[ExI] Is Artificial Life Conscious?

Brent Allsop brent.allsop at gmail.com
Thu May 5 21:45:36 UTC 2022


Hi Stathis,
On Thu, May 5, 2022 at 1:00 PM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 6 May 2022 at 02:36, Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, May 4, 2022 at 6:49 PM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>> I think colourness qualities are what the human behaviour associated
>>> with distinguishing between colours, describing them, reacting to them
>>> emotionally etc. is seen from inside the system. If you make a physical
>>> change to the system and perfectly reproduce this behaviour, you will also
>>> necessarily perfectly reproduce the colourness qualities.
>>>
>>
>> An abstract description of the behavior of redness can perfectly capture
>> 100% of the behavior, one to one, isomorphically perfectly modeled.  Are
>> you saying that since you abstractly reproduce 100% of the behavior, that
>> you have duplicated the quale?
>>
>
> Here is where I end up misquoting you because I don’t understand what
> exactly you mean by “abstract description”.
>


[image: 3_robots_tiny.png]

This is the best possible illustration of what I mean by abstract vs
intrinsic physical qualities.
The first two represent knowledge with two different intrinsic physical
qualities, redness and greenness.
"Red" is just an abstract word, composed of strings of ones and zeros.  You
can't know what it means, by design, without a dictionary.
The redness intrinsic quality your brain uses to represent knowledge of
'red' things, is your definition for the abstract word 'red'.


> But the specific example I have used is that if you perfectly reproduce
> the physical effect of glutamate on the rest of the brain using a different
> substrate, and glutamate is involved in redness qualia, then you
> necessarily also reproduce the redness qualia. This is because if it were
> not so, it would be possible to grossly change the qualia without the
> subject noticing any change, which is absurd.
>

I think the confusion comes in the different ways we think about this:

"the physical effect of glutamate on the rest of the brain using a
different substrate"

Everything in your model seems to be based on this kind of "cause and
effect" or "interpretations of interpretations".  I think of things in a
different way.
I would emagine you would say that the causal properties of glutamate or
redness would result in someone saying: "That is red."
However, to me, the redness quality, alone, isn't the cause of someone
saying: "That is Red", as someone could lie, and say: "That is Green",
proving the redness isn't the only cause of what the person is saying.
The computational system, and the way the knowledge is consciousnessly
represented is different from simple cause and effect.
The entire system is aware of all of the intrinsic qualities of each of the
pixels on the surface of the strawberry (along with any reasoning for why
it would lie or not)
And it is because of this composite awareness, that is the cause of the
system choosing to say: "that is red", or choose to lie in some way.
It is the entire composit 'free will system' that is the initial cause of
someone choosing to say something, not any single quality like the redness
of a single pixel.
For you, everything is just a chain of causes and effects, no composite
awareness and no composit free will system involved.

If I recall correctly, you admit that the quality of your conscious
knowledge is dependent on the particular quality of your redness, so qualia
can be thought of as a substrate, on which the quality of your
consciousness is dependent, right?  If you are only focusing on a different
substrate being able to produce the same 'redness behavior' then all you
are doing is making two contradictory assumptions.  If you take that
assumption, then you can prove that nothing, even a redness function can't
have redness, for the same reason.  There must be something that is
redness, and the system must be able to know when redness changes to
anything else.  All you are saying is that nothing can do that.

That is why I constantly ask you what could be responsible for redness.
Because whatever you say that is, I could use your same argument and say it
can't be that, either.
If you could describe to me what redness could be, this would falsify my
camp, and I would jump to the functionalist camp.  But that is impossible,
because all your so-called proof is claiming, is that nothing can be
redness.

If it isn't glutamate that has the redness quality, what can?  Nothing you
say will work, because of your so-called proof.  Because when you have
contradictory assumptions you can prove all claims to be both true and
false, which has no utility.

Until you can provide some falsifiable example of what could be responsible
for your redness quality, further conversation seems to be a waste.
Because my assertion is that given your assumptions NOTHING will work, and
until you falsify that, with at least one example possibility, why go on
with this contradictory assumption where qualitative consciousness, based
on substrates like redness and greenness, simply isn't possible?
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