[ExI] Is Artificial Life Conscious?

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Wed, 11 May 2022 at 10:32, Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> There are lots of competing theories making predictions about what qualia
> are.
> It will be an answers to the question: Which of all our descriptions of
> stuff in the brain is a description of redness.
> My assumption is there is some necessary and sufficient set of
> observable physical behavior or chemical reactions which are the
> descriptions of redness.
> So to say anything that is not the qualia, is anything outside of this
> necessary and sufficient set of physics.
> So, by definition, if anything varies from the necessary and sufficient
> set, it would no longer be redness.
> I like to think of it as being similar to when you burn certain metals, it
> emits  different colored light.
> Obviously, if you change or remove the metal, the color changes.  And
> nothing but those metals will produce the same chemical reaction that emits
> that particular color.
> It isn't the light, which many things could produce the same light, it is
> possible that only the particular chemical reaction that can be
> computationally bound, such that if it changes, the redness will change in
> a way that the entire system must be aware of that change from redness.
>

It's possible that for technical reasons nothing can be found that will
affect the rest of the system in the same way as glutamate does. However,
saying this is avoiding the question. There is no logical reason why a
substitute either for glutamate or one of the thousands of other components
in the brain could not be found. As an example that would probably work,
substitute some of the atoms in a molecule with different isotopes. This is
a quite common technique to track molecules in biomedical research. You can
order some online if you want:
https://www.moravek.com/what-exactly-is-radiolabeling/
So radiolabeled glutamate will behave the same as regular glutamate, but it
is a different substrate. What do you think would happen to the qualia if
radiolabeled glutamate replaced regular glutamate?

-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
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