[ExI] Why stop at glutamate?

Mon Apr 10 00:59:16 UTC 2023

*how do you eff the ineffable nature of colorness quality experience*s.
You don't because it is not what knowledge or science is about. You are
confusing the territory and the map. We already discussed this.
You are basically putting the finger on a blue line on a map and saying
"this is not a river because my finger is not wet". It is a freaking map.
Or you are looking at the drawing of an engine in a very detailed blue
print and say "I don't hear the engine noise or it doesn't move". Do you
understand what I try to tell you?
The beauty of the map and the blue print is that you can build in real life
the engine or you can navigate the territory with the map, but they are not
engine or the landscape the map is supposed to represent. Do you
understand what I mean?
But it clear it doesn't matter what the engine is made of. I can use the
same blueprint and make the engine with titanium vs steel. I can recreate
the engine in a virtual environment. The real engine is in the design, the
relation between the parts, how they move relative to one another, the fuel
(real or virtual) i put in it and how it used. That is where the knowledge
really is.

The explanation gap is not an explanation gap is "make it real gap" that is
stupid because of course the map is not the territory. But you can use the
map to build a landscape if you wanted (for example you could recreate an
accurate digital version of a city and so on).

All this stuff is not as mysterious as you and the other philosopher think
it is. There is no hard problem if not in the head of navel-gazing
philosophers. I'm glad I'm a scientist in the tradition of Galileo.
Giovanni

On Sun, Apr 9, 2023 at 5:44 PM Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 9, 2023 at 4:16 PM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> What "redness" quality means? I still don't get it.
>>
>
> Yes, and this is the problem.  All this is quality blind, and part of what
> Chalmers refers to as the easy problems.  None of this work provides
> anything that will solve what everyone believes is the "hard problem"  It
> doesn't answer questions like "What did mary learn" or "what is it like to
> be a bat" and "how do you bridge the explanatory gap", or how do you eff
> the ineffable nature of colorness quality experiences.
>
> Other than it all being quality blind, I agree with most everything you
> are saying here.
>
>
>> There is plenty of evidence, like entire libraries, that show that brain
>> stuff (I will use this term to mean stuff like perception, memory,
>> awareness and so on) is all in the patterns. That is what matters.
>> I can give you some of these examples.
>> 1) Working memory chips. I mentioned Dr. Beger work at UCLA. People have
>> studied models of memory and they reproduced an equivalent on chips,
>> without using any chemical like neurotransmitters, or any other physical
>> thing you will associate with the particular biological makeup of our
>> brains. All what they did was to recreate the functionality or structure
>> relations that their model said was relevant to reproduce memory.
>> This is not a theoretical work that can be debated. It worked. They
>> turned on and off the chip and the rat remembered the layout of a
>> labyrinth. They even transferred, a la Inception, the memory in another rat
>> !!!!
>> If this doesn't destroy completely anybody illusion that the a brain made
>> of meat (and particular stuff like glutamate) I don't know what else it
>> could. These people will always believe that meat brains are necessary
>> because God made them so. No amound of science would convince them.
>> 2) You can train an AI to recognize activation patterns in the brain and
>> associate them with particular stimuli. This has been tried with words and
>> even images both in wake and dreaming state. Here an example that should
>> blow everybody minds:
>> https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.18.517004v2.full.pdf
>> Again, from this study we can see that it doesn't matter how the pattern
>> is generated, but that there is a pattern of activation. These patterns are
>> unique for each individual but statistically they are similar enough that
>> after training over many subjects you can give a statistical estimate that
>> the person is seeing or even thinking about something in particular. Again,
>> IT WORKS people !
>> 3) I have worked in the field of neuroscience and in particular in the
>> field of the neuroscience of sleep. I have direct experience of this vs
>> simply reading some paper (I analyzed the data in this case).
>> There are several experiments that show that if you do for a long time
>> during the day a particular type of activity, lets say listening to an
>> audio book or playing a video game with a lot of visual stimuli during the
>> night a given brain region will light up with a lot of slow waves
>> preferentially in a given region of the brain, in fact, the one you would
>> expect. If you listened for hours to an audiobook the auditory region of
>> the brain will have a lot of slow waves and if you played a video game the
>> visual part of the brain is the one that will light up.
>> Slow waves are associated with the process of memory consolidation which
>> is the moving of memory from the hippocampus to the cortex and the
>> formation of new long-term memories. Notice, that in this process there is
>> a MAPPING of these memories from the hippocampus to the cortex that is not
>> 1 to 1. The pattern in the cortex is related to the one in the hippocampus
>> but not exactly the same and in fact, while the memory is created
>> associations are made with previous experiences and things that were
>> learned in the past, so it is a unique and individual pattern that is
>> created when you consolidate the memory. This is actually where a lot of
>> creativity takes place, in making new associations between different
>> experiences. Another thing to notice is that when you retrieve memory the
>> memory is actually actively changed and modified that it is another
>> indication that it doesn't matter what the particular physical means to
>> create the memory are, the real information is in the pattern. That is
>> where the redness is, that is unique for each individual but it can be
>> still identified as redness because statistically is similar between
>> individuals.
>>
>
> Can you not see that what you think is "redness" (the quality that person
> uses to represent red things) is just "redness" for that individual.  And
> the differences you are referring to could be because that person's redness
> is more like your grenness, or qualitatively something you have never
> experienced before.  Just because you are mapping what you observe, back to
> wavelengths of light, is false coloring the qualities.  And ignoring the
> differences is what is making us quality blind.  You would see the same,
> what you call "redness" when using these techniques, for both the first
> person and the second person in the image.  Simply because they use
> different qualities to represent their knowledge of light.
>
>
>
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