[ExI] Red

[John Clark]

On Mon, Jul 6, 2026 at 7:42 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:


> * > nor can you doubt that your knowledge of the pencil has your
> yellowness quality.*
>

*You can objectively observe your own "yellowness quality" but you are the
only conscious being in the universe that can do that; meanwhile I have my
own "yellowness quality" that you will never be able to objectively
observe. *


> *> we must remember that subjective qualities must have causal properties*
>

*Yellow light causes X to undergo certain changes, but if X≠Y then yellow
light will cause changes to Y that are different from the changes it made
to X.*


> *> It's just that cause and effect observation doesn't tell you what they
> are like. **An example of wrong physics would be that glutamate behaves
> the way it does, because of its redness quality.  But that may be the wrong
> set of physics.  It might be glycine, that has the redness quality.
> Glutamate might have your grenness quality. *
>

*Yes and that is the fundamental problem you will never be able to
overcome, there is a limit to what cause-and-effect can tell you, and
therefore there is a limit to what science can tell you. Quantum Mechanics
can say why some molecules reflect red light and other molecules reflect
green light but that's not what you're talking about, you're talking about
color qualia. You could maintain it's a brute fact that Glutamate has the
green quality and glycine has the red quality; but both those molecules are
extremely complicated objects and yet they produce an extremely narrow very
specific qualia, so to explain the entire conscious experience with your
theory you're going to need an astronomical number of brute facts, perhaps
even an infinite number of them. But my theory only needs 2 brute facts:*

*1) On is different from off. *
*2) Consciousness is the way data feels when it is being processed
intelligently. *

*Therefore William of Ockham would say that my theory is superior to your
theory. *


> *> We simply need nature to tell us, through direct apprehension, which
> one is which, so we can have our grounded dictionary of the physical
> qualities of what we are objectively observing.*
>

*This dictionary you keep talking about is going to be huge, perhaps going
beyond huge and merging with the infinite; even if by some miracle you
possessed such a monstrosity would you really feel that the consciousness
problem had been solved? Wouldn't you want to know WHY one molecule has the
happiness property while another slightly different molecule has this
sadness property? *


*I'd  be interested to know if you read the paper that Jason mentioned: *

*https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace
<https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace> *


*We're getting to the point where maintaining that AIs are not conscious is
becoming indistinguishable from maintaining that solipsism is true. *

*John K Clark *

>
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