[ExI] Symbol Grounding

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Jason,

On Mon, Apr 24, 2023 at 3:09 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> as in say the strawberry is red, but it would answer the question: "What
>> is redness like for you." differently.
>>
>
> I don't see why they would answer this question differently if everything
> got inverted, including all emotional associations. If you changed only the
> word, but left the emotional associations as they were, then you could
> perhaps get different descriptions.
>

I'm skipping a bunch of stuff that I think is less important, and focusing
on what I think is most important, but if I skip over something important,
don't let me brush over it.

Giovani, evidently you think even a person engineered to have red / green
qualia inversion, you would consider them to be indistinguishable, and that
the quality difference of the subjective knowledge wouldn't matter?

It sounds like Jason at least thinks the two would be qualitatively
different, and this difference is important, if you are asking what his
redness is like for each of them.  Jason just has a problem with how we
would know, or how he would report that.  For the moment, can we just say
we are God, for a bit.  And we can know if the redness is now greenness,
even though the person wouldn't know, since all of his memories and
references have been remapped.
The prediction is the future, we will be able to read people's minds, and
objectively observe whether it is Jason's redness, or Jason's greenness,
via neural ponytails, or whatever.
The critically important part is we need to focus on only the important
thing, the quality of the redness.  Not what the person thinks that quality
is called, whether he is lying or whatever.  Let's only focus on the
quality of the redness experiences.  Would God say that quality has changed
or not, regardless of what the person says.

So, again, if you engineered someone to be a qualia invert.  God could
honestly tell those two people that one's redness was like the other's
grenness.
And even though they would function differently, when asked what is redness
like for you, they would know, since God told them, that their redness was
like the other's greenness, so despite them being otherwise identical, they
were qualitatively different.

So, would you agree that the quality of their consciousness is dependent on
what their redness is like, and if one redness quality is like the other's
greenness, that would be important and objectively observable?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20230424/4dbbb8f5/attachment-0001.htm>