[ExI] What is "Elemental Redness"?

Mon May 1 21:16:41 UTC 2023

See the most marvelous thing about GPT-4 is not that it has reached
consciousness or you can fall in love with it (I do love it to be honest).
But that just a few billion numbers in a matrix can do things like having
amazing mastery of language, solving logical problems, developing a theory
of mind, and all sorts of things that we consider intimately and uniquely
human.
GPT-4 is just a bunch of numbers in the end.

When the religious folks (that includes a lot of philosophers) were
confronted with the discovery by medical science that the brain is
responsible for human consciousness and cognitive abilities they came up
with all sorts of possible ways out like "the brain is just a radio" ideas
(consciousness is out there and the brain catches consciousness, it doesn't
create it), there is a soul and interacts with the brain and all sort of
dualist ideas that still permit the uniqueness and exceptionality of humans
as creatures created in the image of god. The evidence that brains somehow
were correlated with awareness and cognition was too overwhelming to be
dismissed but somehow the soul still existed inside the brain. How
otherwise the brain could do all these amazing things without a soul? A
bunch of neurons cannot do that for sure.

Well, now it is even worse. GPT4 is not even made up of some complex
biological system like the brain that after all could be created by divine
intervention but numbers in a matrix. And it can do language, better than
most humans...
How do you deal with this crazy fact? Most language and human cognition can
be reduced to a mathematical object, a matrix (not even a tensor, lol),
most human knowledge is in that matrix.
What the heck???
So excuses are made, it is not conscious, it doesn't understand red, it
doesn't understand the meaning of the words it uses, it is just a golem,
blah, blah....
Excuses...
The religious-minded folks grasp at straws. I think Brent is in a special
category, he claims he is not religious but his views are.

To me instead, it is marvelous and amazing, in fact, a spiritual experience
(that is different from being religious) that numbers can do all that.
Numbers that represent how things are related to each other, the
interaction and web of meaning give rise to meaning itself, it is meaning
itself. I find that religious people view ugly and untrue instead, the
opposite of real spirituality, ironically.

Giovanni

On Mon, May 1, 2023 at 1:55 PM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
>
>
>
> *"Qualia certainly correlate to physical reality, but declaring
> causationthere seems like a bit of a stretch - at least a begging of the
> questionof materialism. It's a very odd sort of causation where the
> physical properties of thepresumptive proximate cause have nothing to do
> with the characteristicsof the caused phenomena*Ben,
> Yeah, when I was reading this I almost spilled my coffee by laughing. All
> this after you begging not to write some self-jargon nonsense. I really
> don't get it either. The only thing I can imagine is that the particular
> chemistry and anatomy of the brain is required according to Brent (and
> others) for consciousness (and qualia supposedly are "elemental" conscious
> experiences that is bs in my opinion).
> Of course, my position is that the anatomy of the brain and the use of
> neurotransmitters and electrical pulses was the best biology could do given
> the material available and the constraints of evolution and biology. Maybe
> occasionally there is a biological clever solution or design but in
> general, there are better ways to do things.
>
> Even if particular molecules were needed to reproduce perfectly a
> particular person then we can still do this by simulating the entire brain
> including neurotransmitters. Do you want to give it grounding as Gordon
> insists then give it access to a camera, and bodily sensations put it in a
> robot, and so on...
> Maybe it is a valid question to find out what level of complexity is
> needed to create awareness and what minimal functionality is required. But
> my bet is that most complexity in the brain is redundant and not necessary,
> it is a bug, not a feature.
>
>
>
> On Mon, May 1, 2023 at 1:44 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> On 01/05/2023 20:22, Gadersd wrote:
>> >
>> > I think you have “communicating” and “convincing” confused. I am
>> > confident that most members on the list understand what your theory
>> > is. The problem is that we just don’t find it convincing.
>>
>> Well, I don't understand it. I can't make head nor tail of it. Which is
>> why I'm asking these questions. I originally thought that the argument
>> was that, literally, molecules had experiences, and that our own
>> experiences were somehow the same thing (the 'glutamate = seeing red'
>> idea (although exactly which shade of red was never mentioned)).
>> Obviously that's nonsense, but that's the only interpretation I've been
>> able to come up with. And as my disproof of the idea was not accepted, I
>> must have had the wrong idea.
>>
>> So if lots of people here do understand this theory, surely someone can
>> communicate it to me in words of no more than 3 syllables? Preferably 2.
>>
>> As if explaining it to an 8-year old, who happens to know a lot of
>> biology, but has never read a philosophy book, please.
>>
>> I didn't understand what Darren meant (or who he's responding to) by
>> "Qualia certainly correlate to physical reality, but declaring causation
>> there seems like a bit of a stretch - at least a begging of the question
>> of materialism.
>>
>> it's a very odd sort of causation where the physical properties of the
>> presumptive proximate cause have nothing to do with the characteristics
>> of the caused phenomena."
>>
>> Does the mental image of a unicorn 'correlate to physical reality'? I
>> don't think so. Or is that not a quale? On the other hand, physical
>> reality doesn't cause qualia? Well not by itself, but when oscillating
>> pressure waves enter my ears, I normally hear a noise. I'm pretty sure
>> that's not just a correlation.
>>
>> And the last paragraph, does that mean that it's very odd that if you
>> poke someone with a stick, they'll probably shout at you? Because I
>> don't think that's odd at all. Similarly, what our eyes see is a
>> collection of edges and light intensities, but what we perceive is a dog
>> leap-frogging a sheep. It might be an odd event, but it's not odd at all
>> that we turn the one bunch of things into something completely different.
>>
>> Ben
>>
>>
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>>
>
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