[ExI] Is Artificial Life Conscious?

[Stuart LaForge]

Quoting 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:

>> 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/>.

The hard problem of consciousness has been around for less than 50  
years, but you think it is impossible to solve. The problem of  
universals has been around for thousands of years, yet you think it is  
solvable.

> 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.

Why not? If redness is not intrinsic to the strawberry but is instead  
a quality of our knowledge of the strawberry, then why can't we  
explain to a blind person what redness is like? Blind people have  
knowledge of strawberries and plenty of glutamate in their brains.  
Just tell them that redness is what strawberries are like, and they  
will understand you just fine.

> The entirety of our objective knowledge tells us  nothing
> of the intrinsic qualities of any of that stuff we are describing.

Ok, but you just said that redness was not an intrinsic quality of  
strawberries but of our knowledge of them, so our objective knowledge  
of them should be sufficient to describe redness.


> 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.

But blind people have computationally bound conscious knowledge and  
can directly apprehend qualities too. Why can't they directly  
apprehend the glutamate in their brains? Is blind people glutamate  
different than normal glutamate?

> 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.

Why is not telling a blind person that redness is what perceiving a  
strawberry is like, not sufficient 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 we assume this, then why can't a blind person apprehend the  
qualities of all that glutamate in their brain?

> (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.

You subsequently correct this to: "My redness is like your greens,  
both of which we chose to represent or
convey red information with. I use glycine (which you use to represent  
green with) and you use glutamate
to represent or convey red information."

So if this "stuff" is glutamate, glycine, or whatever, and it exists  
in the brains of blind people, then why can't it represent redness (or  
greenness) information to them also?

>
>
>>> 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.

You may need something physical to represent the abstract 1, but that  
abstract 1 in turn represents some different physical thing. One  
should be careful to distinguish between how information is  
represented and what it represents.

> 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.

Using ones and zeros to represent the word 'red' is not the same thing  
as using ones and zeros to represent the redness quality.

> Does that answer your questions?

No, you did not even address my question. You just repeated your  
mantra. But that is ok, because my question was largely rhetorical.

Stuart LaForge