[ExI] People often think their chatbot is alive

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Adrean,
I agree with most everything you are saying, but you seem to be missing
what I'm trying to focus on.

On Sat, Jul 16, 2022 at 11:28 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 16, 2022 at 9:39 AM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> You said: "Things like redness might be part of it, " which says to me
>> you would agree that, though the one on the right can "function" the same
>> (as in can tell you the strawberry is red) you would not consider it to
>> have the same kind of conscious knowledge as you, who knows the physical
>> definition of redness, and would answer different than the one on the
>> right, when asked: "What is redness like for you?"
>>
>
> I would consider it to have functionally the same kind of conscious
> knowledge until presented with evidence to the contrary.
>
[image: 3_functionally_equal_machines_tiny.png]

Surely you must admit that these 3 are all fundamentally different.
IF redness could emerge from some set of 1s and 0s, or whatever "function"
or "pattern" results in a redness experience, then you could do whatever
that is, and engineer the one on the right, to use whatever that set of 1s
and 0s are, which have the redness quality.  and you could invert that to
get the one in the middle.  Then that one would answer the question of
"what is redness like for you?" differently than the one, on the right.

The critical issue I'm trying to get to is we have no physical description
of what it is in the world that has all the colorness qualities we can
experience.  All we know are the colors things seem to be.  People think
there is a 'hard' problem of consciousness, that qualia are "ineffable' but
it is just a color problem.  All we are missing is the dictionary which
says it is X, in the brain, that has the redness quality you represent
knowledge of red things with.  Another part is colorness qualities are a
key part of the way we do consciousness.  Consciousness computes directly
on whatever it is, in the brain, (even if some function or pattern is what
is responsible for redness) which has this quality.

In my opinion, it is CRITICAL that people understand the importance of
knowing the colorness qualities of physical things, not just the colorness
qualities things seem to have.  If we could have 10,000 people sign a
petion, then not only would the experimentalists start to look for what it
is, in the brain that has a redness quality, we would finally discover what
it is.  Once we discover that, it's going to falsify all the crap in the
gap theories of consciousness (like functionalism and dualism, which
seperate qualia from physical reality).  And we could achieve a scientific
consensus about consciousness, and how we not only know what is and isn't
conscious, but we know what various conscious systems are like.

I guess I"m asking you to either support the petition camp
"Representational Qualia Theory" (hopefully, someday we'll have 10,000
supporters) or if you disagree, help us create and support a better
competing camp.  May the best camp achieve the most consensus.

We need to know what consciousness not only is, but what it is like.  our
moral future, and how fast we get to things like mind uploading and brain
augmentation, depends on it.




















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