simplest
elemental level this is what it would be like.  As you rotate the
strawberry around from in front of you, to behind you, as this knowledge of
the strawberry moved between your visual cortex and your partner’s, it
would change from redness to greenness, just as it does in our video, when
the cell phone moves across the field of light between the strawberry and
the eye.

On Mon, Jan 6, 2020 at 6:35 AM John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 5, 2020 at 11:27 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>
>> *> When you experience a redness quality, when you are dreaming or not,
>> there must be something, that is that redness quality you are
>> experiencing.  *
>>
>
> But that redness qualia could not exist in isolation, it needs contrast to
> have a meaning and only other color qualia can provide that. So the
> important thing determining what you subjective experience will be is how
> many distinguishable labels (aka color qualia) you can stick on wavelengths
> of light not the particulars of what chemicals the labels are made of.
>
>
>> > *My redness could be like your greenness,*
>>
>
> We already know some things about that, we know that my redness can't be
> identical to your redness because we have a different brain structure, and
> we both know that whatever qualia the other uses to label electromagnetic
> waves with a frequency of 400 terahertz it's consistent, I put the same
> label on both strawberries and ripe tomatoes and you do the same. But is my
> redness closer to your redness or your greenness?  Suppose we merged our
> brains Avatar like as you suggest, the resulting creature, Brent Clark,
>  would have to be consistent in its use of qualia just as we are and that
> includes the memories that both of us have. For the sake of argument let's
> suppose our red and green qualia really are reversed, if so what would
> Brent Clark experience when he looked at a ripe tomato?
>
> There is no unique answer to that, any consistent labeling system would
> do; perhaps he would see a tomato as my red (your green) or perhaps as your
> red (my green) or maybe he would see a combination of both and see a tomato
> as being what we both think of as yellow. Brent Clark would know the
> answer, he would know what it's like for Brent Clark to look at a tomato,
> but that's all he'd know. And neither Brent Allsop or John Clark would have
> learned anything about how the other views the world.
>
>
>> > *If you engineered someone to be identical to you, except that
>> person swapped all redness/glutamate with glycine/grenness, and visa versa,
>> you would function identically, but qualitatively your knowledge would be
>> physically different.  My redness would be like your grenness.*
>>
>
> I don't see how the knowledge could be different if there is no way you
> could even KNOW that such a change had happened, and there wouldn't be as
> long as the change was made consistently. There would be a objective
> difference in brain structure but that change would produce no change in
> objective behavior, and there would be no change in subjective experience
> at all.
>
>
>> *> The idea of a single neuron firing with with either glutamate or
>> glycine is just an over simplified example to simplify understand how we
>> might bridge the explanatory gap, or find out whether your redness is more
>> like my grenness, or not. *
>>
>
> I don't think that is over simplified. In fact I think if you're topic is
> qualia then worrying about the detailed chemistry of glutamate and glycine
> is being overly complex, the only thing you need to know about them is that
> there is at least one physical process that can distinguish between the two
> chemicals.
>
>  John K Clark
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200106/b80ece1d/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image.png
Type: image/png
Size: 105766 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200106/b80ece1d/attachment-0001.png>