[ExI] Qualia blind thinking (Was re: Uploads are self)

Tue Mar 17 17:18:31 UTC 2026

On Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 12:33 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> To me, all this talk is so completely objectivbely observable qualia
> blind, and ignoring what consciousness is (and how half of your
> consciousness is in the left hemisphere, and othe in the right.)
>
> This statement was in Jason's essay:
>
> "The reason is that empirical science, being that which is practiced by
> way of objective experiments, cannot answer these questions in a
> satisfactory way. This remains true no matter how advanced technology
> becomes in the future."
>

I should highlight that this statement in particular is unrelated to
understanding qualia. Here I was writing only about the question of whether
another mind subjectively survives an upload or if they subjectively die.

There are personal subjective experiments you can perform to verify you do
indeed survive (assuming you do). But there's no objective test another can
perform to decide this question,

Note that this does not rule out the sorts of personal subjective qualia
experimentation that you advocate for.

> And Clark constantly makes similar statements all the time.  But to me,
> this is evidence of how corrupting the neuro substitution argument
> (fallacy) is.  Why would you give up faith and hope for consciousness being
> fully approachable via science?
>

I don't, but there are certain classes of questions, like the problem of
other minds, the question of the reality of the experienced world,
questions of subjective survival, which can't be decided by empirical
(objective) tests.

Do you acknowledge the limits of empiricism for these particular questions?

> I added a statement to this effect, quoting the above statement, in the
> highest-level super camp "Approachable via Science."
>
> https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Theories-of-Consciousness/2-Approachable-Via-Science?is_tree_open=0&asof=review
>
> You guys are completely ignoring the fact that in the near future we will
> be doing very significant neurohacking and re-engineering of our brain.
>

I acknowledge the utility of such experiments. However I reserve some doubt
they they will enable arbitrary minds to understand arbitrary qualia. For I
think the mind in question defined the set of qualia accessible to it.

One minor example is that most of us are trichromats, while others are
> tetrachromats, and some of us suffer from achromatopsia and experience no
> color qualities.  Surely in the near future we will be able to fix issues
> like this and completely redesign our color knowledge to include 10, or
> perhaps even one hundred, primary color qualities that no human has
> experienced before.
>

Yes, I agree with that.

  And we will be able to freely choose what qualities we use to represent
> what wavelengths of light on a whm.  To say nothing about being able to
> increase the phenomenal resolution of our visual knowledge by thousands of
> times in both our current brains and in any avatar brain we might choose to
> do subjectivee mind merging with, similar to the way the left hemisphere is
> subjectively mergeed with the right.
>

But note that by modifying the brain in the manner you suppose, you are
always creating a new mind which will have knowledge of the way some things
are to it, but it can never simultaneously hold the way some things are to
others who are not it. I don't see any way around this purely logical
restriction. Any given vantage point will always see some things, but not
others.

Jason

>
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2026 at 8:34 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 3:56 PM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sun, Mar 15, 2026 at 9:35 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> *I recently met one of the leading researchers involved in the fruit fly
>>>> brain scanning effort. He, and others mentioned two common objections
>>>> people have to the idea of brain preservation (with the eventual goal of
>>>> uploading):*
>>>>
>>>>    - *The first is the idea that silicon computers can't host human
>>>>    consciousness.*
>>>>    - *The second is the idea that even if my upload were conscious,
>>>>    "it wouldn't be me."*
>>>>
>>>> *I told him I would prepare a brief essay that uses the latest
>>>> philosophical arguments to serve as a counter to these objections (written
>>>> to be understandable to laypersons).*
>>>>
>>>> *So if there are people in your life who resist your choice to pursue
>>>> brain/cryro preservation, this document can help them understand the
>>>> various reasons for we can expect uploads not only to be conscious, but
>>>> also capable of extending one's very own subjective self and identity.*
>>>>
>>>> *Here is the document:*
>>>>
>>>> https://docs.google.com/document/d/103wDTRC7-AA6mHVzRj1JptqeulBRXinzvIdfC1Z50t8/edit?usp=sharing
>>>>
>>>
>>> *I read your document and I thought it was excellent.*
>>>
>>
>> Thank you!
>>
>> * I do have a few comments on the subject of personal identity and the
>>> soul, all of them are, I think, in harmony with your views. *
>>>
>>
>>> *If what are you call "Empty Individualism" is true then I will not
>>> survive an upload, but then I have not been "surviving" from one second to
>>> the next since the day I was born, my brain changes to a different quantum
>>> state many trillions of times a second and I have become a different person
>>> each time.*
>>>
>>
>> Yes empty individualism might say we are each trapped in a single moment
>> forever. But such a theory is incompatible with all decision theories, and
>> even empiricism in science, so it's not a very useful theory to live by,
>> even if it were true.
>>
>>
>> * And yet here I am, all those deaths have certainly not bothered me very
>>> much! That's not to say there might be an element of truth in the idea, I
>>> don't think survival is an all or nothing matter, after all the six year
>>> old John Clark no longer exists, although there are similarities we are
>>> different people. But if that is what is meant by "death" then death is not
>>> a big deal. And subjective consciousness is always continuous, although the
>>> objective outside world can jump discontinuously. *
>>>
>>
>>
>> Yes it certainly seems as though it can. Our sense of time leaves is with
>> a powerful impression that empty individualism is false, though I don't
>> think we can rely on our personal experience to decide which theory of
>> personal identity is true. After all relativity shows the subjective flow
>> of time to be an illusion, and yet we still feel as though things
>> constantly change. A similar sort of illusion could be behind our belief
>> that we're not eternally stuck in a single moment.
>>
>>
>>> *As for the "soul", it is a word that means the essential part that
>>> makes you be you and me be me, and I agree there must be something that
>>> causes that, but the religious claim it can never be understood so we might
>>> as well give up even trying, and I disagree with that part.  I can only
>>> conceive of 3 things existing in the universe, matter, energy, and
>>> information. Atoms are interchangeable, energy is fungible, so information
>>> must be the thing that causes you and I to be different people.*
>>>
>>
>> Yes I saw a good argument for this last night. If we accept any theory
>> besides empty individualism, then we must equate two different observer
>> moments with the same person. This the same person is maintained between
>> these two experiences, and thus there is some "Identity Carrier" that
>> preserves the same person from moment to moment. Understand the workings of
>> this Identity Carrier, and under what conditions it preserves an
>> individual, is in my view a way of better understanding what most people
>> mean by the word "soul".
>>
>> If we use this Identity Carrier idea to analyze a split brain patient who
>> develops two independent conscious minds, then we have a situation where
>> the person before the surgery "A" has their identity carried to their left
>> hemisphere "B" and the right hemisphere "C".
>>
>> If there is an identity between A and B, and there is an identity between
>> A and C, then by the  transitivity of the identity relation, then B is also
>> identical to C. So we have a case where the same mind is now in two
>> locations at once!
>>
>> I saw this argument last night here:
>> https://youtu.be/hhoqz4PEtkU
>>
>>
>>
>>> *I think information is as close as you can get to the traditional
>>> concept of the soul and still remain within the scientific method. *
>>>
>>
>> Yes, I agree.
>>
>>
>> *The soul is non material and so is information. It's difficult to pin
>>> down a unique physical location for the soul, and the same is true for
>>> information. The soul is the essential, must have, part of consciousness,
>>> exactly the same situation is true for information. The soul is immortal
>>> and so, potentially, is information.   *
>>>
>>
>> There are many parallels.
>>
>> The information is distinct from any material organization, so it leads
>> to a sort of "dualism" in that then the soul is distinct from the body,
>> just as a story is distinct from a book.
>>
>> Information can be copied between universes. Think about how we simulate
>> and look at gliders in the game of life. A more powerful intelligence,
>> could in principle simulate our universe and see all the conscious entities
>> that evolve in it. If it had access to unlimited computational resources in
>> its universe, then this intelligence might choose to "save the souls" of
>> beings in this universe, by copying their information patterns (their
>> souls) into computer simulations it ran in its universe.
>>
>> In this way, the soul (as an informal pattern) is not only immaterial,
>> but non physical it can in principle leave this universe and travel to
>> another, where it can survive and continue as before. The other universe
>> need not even have matter as we know it, even the game of life universe can
>> support the building of computers, and that is the only physical
>> requirement for a universe to host your consciousness (according to
>> functionalism).
>>
>>
>>
>>> *But there are also important differences. A soul is unique but
>>> information, at least conventional non-quantum information, can be
>>> duplicated. The soul is and will  always remain unfathomable,
>>> however information is understandable, in fact you might even argue that
>>> information is the ONLY thing that is understandable. *
>>>
>>
>> Yes it is for this reason that I have titled my book "The Science of the
>> Soul." The soul is comprehensible and science is uncovering this but by
>> bit. It would not be the first time science has shed light on what was
>> previously considered divine and beyond human comprehension (it happened
>> with "the heavens" and the "mystery of life").
>>
>> *And  Information unambiguously exists, I don't think even the most
>>> religious would deny that, but even if the soul exists it's existence it
>>> will never be proven.  *
>>>
>>
>> I think instead of trying to prove an unprovable idea, we will over time,
>> reform our understanding of what then word soul means. We'll keep the word
>> but update our conception, just as we've done with words like "heat",
>> "sunrise", "energy", "element", "atom", etc.
>>
>> Jason
>> _______________________________________________
>> extropy-chat mailing list
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20260317/c6e7f513/attachment-0001.htm>