[ExI] Is Artificial Life Conscious?

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Stathis,
I think we are in agreement with that.  There may be different things, or
variants of things, that all have a redness quality.
But, there must be something physically different than that, which has the
greenness quality, and you can't get redness, from the stuff that has a
greenness quality, unless you have a dictionary that says greenness is
representing red.




On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 7:17 PM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> 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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