[ExI] Definition of Consciousness (Was Re: My guesses about GPTs consciousness)

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Jason,

On Tue, Apr 18, 2023 at 6:26 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 18, 2023, 7:52 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi Daniel,
>> Yes, currently our priority is getting Canonizer to make some income.
>> Once we achieve that, we will focus on significantly expanding the
>> theories of consciousness survey, hopefully including 10s of thousands of
>> philosophers representing their current views.
>> Right now it is Just a concise and quantitative representation of what
>> the 70 or so participants believe.
>> There is evidence with what we have that functionalism is the most
>> popular way to think about consciousness,  And you sound like a
>> functionalist.
>> Except the current functionalist camps do differ from this belief:
>>
>> "qualia and redness in fact are "red herrings" that will get us nowhere,
>> and should best be left alone."
>>
>> I've been working to get someone to help us get a camp along these lines,
>> as a competitor to the Representational Qualia Theory camp started.  I'm
>> sure once a camp like that exists, there will be more people interested in
>> supporting a camp like that.  Probably some on this list?  Anyone?
>> Would you be willing to support such a camp?  I'd be willing to do all
>> the work.  All you'd need to do is "support' it.
>>
>> What's the difference between a camp and an idea?
>

A camp can contain anything the supporters want.  It can be ideas,
doctrine, arguments, criticism of competing camps, and so on.  It's kind of
like a petition, with the goal of getting as many supporters as possible.
The quality of a new argument being added to a camp (or a peer reviewed
paper on scientific results...) can be determined by how many people it
converts to that camp.


> Can a person only belong to one camp at a time?
>

You can support as many camps as you want, in your prefered order.  Your
"canonized score" is split amongst them, so you normally get less of a
vote, if you support more than one camp.


> This is why I think simple polls with Yes/No, Agree/Disagree statements
> might be more illustrative. The absolute number of people answering would
> be unimportant, but it would show what the consensus of thought is on any
> particular question.
>

Yes, it is on my list of things to do, to make a survey topic of all the
questions you once proposed.  There is lots of related stuff like this in
the "Consciousness Consensus Project
<https://canonizer.com/topic/105-Consciousness-Consensus-Projct/1-Agreement>."
Your yes/no questions would make a great addition to this.


> My reservation with subscribing to a camp is  that as I understand it,
> anyone might change the definition of the camp (or it's position in the
> hierarchy of camps) to one I disagree with. I also think my positions are
> nuanced enough that I don't know if one person in a thousand would fall
> into the same camp as I would define it.
>

Once you support a camp you gain editorial control over that camp.  When a
change is submitted to a supported camp, all direct supporters are notified
of that proposed change, and the change goes "into review" for 24 hours.
During that time any supporter can object to the change.  If it survives
the 24 hours, with no objections, we assume all supporters are on board
with the change.  If you are busy during that 24 hours, and something
sneaks into a camp you support, which you disagree with, you can then
approach the camp in the camp forum, and ask for a fix to be made.

Does that help?  If you agree with everything that is specified in RQT,
your camp would be a supporting sub camp of that.  If there is something in
there you don't agree with, it needs to be pushed down to a lower
level supporting sub camp, so you don't need to support it.

Thanks for asking about all this, instead of just dismissing things before
you fully know what it is.

Brent
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