[ExI] Red

[John Clark]

On Thu, Jul 9, 2026 at 12:35 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. *
>>
>
> *> This assertion is obviously falsified by the simple fact that your left
> hemesphere knows infallably, what redness in the right hemesphere is like. *
>

*As I've mentioned before, unless the Corpus Callosum has been surgically
severed, the two hemispheres of the brain are so intimately connected that
the left hemisphere does not know what just being the right hemisphere
would be like, and the right hemisphere doesn't know what just being the
right hemisphere would be like either.  *

*>> 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> *
>
>
>
> *> Interesting video, yes.  I haven't made it all the way through yet. *


*This is one of the most interesting AI papers I have ever read, it doesn't
prove that Claude is conscious of course but it comes closer to doing so
than I would've thought possible. They use a mathematical technique that
was discovered about 200 years ago called the "Jacobian"; a complicated
system may be virtually impossible to understand globally but if it is
"smooth" (no discontinuous jumps) and if you zoom in enough then it looks
approximately linear, the Jacobian is that approximation.   *

*An AI like Claude has trillions of electronic neurons with trillions of
different activation values. When one activation changes even by a tiny
amount it causes thousands of other activations to change which is why they
are so hard to figure out. You can think of Claude as a mind with a
trillion different directions and most of them don't have much effect on
what the AI ends up saying and doing, but a very few specific directions
do, and the Anthropic researchers have manage to find those directions by
using the Jacobian, they call it the "J-space". A small change in the
J-space makes it much more likely that Claude will talk about a specific
concept, like Paris or error or** the red qualia. *

*When you ask Claude an easy question not much happens in the J space just
as when you're walking you don't think about placing one leg in front of
the other, but when you ask Claude to solve a hard problem things become
much more interesting, the J-space sounds like an internal monologue that
is very much like a human's, or at least like this human's internal
monologue when I try to solve a difficult problem.*

* John K Clark   *







>
>
>> *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? *
>>
>> *We're getting to the point where maintaining that AIs are not conscious
>> is becoming indistinguishable from maintaining that solipsism is true. *
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20260709/8cc4996f/attachment.htm>