<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000">The only problem with the definition of consciousness as needing external inputs is that there are stages of sleep where the person thinks he is awake - i.e. cannot tell if he is asleep or awake. If he can't tell one from the other, is it the same thing? I spent a night at a clinic which was trying to tell if I had sleep apnea. My experience was that I did not sleep at all - was conscious all the time. All my thought was rational. But they told me that I did spend some time in light sleep (the very stage where you might not be able to tell the difference). So I would call that at least partial consciousness- and thus change that definition. Then there is the odd problem of, while being asleep, taking external inputs and including them in your dreams, such as a fire truck siren being experienced as part of the dream. bill w</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 1:37 PM Brent Allsop <<a href="mailto:brent.allsop@gmail.com">brent.allsop@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Hi William,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:rgb(0,112,192);background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">Is dreaming - aka REM sleep - a variety of
consciousness to you?</span><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:rgb(0,112,192)"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">My understanding of Stuart’s
definition is that <span style="color:rgb(112,173,71)">“</span></span><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(112,173,71);background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">No being can be deemed conscious without some manner of inputs
from the real world.”</span><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"> So a dreaming person is not conscious, according
to that definition, since there is no inputs from the real world. It seems to me that given such a definition
they would also consider all <a href="https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/detecting-consciousness-in-the-vegetative/" style="color:blue" target="_blank">vegetative
people as not conscious</a>. If I were I
such a person, very aware of my thoughts and their physical qualities, and such but unable to receive input
through my senses, nor control any motor functions, I wouldn’t want a person with this definition as their
working hypothesis of who is and isn't "deemed conscious" to be my doctor.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Also, I think many people agree that
sleep is when much of the neural brain programming occurs, enabling us to figure
things out like “</span><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:rgb(0,112,192);background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">what we are trying to tell ourselves</span><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Brent</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> </span></p></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 8:51 AM William Flynn Wallace <<a href="mailto:foozler83@gmail.com" target="_blank">foozler83@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">stuart/brett wrote <span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(34,34,34)">If intelligence is, as you claim, separable from </span><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(34,34,34)"> </span></div>consciousness<div><br></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Is dreaming - aka REM sleep - a variety of consciousness to you? I have certainly used my intelligence while I was dreaming - mainly to figure out what I was trying to say to myself!</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">In a way, stage 4 sleep in the deepest. That's where the night terrors take place - which I have never experienced, but I assume there is something like consciousness there for the terrors to be experienced in.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Other stages of sleep are not accompanied by any consciousness, although we can drift between a bit of consciousness and sleep in stage 1. Some people have said that they can tell when they are entering sleep when their thoughts go from rational to a bit crazy.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">bill w</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">bill w</div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 2:00 AM Stuart LaForge <<a href="mailto:avant@sollegro.com" target="_blank">avant@sollegro.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><br>
Quoting Brent Allsop:<br>
<br>
<br>
>> ?Consciousness is not magic, it is math.?<br>
><br>
> How do you get a specific, qualitative definition of the word ?red? from<br>
> any math?<br>
<br>
Red is a subset of the set of colors an unaugmented human can see. <br>
There I just defined it for you mathematically. In math symbols, it <br>
looks something very much like {red} C {red, orange, yellow, green, <br>
blue, indigo, violet}. If you were a lucky mutant (or AI) that could <br>
perceive grue, then the math would look like {red} C {red, orange, <br>
yellow, green, grue, blue, indigo, violet}<br>
<br>
Whatever unique qualia your brain may have assigned to it is your <br>
business and your business alone since you cannot express red to me <br>
except by quantitative measure (650 nm wavelength electromagnetic <br>
wave) or qualitative example (the color of ripe strawberries). Any <br>
other description of red only means anything to YOU (Perhaps it makes <br>
your dick hard, I have no clue, don't really care.)<br>
<br>
<br>
In other words, you can't give me any better a qualitative description <br>
of red then I can give you. Prove me wrong: What is red, oh privileged <br>
seer of qualia? (Yes, that was sarcasm.)<br>
<br>
><br>
> ?I don't think that substrate-specific details matter that much.?<br>
><br>
> Then you are not talking about consciousness, at all. You are just talking<br>
> about intelligence. Consciousness is computationally bound elemental<br>
> qualities, for which there is something, qualitative, for which it is like.<br>
<br>
Intelligence and consciousness differ by degree, not by type. Both are <br>
emergent properties of some configurations of matter. If I were to <br>
quantitatively rank emergent properties by their PHI value, then I <br>
would have a distribution as follows: reactivity <= life <= <br>
intelligence <= consciousness <= civilization<br>
<br>
>> ?It is irrelevant that I perceive red as green.?<br>
<br>
> Can you not see how sloppy language like this is? I?m going to describe at<br>
> least two very different possible interpretations of this statement. If<br>
> you can?t distinguish between them, with your language, then again, you are<br>
> not talking about consciousness:<br>
<br>
You pull a single sentence of mine out of context and then use it to <br>
accuse me of sloppy language? Here is my precise and unequivocal <br>
retort: NO! I challenge you to take that out of context.<br>
<br>
> 1. One person is color blind, and represents both red things and<br>
> green things with knowledge that has the same physical redness quality. In<br>
> other words, he is red green color blind.<br>
><br>
> 2. One person is qualitatively inverted from the other. He uses the<br>
> other?s greenness to represent red with and visa versa for green things.<br>
<br>
When you said, "Are you talking about your redness, or my redness <br>
which is like your [sic] grenness?" I meant whichever you meant by the <br>
quoted statement. My argument holds either way. Unless you believe <br>
that color-blind people are not really conscious. In which case you <br>
should be enslaving the colorblind and tithing me 10% of the proceeds.<br>
<br>
><br>
> You can?t tell which one you?re statement is talking about. Again, you?re<br>
> not talking about consciousness, if you can?t distinguish between these<br>
> types of things with your models and language.<br>
<br>
Again, my statement reflects yours with the exact same scope. So you <br>
tell me what I meant.<br>
<br>
> Sure, before Galileo, it didn?t matter if you used a geocentric model of<br>
> the solar system or a heliocentric. But now that we?re flying up in the<br>
> heavens, one works, and one does not. Similarly, now, you can claim that<br>
> the qualitative nature doesn?t matter, but as soon as you start hacking the<br>
> brain, amplifying intelligence, connecting multiple brains (like two brain<br>
> hemispheres can be connect) or even religiously predicting what ?spirits?<br>
> and future consciousness will be possible. One model works, the other does<br>
> not.<br>
<br>
I don't see how your model predicts anything except for your ignorance <br>
of what consciousness is. You say that every consciousness is a unique <br>
snowflake of amassed qualia, I say that every machine-learning <br>
algorithm starts out with a random set of parameters and through <br>
learning its training data, either supervised or unsupervised, <br>
converges on an approximation of the truth<br>
<br>
Every deep learning neural network is a unique snowflake that gets <br>
optimized for a specific purpose. Some neural networks train very <br>
quickly, others never quite get what you are trying to teach it. There <br>
is very much a ghost in the machine and each time you run the <br>
algorithm, you get a different ghost. If you don't believe me, then <br>
download Simbrain, watch the turtorial video on Youtube, and I will <br>
send you a copy my tiny brain to play with. Be the qualitative judge <br>
of my tiny brain, I dare you.<br>
<br>
Do you not understand the implications of me creating a 55 neuron <br>
brain and teaching it to count to five? Do you not understand the <br>
implication of my tiny brain being able to distinguish ALL three-bit <br>
patterns after only being trained on SOME three-bit patterns? Do you <br>
not see the conceptualization of threeness that was occurring?<br>
<br>
> In fact, my prediction is the reason we can?t better understand how<br>
> we subjectively represent visual knowledge, is precisely because everyone<br>
> is like you, qualia blind, and doesn?t care that some people may have<br>
> qualitatively very different physical representations of red and green.<br>
<br>
Quit calling me "qualia blind". I am not sure what you mean by it, by <br>
it sounds vaguely insulting like you are accusing me of being a <br>
philosophic zombie or something. I assure you there is something that <br>
it is qualitatively like to be me, even if I can't succinctly describe <br>
it to you in monkey mouth noises. I could just as easily accuse you of <br>
being innumerate and a mathphobe, so either explain what you mean or <br>
knock it off.<br>
<br>
><br>
> If you only care about if a brain can pick strawberries, and don?t care<br>
> what it is qualitatively like, then you can?t make the critically important<br>
> distinctions between these 3 robots<br>
> <<a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YnTMoU2LKER78bjVJsGkxMsSwvhpPBJZvp9e2oJX9GA/edit?usp=sharing" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YnTMoU2LKER78bjVJsGkxMsSwvhpPBJZvp9e2oJX9GA/edit?usp=sharing</a>><br>
> that are functionally the same but qualitatively very different, one being<br>
> not conscious at all.<br>
<br>
No being can be deemed conscious without some manner of inputs from <br>
the real world. That is the nature of perception. A robot without <br>
sensors cannot be conscious. If that is what you mean by an "abstract <br>
robot" than I agree that it is not conscious. On the other hand, a <br>
keyboard is a sensor. A very limited sensor but a sensor nonetheless.<br>
<br>
>> ?Nothing in the universe can objectively observe anything else.?<br>
<br>
> All information that comes to our senses is ?objectively? observed and<br>
> devoid of any physical qualitative information, it is all only abstract<br>
> mathematical information. Descartes, the ultimate septic, realized that he<br>
> must doubt all objectively observed information.<br>
<br>
You are in no way an objective observer. Any information that may have <br>
been objective before you observed it became biased the moment you <br>
perceived it. That is because your brain filters out and flat out <br>
ignores out any information that does not have relevance to Brent. Why <br>
else could you not see the color grue unless it had no survival <br>
advantage to you or your ancestors? Even now, your inborn Brentward <br>
bias is seething with the need to disagree with me: your primal and <br>
naked need to impose Brent upon me and the rest of the world. Can't <br>
you feel it?<br>
<br>
> But he also realized: ?I<br>
> think therefore I am?. This includes the knowledge of the qualities of our<br>
> consciousness.<br>
<br>
No it doesn't. Thinking pertains to logic and abstracts and not to <br>
qualia which are in the realm of that what you perceive and feel. <br>
Descartes said that his ability to make logical inferences entailed <br>
that he existed. If intelligence is, as you claim, separable from <br>
consciousness, then Descartes did little more than make a good case <br>
that he was intelligent. In fact he made it point to explicitly assume <br>
that all his perceived qualia were the work of some kind of malicious <br>
demon trying to mislead him about his existence through his senses or <br>
something similarly paranoid. In any case, if anyone was "qualia <br>
blind" it was your man Descartes, who used imagined demons to come up <br>
with a definition of himself that did not incorporate sensory <br>
information. Nonetheless, I don't think Descartes was a philosophic <br>
zombie.<br>
<br>
> We know, absolutely, in a way that cannot be doubted, what<br>
> physical redness is like, and how it is different than greenness. While it<br>
> is true that we may be a brain, in a vat. We know, absolutely, that the<br>
> physics, in the brain, in that vat exist, and we know, absolutely and<br>
> qualitatively, what that physics (in both hemispheres) is like.<br>
<br>
How could we know for sure what what the physical redness of ripe <br>
strawberries looks like when they would look different in the light <br>
and the shadow?<br>
<br>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion</a><br>
<br>
> Let?s say you did objectively detect some new ?perceptronium?. All you<br>
> would have, describing that perceptronium, is mathematical models and<br>
> descriptions of such. These mathematical descriptions of perceptronium<br>
> would all be completely devoid of any qualitative meaning. Until you<br>
> experienced a particular type of perceptronium, directly, you would not<br>
> know, qualitatively, how to interpret any of your mathematical objective<br>
> descriptions of such.<br>
<br>
Perceptronium is Tegmark's notion and not mine. I am not sure that as <br>
a concept it adds much to the understanding of consciousness.<br>
<br>
> Again, everything you are talking about is what Chalmers, and everyone<br>
> would call ?easy? problems. Discovering and objectively observing any kind<br>
> of ?perceptronium? is an easy problem. We already know how to do this.<br>
> Knowing, qualitatively, what that perceptronium is qualitatively like, if<br>
> you experienced it, directly, is what makes it hard.<br>
<br>
Being Brent is necessarily like being Brent. And if I were born in <br>
your stead, then I would necessarily be Brent. Moreover, you are being <br>
of finite information in that your entire history, your every thought, <br>
and your every deed can be described by a very large yet nonetheless <br>
finite number of true/false or yes/no questions and their answers. The <br>
smallest number of such yes/no questions and answers would equal your <br>
Shannon entropy.<br>
<br>
That means that there is a unique bitstring that describes you. The <br>
sum total of every discernible thing about you can be expressed as a <br>
very large integer. It would be the most compressed form of you that <br>
it is possible to express.<br>
<br>
> The only ?hard? part of consciousness is the ?Explanatory Ga<br>
> <<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap</a>>p?, or how do you eff the<br>
> ineffable nature of qualia.<br>
<br>
There is no "explanatory gap" because it is filled in by natural <br>
selection quite nicely. There are some qualia invariants that can be <br>
identified and experienced quite universally. For example, I know what <br>
your pain feels like. It feels unpleasant. I know that because our <br>
ancestors evolved to feel pain so they would try to avoid dangerously <br>
unhealthy environments and behaviors.<br>
<br>
> Everything else is just easy problems. We<br>
> already know, mathematically what it is like to be a bat. But that tells<br>
> you nothing, qualitatively about what being a bat is like.<br>
<br>
You are right, that's where technology can help. If you go <br>
hang-gliding on a moonless night while wearing a pair of these sonar <br>
glasses, you might come close to knowing what it is like to be a bat.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://sonarglasses.com/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://sonarglasses.com/</a><br>
<br>
Alternatively, since you are what you eat, you could just eat a bat <br>
and describe how it makes you feel. ;-)<br>
<br>
<br>
Stuart LaForge<br>
<br>
<br>
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