[ExI] What is "Elemental Redness"?

Tue May 2 00:04:54 UTC 2023

*if the patterns just cause the experience, then what is doing the
experiencing*The patterns are doing the experience. That is really where
the "mystery" of consciousness comes from.
Self-loops are weird, they are "magical" (in the sense of a lot of very
complex, dynamic, emergent behavior is present). We know this by even
simple experiments with iteration. Mandelbrot set is one of the most
astounding complex mathematical objects but it can be represented by a very
simple function.
What is often missing in this discussion is that while the function is the
Mandelbrot set the only way to realize its complexity is to actually
interact with it, visualize it, zoom in in different regions, discover
patterns and regularities, and so on. Same thing with consciousness you
need to run the program to fully realize what consciousness is about.
When a complex enough system knows itself it experiences consciousness,
consciousness is the result of running these self-referential loops.
On the one hand, this is marvelous, amazing, and beautiful, call it
mysterious but it is not mysterious in the sense that something is missing.
I think we got it.
Music is amazing and mysterious but then if you want to enjoy music you
just make it happen and you do it.
That is the way of science.
While philosophers debate scientists reproduced, I don't know if it makes
sense to give it a number but for argument's sake let's say 80 % of what we
consider an expression of the highest level of human consciousness, that is
language.
You can argue GPT-4 doesn't understand, it is not conscious, Chinese rooms,
or whatever but hey while you are on the ground saying that
heavy-than-air flying machines are not possible I'm flying in one.
Stay on the ground then.
This is how the pragmatism of science has won in the last 400 years since
Galileo. It said enough with the stupid philosophical discussion let me
understand what is essential about nature and let me use this knowledge to
do useful and powerful things.
Science works, bitches.

Giovanni

On Mon, May 1, 2023 at 4:23 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, May 1, 2023, 6:43 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> On 01/05/2023 22:34, Darin Sunley wrote:
>>
>> Because neural firing patterns don't have a color (they're mushy gray,
>> just like everything else in the brain), nothing about their physical
>> properties has a direct causal relationship with color experiences. Color
>> experiences are correlated to neural firing patterns, but to flatly declare
>> that they are caused by neural firing patterns is begging the entire
>> question [and very probably wrong].
>>
>>
>> No, colour experiences aren't *correlated with* or *caused* *by* neural
>> firing patterns, they *are* neural firing patterns.
>>
>
> I disagree with mind-brain identity theory. To say something is something
> else established an identity relation, or a 1-to-1 mapping, if A is
> identical with B and B identical with C then A is identical with C.
>
> But note that identity theory rules out multiple realizability. If colour
> experiences are identical with certain neural activity, then those same
> experiences can't be identical with certain silicon computations.
>
> Here, if A is identical with B but we know A ≠ C, then we know B ≠ C.
>
> If multiple realizability is true, then there must be a 1-to-many
> relationship between conscious states and realizations of those conscious
> states, be they by neurons, computer chips, or any other substrate, and
> this precludes an identity relationship between the conscious state and any
> realization of it.
>
>
> How is that not obvious? There's nothing else they could be.
>>
>
> We could also say experiences aren higher level patterns than the neural
> activity. For example: thoughts, ideas, beliefs, states of awareness, etc.
> The neurons then would be a lower level substrate thet supports the higher
> level structures. An analogy would be asking "what else a city skyline be
> but bricks?" While not entirely wrong, it's perhaps more reasonable to
> answer the skyline is made of buildings.
>
> The dynamic information patterns, embodied as neural firing patterns, are
>> what we call subjective experiences. They probably need to have a certain
>> structure or degree of complexity in order to be conscious experiences, and
>> that's something yet to be discovered, but the general principle is not
>> only sound, but inevitable (if the patterns just *cause* the experience,
>> then what is doing the experiencing? In what are the patterns causing the
>> experience to happen? Doesn't make sense, does it? No, the patterns are the
>> experience).
>>
>
>
> I don't follow why saying that "experience is" rather than "experience is
> caused" escapes or answers the question of who is having the experience.
>
> Jason
>
>
>> This is similar to the confusion I mentioned earlier, caused by the
>> terminology 'my mind'. You don't *have* a mind, you *are* a mind.
>>
>> These two misconceptions have the same cause, I think. Dualism. Once you
>> properly ditch that, these things are blindingly obvious.
>>
>> Ben
>>
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