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

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Daniel,

On Wed, Apr 19, 2023 at 4:36 AM efc--- via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Hello Brent,
>
> On Tue, 18 Apr 2023, Brent Allsop via extropy-chat wrote:
>
> > Hi Daniel,Yes, currently our priority is getting Canonizer to make some
> income.
>
> Oh, it's your business? =) That's nice! Who are your target customers at
> the moment? Are you selling primarily to schools? Could this be combined
> perhaos with some kind of online delphi system to hash out positions and
> derive answers? If you would get experts in their fields to participate,
> that would be a nice resources.
>

Yes. all those are good use cases.  We are currently targeting local city
governments.  They pay lots of survey companies like Y2K analytics or
flashvote, in an attempt to find out what residents want or believe.  They
are part of the polarization problem, and we believe we can disrupt that
industry.



> > 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.
>
> Ahh, now I see the vision! Perhaps I could then stop using wikipedia for
> introductions to various philosophical topics!
>
> > 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'll read up on the functionalist camp to see where we part ways. But
> based on a very quick wikipedia glance, I do see quite a few things I
> agree with. Then there was a link to computationalism, and I see some
> good things there. Well, let me stop this rambling of trying to put
> "isms" on myself. ;)
>
> > 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 would it mean in terms of time? Since I have my own business some
> weeks are very busy, and other are less so. I saw in the other reply a
> note about 24 hour windows and I'm sorry to say that I cannot promise to
> strictly follow anything within a 24 hour window.
>

I (or anyone) could create a camp called "Qualia are Red Herrings".  Create
a new competing sibling camp to "Representational Quali Theory
<https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Theories-of-Consciousness/6-Representational-Qualia>"
Then add this as a statement:
                    'qualia and redness in fact are "red herrings" that
will get us nowhere, and should best be left alone.'

Then all you'd need to do is support it, like signing a petition.

It looks like Ben currently shares your views.  I'd hope he'd support it
also.  It'd be interesting to see how much consensus this view could
achieve, compared to other camps.
As always, may the best camp achieve the most consensus.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20230419/9b55744f/attachment.htm>