[ExI] Why stop at glutamate?

Jason Resch jasonresch at gmail.com
Tue Apr 11 03:12:12 UTC 2023


On Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 8:51 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> Hi Jason,
> Great, qualities are "encoded in the patterns of neural activity" could be
> a theory that is not yet experimentally falsified.
> I know there are many others that have made similar claims, I just haven't
> been able to get anyone to canonize that theory,
>


What theory is it? I could see materialists, mind brain identity theorists,
neural correlationists, and functionalists all potentially agreeing with
that statement.

so people like you could just join that camp.  I suspect it might be kind
> of like I can't get any of the many people that bleat and tweet things
> like  "in defense of naive realism" to canonizer the theory that predicts
> redness is a property of the strawberry.
>

Does anyone believe that? People have, for at least 2300 years, recognized
that color exists in us, not in the world. Democritus, Galileo, Newtown,
Shrodinger, have all said that.



> Can I ask you another question?  You say qualities are "encoded."  To me,
> a "code" is something that is not what it represents, like the word "red"
> merely represents its grounding referent.  Or a physical hole in a paper
> may be a physical property that isn't a redness property and only
> represents another property (requiring a transducing dictionary to tell you
> the meaning of the code).
>
> How would you decode, what is "encoding" those qualities?  Please don't
> tell me you'd use light. ;)
>

Other parts of the brain decode the meaning of the signals they receive.

Jason



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> On Mon, Apr 10, 2023 at 5:47 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 7:08 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Apr 10, 2023 at 11:11 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Sun, Apr 9, 2023 at 5:20 PM Giovanni Santostasi via extropy-chat <
>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> 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 !
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I consider this a knock-down argument against the functional role of
>>>> glutamate (or other molecules) in the sensation of red. These tests use
>>>> only blood flow data, which is a proxy for neural activity. They are not
>>>> measuring ratios of specific neurotransmitters or molecules, or
>>>> introspecting the activity within the cell, the fMRI looks only at which
>>>> neurons are more vs. less active. And yet, from this data we can extract
>>>> images and colors. This proves that neural activity embodies this
>>>> information.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I guess I've failed to communicate something important about why we use
>>> glutamate.  The primary reason we use glutamate is precisely because of
>>> its ease of falsifiability.  I fully expect redness to be falsified
>>> (someone will experience redness with no glutamate present) and something
>>> different from glutamate will then be tried, and eventually something will
>>> be found to be experimentally proven to be redness.  Easy and obvious
>>> falsifiability is what everyone is missing, so THAT is what I'm most
>>> attempting to communicate with the glutamate example.
>>>
>>> If you guys think there are knock down arguments for why a redness
>>> quality is simply due to recursive network configurations (I am not yet
>>> convinced, and am still predicting otherwise (see below), and it's much
>>> easier to say glutamate than whatever stuff you guys are talking about,
>>> which nobody is concisely stating, and I have problems understanding), then
>>> please, every time I say 'glutamate', do a substitution for anything you
>>> like such as  'Recursive network model A', or any other yet to be falsified
>>> theory.  And let's leave it up to the experimentalists to prove who is
>>> right, like good, humble, theoretical scientists should.
>>>
>>>
>>> P.S.
>>> At least that paper
>>> <https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.18.517004v2.full.pdf> you
>>> referenced has pictures (composed of real qualities), not just abstract
>>> text (tells you nothing about qualities), as text only would be completely
>>> meaningless, right?
>>> But why don't you guys ask the publishers of that paper, how they came
>>> up with the qualities displayed on the images depicting what they are
>>> detecting?
>>> Here is a link to Jack Galant's work
>>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FsH7RK1S2E&t=1s>, done over a decade
>>> ago, to which all these modern examples are just derivative works, easily
>>> done with modern AI tools.
>>> When I saw Jack Galant's work
>>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FsH7RK1S2E&t=1s> back then, I knew he
>>> had a problem determining what qualities to display on his screens,
>>> depicting what he was detecting.  The fMRI only providing abstract
>>> qualityless data which is meaningless without a quality grounded dictionary.
>>> So I called him and asked him how he knew what qualities to display.  He
>>> immediately admitted they "false-colored" them (Jack Gallant's words).
>>> They used the original color codes in the digital images they were showing
>>> to their subjects, to determine what color to display.  In other words,
>>> they were grounding their colors to physical light, which is nothing like
>>> either the properties of a strawberry, which the light merely represents,
>>> or the very different properties of conscious knowledge they are detecting
>>> and describing with qualityless abstract text.  As Giovanni admits, they
>>> are correcting for any changes in physical properties or qualities they are
>>> detecting so they can falsely map all those diverse sets of properties they
>>> are detecting back to the same false colored light, blinding them to any
>>> possible inverted qualities they may be detecting in all that diversity.
>>>
>>> By the way, I added this Japanese paper
>>> <https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.18.517004v2.full.pdf> to
>>> the list of yet another example of quality blind papers, including Jack
>>> Galant's work that only uses one falsely grounded abstract word for all
>>> things representing 'red' here
>>> <https://canonizer.com/topic/603-Color-Exprnc-Observation-Issue/1-Agreement>
>>> .
>>>
>>> If anyone finds a peer reviewed paper that is not quality blind. (other
>>> than mine
>>> <https://www.dropbox.com/s/k9x4uh83yex4ecw/Physicists%20Don%27t%20Understand%20Color.docx?dl=0>,
>>> which is about to be published) will you please let me know about one?  As
>>> I will trust someone that believes and understands that qualities are
>>> necessarily real properties of real hallucinations in our brain.  I predict
>>> they are just the physical properties they are detecting but only
>>> abstractly describing and then false coloring.
>>>
>>
>>
>> Brent,
>>
>> I appreciate that added detail and correction. If the colors in the
>> reconstructed images are false colors or inferred by the AI from the
>> reconstructed image then I retract my statement of it being a knockdown
>> argument against the molecular basis of color qualia. I still suspect color
>> information is encoded in the patterns of neural activity, but it may be at
>> a low enough level that the fMRI lacks the spatial resolution to detect it.
>>
>> Jason
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