[ExI] Is Artificial Life Conscious?

[Brent Allsop]

Yay, someone is finally talking about what I’m interested in.



It is impossible to communicate to a blind person what redness is like for
a reason.  This is because our abstracting senses can tell us everything
about how the neurotransmitter glutamate reacts in a synapse.  But for the
same reason, such abstract descriptions tell us nothing of the intrinsic
colorness quality or quale of glutamate.



An important part of all this is there are two ways to gain knowledge about
physics.  There is perception through our abstract senses, and there is
direct apprehension of intrinsic qualities (qualia) of the resulting
rendered conscious knowledge.  These two different ways are compared in this
video segment
<https://canonizer.com/videos/consciousness/?chapter=differentiate_reality_knowledge&t=290>
.



Given all that, you could communicate to a person with no eyes what redness
is like, as long as you had a dictionary.  You would stimulate something in
his visual cortex, causing him to have an experience of directly
apprehending and intrinsic redness quality.

Then you would say: ‘That is redness, and THAT is what we are describing
when we describe glutamate reacting in a synapse.  With that dictionary, he
would then know what you are talking about, when you say redness, even
though he didn’t have any eyes.



You can’t know what an abstract word like ‘red’ means, without a dictionary.

The redness quality your brain uses to represent knowledge of red things
with, is your definition of the word red.



A painting is composed of a bunch of different colored pixels.  Similarly,
consciousness is composed of a bunch of computationally or meaningfully
bound elemental intrinsic qualities like redness and greenness.  Simple as
that.

On Fri, Apr 29, 2022 at 2:53 PM Mike Dougherty via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 29, 2022, 4:30 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Something of that sort might partly explain the difficulties trying to
>> verbally explain a qualia. Since we communicate audibly, describing a color
>> using what are, after all, "just sounds" (speech), might be like trying to
>> explain a sound in terms of smell, or a feeling in terms of a taste. These
>> various qualia spaces corresponding to our different senses can have
>> different dimensionality, or otherwise don't commute.
>>
>
> Tastes like purple
> You mean grape?
> No, I mean the cheap purple food coloring in knockoff Otter Pops
>
> Synesthesia is going to make eating your words much more interesting :)
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