[ExI] People often think their chatbot is alive

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sun, Jul 17, 2022 at 2:47 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> I am talking about the qualities of your knowledge.  The quality of your
> redness, and your greenness, is what your conscious knowledge is like.
>

...is what the components are like, but not the whole.


> The quality of your conscious knowledge is  dependent on those particular
> qualities.
>

This is not the case.  It emerges from them, perhaps, but the exact same
pattern can emerge from different elements.

For instance, let us say that the pattern of chemicals and energy states I
use to encode greenness is the same one you use to encode redness and vice
versa, and that there is some robot that encodes redness and greenness
using electrical signals on silicon-based memory.  In all three cases there
exists a memory state that encodes redness, and it performs this function
to the same degree despite being three different physical processes.  I
suspect this is the example your illustration is trying to posit.

Crucially, in all three cases, "redness" is encoded.  It is encoded in
different ways, but the same thing is being encoded.  If it wasn't, there
would be no point in making the comparison.

The same quality is recorded, yielding the same potential reactions.  (In
practice the reactions will differ since everyone has a different setup,
but if in theory you had the exact same brain just with redness's and
greenness's physical representations switched, it would have the same
output for the same input.)

The quality of the conscious knowledge is that a thing is red.  It is not
how the redness is actually encoded.  The conscious knowledge is a pattern
formed by such subunits, and would go away if the subunits vanished, but it
itself is not those subunits.


> As I pointed out to Stathis, this cannot be denied
>

It can be and is being denied.
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