[ExI] [Extropolis] conversation with GPT-4 on black hole QM

Tue May 16 20:22:21 UTC 2023

My question is;  what IS a fundamental quality and how do you know that
something is one?  And what difference does that make?  If you think that a
fundamental quality is one that is not processed but goes straight to
consciousness, I think that you are wrong; that everything is processed
through memory etc.  bill w

On Tue, May 16, 2023 at 2:05 PM Dylan Distasio <interzone at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm not sure if I'm just too simple, and apologies if I am misrepresenting
> your position as it is not my intention, but I have never understood how
> you can be so confident that redness is a fundamental quality (qulia) of
> the human nervous system.   It would appear to me it's abstractions all the
> way down until you get to the bare iron of the sensory system.
>
> I have been listening to a lot of lectures by the biochemist Nick Lane
> lately.   Although he is not focused on consciousness per se in his
> research, he tends to believe it runs on a gradient in biological
> organisms, so that even the first organisms like prokaryotes that have the
> ability to detect a change in the electrical field of their membrane are
> slightly conscious and can react to their environment.   Once eukaryotes
> arose and mitochondria opened up a much larger genetic landscape to
> explore, predators/prey could develop and sensory systems expanded, along
> with the capabilities in terms of consciousness in higher level organisms
> and where they lie on the gradient.
>
> Despite all the cartoons, I am still not sure why redness has to exist as
> a fundamental quality somewhere in the brain.   Your eyes have receptors
> that trigger electrical impulses based on the wavelengths they're capable
> of capturing.   This gets abstracted away and an image is created with
> various colors that have been assigned labels by human beings.   Everything
> is likely an abstraction beyond the initial receptor change in the
> rods/cones.   Red looks red because of the interaction between the
> rods/cones and photons.
>
> I happen to be color blind so some reds look the same as some greens to me
> because I have a defect in my rods/cones.   With other shades of red and
> green, I can clearly see the difference.    This is all being driven at its
> root by the initial signals in the receptors interacting with photons.  I
> know what blue looks like because as a child someone showed me objects
> reflecting those wavelengths and told me they were blue, etc.   You can
> call it whatever you want to but it's still just an abstraction of photons
> hitting receptors in my eyes that at its root depends on the physics of
> light and the physics of the receptors in my eyes.   I just can't imagine
> how a general purpose nervous system would evolve any other way.   These
> different levels of abstractions provide huge benefits and flexibility
> despite your argument that a dictionary is somehow inefficient compared to
> the qualia theory.
>
> Despite many attempts to understand your position, I'm not sure why any
> model of the brain would need to incorporate redness as an actual
> fundamental unit hiding somewhere in the physical system.   Redness needs
> to be nothing more than what a photon of a certain wavelength interacting
> with a receptor looks like when a full image of the field of view is
> assembled by the brain at a higher level of abstraction.
>
> There doesn't need to be a fundamental "red" hidden somewhere in the brain
> to be able to know what red is, decompose a field of vision into different
> objects, and identify the strawberry as red.
>
> Is there a shred of physical evidence that redness is actually located as
> a distinct unit in the brain?   It seems an enormous leap of faith to
> maintain your current theory when all existing evidence (to my knowledge)
> points to the idea that everything downstream of the photon hitting the
> receptor is an abstraction of one sort or another.   I don't see high level
> how this is much different from how a computer with a camera and a
> convolutional neural network breakdown an image into its components and
> assign RGB values to it based on the sensor outputs.
>
> On Tue, May 16, 2023 at 12:25 PM Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> This is the key to the issue.  You are saying "even the functioning as a
>> gear is not accessible to the conscious system."  But redness is a quality
>> of something, like a gear or glutamate or something, and those properties
>> are what consciousness is composed of.  If a single pixel of redness
>> changes to greenness, the entire system must be aware of that change, and
>> be able to report on that change.  You are saying, or assuming, or just
>> stating, that nothing can do that.  But, without that, you can't have
>> composite subjective experiences composed of thousands of pixels of
>> qualities like redness and greenness, where the entire system is aware of
>> every pixel of diverse qualities, all at once.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, May 15, 2023 at 7:25 PM Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, 16 May 2023 at 10:41, Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Hi Stathis,
>>>> Functionality wise, there is no difference.  There are lots of possible
>>>> systems that are isomorphically the same, or functionally the same.  That
>>>> is all the functionalists are talking about.  But if you want to know what
>>>> it is like, you are talking about something different.  You are asking:
>>>> "Are you using voltages, cogs, gears or qualities to achieve that
>>>> functionality?"
>>>>
>>>> And capability and efficiency is important.  Voltages are going to
>>>> function far better than cogs.  And computation directly on qualities is
>>>> more efficient than systems which represent information which is abstracted
>>>> away from what is representing it, doing the computational binding with
>>>> brute force discrete logic gates.  Motivational computation done by an
>>>> actual physical attraction which feels like something is going to be much
>>>> more robust than some abstractly programmed attraction, that isn't like
>>>> anything.
>>>>
>>>> And then, there is the simple: "What is fundamental?" question.  What
>>>> is reality, and knowledge of reality made of?  What are we.  How is our
>>>> functionality achieved?  What is reality made of?  How do you get new
>>>> qualities, to enable greater functionality, and all that.
>>>>
>>>
>>> What if there are no "qualities" accessible to the conscious system
>>> other than the qualities generated by the system? A brass gear has a
>>> certain mass, feels cool to the touch, even has a certain brassy smell. But
>>> if it is part of a conscious system, none of that is relevant. The only
>>> relevant thing is that it functions as a gear. Furthermore, even the
>>> functioning as a gear is not accessible to the conscious system: all it
>>> knows is that it is able to experience red qualia, which it could do
>>> regardless of what the gear was made of. Is there any reason why this model
>>> should be wrong?
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Stathis Papaioannou
>>>
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