<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">Augh oh. Bill said:</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:Arial,sans-serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">“There are numerous reports of conscious
experience even when what we know as "neural activity" has stopped
(i.e. near death experience.)”</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">You’re not going all hooga booga on
us are you? ;)</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">Not that, that is bad. Some of my best friends and family are like
this.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><br></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><span style="font-size:12pt">You are a "materialist" right? All the stuff Chopra and all the
other hooga booga folk talk about like</span></font><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;font-size:12pt;color:rgb(47,85,151)">: “Without consciousness, the universe would vanish in a puff of
smoke”</span><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><span style="font-size:12pt"> and </span></font><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;font-size:12pt;color:rgb(47,85,151)">“The universe and the observer exist as a pair. I cannot imagine a
consistent theory of the universe that ignores consciousness,”</span><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><span style="font-size:12pt"> and on and on </span><span style="font-size:16px">ad</span><span style="font-size:12pt"> </span><span style="font-size:16px">infinitum</span><span style="font-size:12pt">, is just
them conflating their subjective knowledge of the universe with the universe.</span></font></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">The huge gap in our science that
fails to account for qualia (really just physical qualities or color) frees
these religious folk to get so much traction with all this kind of, in my
opinion, anti scientific and "unfalsifiable" ("unfalsifiable is their term) “crap in the
gap.”</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">If secularists (and Spike) would
just stop thinking sloppily about the epistemology of color (as in notice the
obvious: that the word red isn’t physically red), instead of just “quining” or ignoring
this explanatory gap, they could once and for all close this last remaining gap
full of crap by simply telling us which of all our physical descriptions are a
description of redness.</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">Bill also said: “</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">What
about chemicals that participate in qualia in the brain and then go to a
different part of the body?</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 id="m_-1272919214611093847gmail-_x0000_t75">
</span><span id="m_-1272919214611093847gmail-Picture_x0020_2" type="#_x0000_t75" alt="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/_ndIC9sILwB28_LquUV7kN2ajzvMZFRRfPfiq5S2lg9DZER9UW46EXCSp24EsVgII9KswaUcGUy-ySZ8fM4yzfhq_XCjMaGiPPqLG3HNDvcZwJXeVsN1OsKqvXr235q3OHnOSkk" style="width:129.5pt;height:97pt">
</span></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"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">"<b>participate </b>in qualia"? Why does everyone insist on using words that seperate qualia from physical reality? We should be more interested in physical redness, not just what physics "participates" with it. <span style="font-size:11pt">Yet another word to add to the continuously growing list of terms people seem to be compelled to use which separate qualia from physical reality:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><br></p><div dir="auto" style="color:rgb(80,0,80)">•<span style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>Generates</div><div dir="auto" style="color:rgb(80,0,80)">•<span style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>Causes</div><div dir="auto" style="color:rgb(80,0,80)">•<span style="white-space:pre-wrap"> Associated</span> with</div><div dir="auto" style="color:rgb(80,0,80)"></div><div dir="auto" style="color:rgb(80,0,80)">•<span style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>Correlates with</div><div dir="auto" style="color:rgb(80,0,80)"></div><div dir="auto" style="color:rgb(80,0,80)">•<span style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>Arises from<br></div><div dir="auto" style="color:rgb(80,0,80)">•<span style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span><span style="font-family:sans-serif">Supervenes on</span></div><div dir="auto" style="color:rgb(80,0,80)"><div dir="auto" style="font-family:sans-serif">•<span style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>Intervenes on</div><div style="font-family:sans-serif">•<span style="white-space:pre-wrap"> Participate in</span><br></div></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><br></p><div><img src="cid:ii_k4p4o23j0" alt="image.png" width="119" height="89" style="margin-right: 0px;"><br></div>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><span style="font-size:12pt">It’s as simple as the fact that the above
is a pile of glutamate. We say it <b>IS</b> white, because it reflects white light. We don't say it "participates in white." </span></font><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;font-size:12pt">But it’s actual physical quality or colorness we can be </span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;font-size:16px">directly</span><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><span style="font-size:12pt"> aware of </span></font><b style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;font-size:12pt">IS</b><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><span style="font-size:12pt"> redness. Its colorness could be redness, even when it is sitting in a pile like that. We don't </span><span style="font-size:16px">doubt</span><span style="font-size:12pt"> that red paint stops being red when it stops 'participating' in a painting, or when there is no light to reflect off of it. </span></font><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;font-size:12pt">Just like a painter
collects chemicals that reflect the right kind of light out of which to paint a
painting, we need to take the right kind of chemicals that have the right
colorness, and computationally bind them together to build any kind of composite
qualitative experience of knowledge you want.
Everything from love, to free will, and </span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;font-size:16px">everything</span><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><span style="font-size:12pt"> else that the hooga booga types like to think is more than just an </span><span style="font-size:16px">artificially</span><span style="font-size:12pt"> constructed virtual reality seeming we think of as reality.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><br></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">Again, there is no “hard mind
problem” it’s just a color problem. And
to solve that problem all we need to do is stop being qualia blind by not conflating
reality with our knowledge of reality.</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, Dec 27, 2019 at 8:49 PM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</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">What is the absence of matter? There are absences of matter all around us, including ones in the brain, that consciousness seems to have no problem 'traveling' across. Does consciousness exists as it goes between points, or can it be frozen in time? Is it located in points or between them, or both? Is it fundamentally relational and not the same kind of physical property that can exist in a single state, like charge for example? Qualia seem very acute but it seems like the traditional view is that brain consciousness is related to the movement of electricity, chemicals, and proteins. But it does seem like 'redness' being one evident thing should mean it can be represented by one clear state. <div><br></div><div>This thought experiment (can consciousness be 'frozen'?) gives me a lot of confusion. Qualia are acute, but *comprehending* a quale requires time! What the fuck is up with that?<br><div><br></div><div>Which leads me to ask, is there consciousness in the brain even when there is no motion? There are numerous reports of conscious experience even when what we know as "neural activity" has stopped (i.e. near death experience.) An easy solution to this is to simply accept that it is not only the electricity of the brain, but the entire molecular/atomic composition which is integrated and experiencing consciousness somehow. I think this is much more parsimonious. Why should only electrochemical signaling cause consciousness? You would certainly not be conscious if I removed your glia, or astrocytes, or CSF. Just because we understand them less shouldn't mean they are any less consciousness-associated.</div><div><br><div>What about chemicals that participate in qualia in the brain and then go to a different part of the body? Or the blood that is in the brain during the experience of a certain quale? I don't understand how these can be fundamentally separated from the experience. They are absolutely necessary for the experience. Maybe they don't 'live' in the brain, but is that the criterion? The brain is fluid anyway.</div><div><br></div><div>And all space was originally one, and all matter/energy was originally connected, so in the end I have a hard time separating my consciousness from the rest of everything (Sagan's apple pie thing which I think a lot of people don't understand or just take as some trite "wow the universe is big" science deal.)<br></div></div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Dec 27, 2019 at 6:56 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</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)"><a href="https://dailygalaxy.com/2019/12/the-ultimate-mystery-consciousness-may-exist-in-the-absence-of-matter-2019-most-popular/" target="_blank">https://dailygalaxy.com/2019/12/the-ultimate-mystery-consciousness-may-exist-in-the-absence-of-matter-2019-most-popular/</a><br></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)">The cosmos itself is conscious and more, including a theory by Deepak Chopra, who can be counted on to have some strange, unproveable idea about anything.</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>
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