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

[Brent Allsop]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2026 at 11:19 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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 do not acknowledge this.  I have faith and hope that we are already fully
observing the subjective mind.  The only thing we don't yet know are things
like which of all our descriptions of stuff in the brain is a description
of redness.  Once we make that connection, it will all make sense, and we
will know in 3 different ways, what it is like for other brains.  (see:  Three
types of effing the ienffable
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JKwACeT3b1bta1M78wZ3H2vWkjGxwZ46OHSySYRWATs/edit?tab=t.0>
)

Oh, and did I mention that neuro ponytails will disprove solipsism, and
theories like we are brains in vats?


> 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.
>
>
See my other post in this chain where I refer to the youtube short where
we'll be able to upgrade half, or small portions of our consciousness, to
test them out, before we go full blown upgrade, and if we really want to,
we'll be able to mind meld to previous copies of ourself, for nastalgia
desires), to see how terrible consciousness is now, compared to what it
will soon be like.
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