[ExI] Taxonomy of Minds

[Brent Allsop]

On Sat, Apr 4, 2026 at 5:44 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Saturday, 4 April 2026 at 12:05, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2026 at 5:12 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> *> We should be extremely careful when looking at what dolphins do. The
>> tendency to anthropomorphise is almost irresistible.*
>
>
> *Is that always a bad thing, isn't anthropomorphism exactly what we're
> doing when we reject solipsism and ascribe consciousness to our fellow
> human beings?*
>
>
>
> Not at all.
>
> Anthropomorphism is the tendency to ascribe human characteristics to
> non-human things.
>
> Solipsism is the position that I am the only thing that really exists.
> Rejecting it just denies that statement, it says nothing about the nature
> of the other things that we assume to exist. Ascribing human
> characteristics to other humans isn't anthropomorphism.
>
> You could ask "But how do we know they are human?" but that's just heading
> down a rabbit hole.
>

I disagree.  This faithless thinking—that consciousness isn't fully
approachable via science, and that attempting to approach it would only be
"heading down a rabbit hole"—has blinded us to what I predict will be the
greatest discovery of all time: "Which of all our descriptions of stuff in
the brain is a description of elemental redness."" and how is it
subjectively bound to all the other phenomenal qualities to generate
consciousness.  If everyone hadn't engaged in this faithless "rabut hole"
kind of thinking, I think we would have discovered this by now.

Once we know what that, we'll be able to see if a Bat uses that same
redness to represent echolocated food (or at worst has been engineered to
use redness) then we will know what it is like to be that bat.

It seems obvious to me that the left hemisphere of the brain isn't a
solipsist, because it knows, absolutely that the right hemisphere exists,
since it directly apprehends the knowledge in both hemispheres as one
infallible gestalt experience.  Surely we'll be able to engineer similar
neural ponytails to mind meld at least parts of qualia between other
brains.  And surely when they achieve the ability to restore destroyed
primary visual cortices, they will need to know how to engineer redness and
all the other color qualities.

Cortical prosthetic vision systems can now already provide low-resolution
black-and-white vision 'sprites,' and researchers are working hard to
enable color vision.   My prediction is that these are the people who will
first discover which of all our descriptions of brain activity corresponds
to a pixel of elemental redness.  Finally giving us the dictionary to know
what colors things truly are, not just false seeming 'gray matter' seemings.
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