[ExI] Is Artificial Life Conscious?

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Stuart,

On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 11:46 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Quoting Brent Allsop:
> > It is a necessary truth, that if you know something, that knowledge must
> be
> > something.
> > And if you have knowledge that has a redness quality, there must be
> > something in your brain that has that quality that is your conscious
> > knowledge.
>
> I think what you have done with your color problem is entangle the
> hard problem of consciousness with the millennia old problem of
> universals. Does redness actually exist at all? Does redness exist
> only in the brain? Can something have the redness quality without
> actually being red? Does it have the redness quality when it is
> outside of the brain? Can abstract information have the redness
> quality? Is something red if nobody can see it?
>

I'm probably arguing that there isn't an impossible to solve  "hard problem
of consciousness" , there is just the solvable "problem of universals" ?
or in other words, just an intrinsic color problem.
That's the title of our video: "Consciousness: Not a 'Hard Problem' just a
color problem <https://canonizer.com/videos/consciousness/>."

First, we must recognize that redness is not an intrinsic quality of the
strawberry, it is a quality of our knowledge of the strawberry in our
brain.  This must be true since we can invert our knowledge by simply
inverting any transducing system anywhere in the perception process.
If we have knowledge of a strawberry that has a redness quality, and if we
objectively observed this redness in someone else's brain, and fully
described that redness, would that tell us the quality we are describing?
No, for the same reason you can't communicate to a blind person what
redness is like.  The entirety of our objective knowledge tells us  nothing
of the intrinsic qualities of any of that stuff we are describing.
The only way to know the qualities of the stuff we are abstractly
describing is to directly apprehend those qualities as computationally
bound conscious knowledge.
Once we do discover and demonstrate which of all our descriptions of stuff
in the brain is a description of redness and greenness, then we will know
the qualities we are describing.
Once we have this dictionary, defining our abstract terms, we will then be
able to eff the ineffable.
Let's assume, for a moment, that we can directly apprehend glutamates
qualities, and they are redness, and our description of glycine is a
description of greenness.
(If you don't like glutamate and glycine, pick anything else in the brain,
until we get one that can't be falsified.)
Given that, these would then be saying the same thing:
My redness is like your greenness, both of which we call red.
My glutamate is like your glycine, both of which we represent red
information with.



> > This is true if that stuff is some kind of "Material" or "electromagnetic
> > field" "spiritual" or "functional" stuff, it remains a fact that your
> > knowledge, composed of that, has a redness quality.
>
> It seems you are quite open-minded when it comes to what qualifies as
> "stuff". If so, then why does your 3-robot-scenario single out
> information as not being stuff? If you wish to insist that something
> physical in the brain has the redness quality and conveys knowledge of
> redness, then why glutamate? Why not instead hypothesize that is the
> only thing that prima facie has the redness property to begin with
> i.e. red light? After all there are photoreceptors in the deep brain.
>

Any physical property like redness, greenness, +5votes, holes in a punch
card... can represent (convey) an abstract 1.  There must be something
physical representing that one, but, again, you can't know what that is
unless you have a transducing dictionary telling you which is which.
Then once you define a pattern of ones and zeros to be words like 'red' and
'green', again, you need a 3rd dictionary to get from a word like 'red'
back to physical reality.
The redness quality of your knowledge of red things is your definition of
the word red.

Does that answer your questions?



>
> https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnana.2016.00048/full#:~:text=The%20existence%20of%20multiple%20opsin,for%20photoreception%20in%20particular%20regions
> .
>
> Stuart LaForge
>
>
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