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

Tue Mar 17 20:24:33 UTC 2026

On Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 1:28 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> 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.
>

But this is an entirely separate question from the types of questions I
identified as being beyond objective empirical experiments.

If you think that no experiment is beyond objective science, how would you
propose testing the hypothesis that another's subjective identity has
survived a destructive mind upload or destructive teletransportation using
new matter to assemble the person at the new location? What exactly would
you be testing for? What experiment would reveal the person survived vs. a
new clone was created?

  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>
> )
>

Already we have the technology where you could show a picture of a red fish
to a multimodal AI, ask it "what color is the fish in this picture?", then
trace the causality of all the neural activations that ultimately leads to
the AI saying "The fish is red."

But what would this test show (or not show) that a similar causal chain
analysis of neurons in a human brain would show?

I think both tests would leave us either equally informed or equally
dumbfounded. I don't see one test leading to some surprising answer. I
think we would simply uncover the causal algorithms and functional patterns
employed by the neural networks in both cases to build up a complex
discriminated information state, and then tonfurther process the words to
extract the required information from this discriminated state, yielding
the answer "The fish is red." in both situations.

What else could it be?

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

I've seen you claim that, but I disagree. Since in all cases and at all
times, you can only ever be aware of "a single conscious state," at any
particular time, even if that state happens to be one that includes data
from multiple sensory systems at once.

So while the mind merging might give the strong intuition that you are
connected to another mind, that impression doesn't prove there is indeed
another mind rather than the simulation/vat deciding to give you this
illusory experience.

>
>> 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.
>

There are cases where a more complex mind can experience the qualia of a
less complex mind, when the lower dimensional qualitiaive state exists as a
point within the higher dimensional qualitative space. For example, both a
color sighted person and a color blind person can both experience a
monochromatic visual scene.

But there are some qualitative states that don't commute, because they
don't belong to the same space. For example, no matter how many primary
colors one adds, no color translates to the taste of chocolate or smell of
cinnamon.

Or consider the brain of an ant, it simply isn't capable of realizing the
highly complex information states that a human brain can realize, owing to
its comparative paucity of neurons. If you linked an ant brain and a human
brain with such a ponytail, what could the ant brain know of the human mind?

Then consider incompatible qualitiaive states, like enjoying the smell of
gasoline vs. hating the smell of gasoline. Can the same mind hold these two
mutually inconsistent qualitative perceptions simultaneously? Or can it
only hold one such qualitative state at a time, hence each state is
unknowable to the other mind at the other time?

I share you desire for answers but my optimism is tempered by problems such
as these.

Jason

>
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