[ExI] What is "Elemental Redness"?

Giovanni Santostasi gsantostasi at gmail.com
Thu May 4 03:44:48 UTC 2023


Brent,
I respect your motivation in this quest for redness. As I said before I
understand now it is all about the fidelity in reproducing conscious
experience when we are ready for upload.
It is a valid motivation and I understand it. I don't know the details of
your personal history but it seems that you left behind some religious
superstition from your family heritage that was based on dualistic nonsense
like the existence of a soul. Because of this they are resistant to our
transhumanist ideas and in particular, the idea you can upload a mind and
that mind be really you. You said you want to "convert" them by
demonstrating that it is really them by identifying a particular physical
phenomenon (that I imagine you see as something that we can touch and point
to) that overwhelming evidence demonstrates is the cause for the "atoms" of
consciousness that in your view are these qualia and in particular the
qualia par excellence, redness.
While your motivation is noble and understandable the mean to achieve the
goal is completely wrong.
First of all, I doubt that religious people would be swayed by pointing
anything material to them. You can show them in an electronic microscope
anything you want to demonstrate life is made of little amazing machines
and they would say these machines were made by god. No amount of evidence
or reasoning will convince them. Leaving these superstitions is a very
personal journey and it involves confronting hard truth and cognitive
dissonance.
Furthermore, we should find out what the truth is, independently of what
our motivation to find the truth is. There is almost no evidence that
supports your point of view and to me, it looks like another type of
superstition. I understand that to you abstractions seem similar to the
belief of the religious person but it is quite the opposite. The
abstraction is not a belief but it is based on evidence and a deep
understanding of how nature works. This is how we abstract from physical
phenomena the laws of physics. They represent the essential operations of
the universe. The way we know they work is because they allow us to do
things, like building airplanes and probes to be sent to Mars. Same thing
with the idea that activation patterns in the brain is what all the mind
stuff is about. We have applied this understanding to build things like
machines that can read people's thoughts. They didn't do it by catching and
filtering neurotransmitters in the brains but by looking at the patterns in
the brain. Why color should be different from thoughts?
I can assure you there is zero evidence it is more direct, more basic, and
more fundamental that a thought. It is not. It is not even a mystery really
because there is enough research that shows it is exactly the case. The
experience of redness is as complicated and full of recurrent interactions
as the experience of naming a strawberry. Maybe language requires a few
more layers and the involvement of specialized regions of the brain but
fundamentally they are similar processes. It is possible that the
directness and vividness of redness is due simply to the involvement of the
thalamus (for example the thalamus is involved in the opposite way by
gating sensory experience during deep sleep that is the most unconscious
state we experience besides coma). The brain may give a certain flavor to
the experiences that involve external stimuli by involving the thalamus so
we can actually distinguish what is external and internal. But this doesn't
make redness more direct or fundamental than thinking and naming red. They
feel different things simply because they are different types of
processing. As I said before the brain needed to find ways to communicate
to itself that something was happening and colors are brain "words" in a
sense, they are symbols. The dictionary is not needed because all that you
need is association. The brain associated this particularly complicated
firing pattern with the external presence of the color red (or other
complicated light conditions that could be interpreted as red) and this
other pattern with the color green. Same with the other senses. This was
done through the process of evolution given we inherit this ability and
also some training during childhood. The brain learned how to associate red
and redness over a long period of time exactly like artificial neural nets
do via unsupervised learning.
This is really it.
Now this story I gave you that I'm sure is exactly what happens in our
brain (I can have messed up some details but the jest is correct) is
actually reassuring for the goal of uploading minds. The entire idea of
uploading is that substratum doesn't matter. We don't have to reproduce the
brain but just what the brain does, its essential operations and functions
(the high-level ones that count).
Does it mean that when I'm uploaded and I have some artificial eyes I would
experience red exactly how I experienced it when I was made of meat?
Yes and in fact I hope better.

We don't need to wait for the upload to know what it feels like to be
augmented by technology. There are many examples. One is what happens when
people receive artificial lenses that have multiple plane of focuses.
Usually, the natural lens can only focus on a plane at the time, you can
focus on nearby objects or far away. You cannot have everything in focus at
once with natural lenses.
You can with artificial ones. I read reports of people describing the
experience as having "superhuman powers".

There are people that learned how to move a mouse with their brain alone
after an electrode was implanted in their brain. Go and interview them and
ask them how it feels to move the mouse. This is even closer to the idea of
uploading. Here you have some complex brain process that is interpreted by
a machine. You have to understand that nowhere there are instructions that
this signal means to move the cursor left, move it right. The AI algo
learns what these signals mean by itself. It is all in the patterns.
So I think that we are uploaded we will have experiences that are much more
intense, interesting, and powerful than the redness we experience right
now. We will be able to multiply our sensory experience, the speed of
processing information, how much we remember and so on. The brain is pretty
limited while digital computers are almost limitless in comparison with the
brain's capabilities.
So there is absolutely nothing to worry in terms of fidelity of experience
because not just we will be able to reproduce the experience with
incredible fidelity by reproducing the essential features of them (the
patterns) but actually we can expand and amplify these experiences
immensely such that redness would be a very boring and trivial experience
when we finally our free from our biologies.

















On Wed, May 3, 2023 at 8:03 PM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
wrote:

> *terms that separate consciousness from physical reality
> <https://canonizer.com/videos/consciousness?chapter=differentiating+reality+and+knowledge+of+reality&format=360&t=400> *
> Brent,
> Functionalists do not do that. It is you that has an outdated
> understanding of what physical reality means. I have already mentioned that
> physical reality is made of interactions. Even the things that interact are
> themselves interactions.
> It is all fields. And the fields are due to the geometrical and symmetries
> properties of space and time.
>
> I watched the video you linked and it is full of fallacies and
> scientific mistakes from the start. What you describe is not how the brain
> works. And there is no such thing as a pixel of color (our visual system
> doesn't work like a monitor or a camera). A simple Google search would
> clarify issues like these but it seems you didn't bother to do these
> searches. It is no wonder that people are not taking you seriously when you
> go to neuroscience conferences and explain your theory, you have some very
> basic wrong assumptions about the brain that are simply wrong. Everything
> else then is undermined by these wrong assumptions.
>
>
> https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3d0zxk/does_the_human_eye_see_in_pixels/
>
> Giovanni
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, May 3, 2023 at 7:44 PM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Brent,
>> I click on the link you provided and immediately I see a still from the
>> video that says "so it can be mistaken if not correctly interpreted". I
>> gave you all the evidence in the world that this is exactly what happens
>> with color illusions.
>> How does your model of color account for this if it is not due to an
>> error in interpretation?
>> Please explain.
>> Giovanni
>>
>> On Wed, May 3, 2023 at 7:34 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, May 2, 2023 at 8:31 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> What is the label for a person who thinks that "brain excitation causes
>>>> experience" is wrong and that 'brain excitation IS experience'?  bill w
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, May 2, 2023 at 7:56 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On 02/05/2023 02:42, Jason Resch wrote:
>>>>> > 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.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> The 'who' is the neural pattern. This is the central point.
>>>>>
>>>>> I suppose you could say "experience is caused by the neural pattern,
>>>>> in
>>>>> the neural pattern", but that might be more confusing. To me at least,
>>>>> it's clearer to say the experience and the neural pattern are the same
>>>>> thing.
>>>>>
>>>>> The point is to eliminate the dualism implicit in the language used.
>>>>> It's not "my experience is caused by these neural patterns" (which
>>>>> implies the question "what am I? What is it that these patterns cause
>>>>> to
>>>>> have the experience?"), it's "I am these neural patterns, having this
>>>>> experience".
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Thank you Ben.  All the people that use terms that separate
>>> consciousness from physical reality
>>> <https://canonizer.com/videos/consciousness?chapter=differentiating+reality+and+knowledge+of+reality&format=360&t=400>
>>> aren't much better than dualists
>>> <https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Theories-of-Consciousness/48-Substance-Dualism>,
>>> and non mind brain identity theorists
>>> <https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Theories-of-Consciousness/17-Mind-Brain-Identity>,
>>> in my current opinion.
>>>
>>>
>>>> And no, that doesn't mean only patterns created by
>>>>> biological neurons will do. Anything capable of producing the same
>>>>> patterns will produce the same result: Me.
>>>>>
>>>>> Ben
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> extropy-chat mailing list
>>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>>>>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>
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