<div dir="ltr">I think I'm prepared to bite the bullet on qualia being immaterial and aphysical.There's no physical reason why a particular set of neurotransmitter densities scattered in particular patterns across a particular set of neurons should be experienced via one quale, rather than another. Certainly no reason intrinsic to the molecular structures of the neurotransmitters or the connectome of the neurons.<div><br></div><div>And if qualia are indeed nonphysical, while there are almost certainly facts of the matter that govern their behavior, those will definitionally not be "physical facts", and it is not even obvious that they would be constrained by mathematically expressible logic subvenient to the Peano axioms.</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Apr 8, 2023 at 3:54 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">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"><br><div><br></div><div>Yay, Darin, You got some of the core ideas. Thanks.</div><div>You are thinking about qualia in the popular, something produces redness, way.</div><div>This is similar to the way everyone talks about the "neural correlate" of redness, and so on.</div><div>But this all separates qualities from physical reality.</div><div>Even if redness is produced by something this is still a physical fact. Redness would still be a property of whatever system is producing it.</div><div>It's a fundamental assumption of reality about what is more fundamental.<br></div><div>Is redness what is fundamental, and it behaves the way it does, because it is red.</div><div>Or is the function, what is fundamental. It looks red, because of the particular red function (whatever that could be.) from which redness arises.</div><div><br></div><div>The philosophical zombie problem also separates qualities from physical reality. A description of a zombie which (doesn't have redeness) is defined to be physically identical to one that does.</div><div>But that of course is absurd. A zombie is simply an abstract system that is physically different. It represents red information with an abstract word red.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Apr 8, 2023 at 3:30 PM Darin Sunley 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>A bit late to the party, but I'll take my swing at it:</div><div><br></div>The phenomenal conscious experience of redness is a thing our brain does, not a thing 700 nm light does.<div><br></div><div>Not only this, but there is no actual causal link between any specific phenomenal conscious experience that we have been taught to label "redness", and photons of 700 nm light. Different neural architectures can, and may very well do generate different phenomenal conscious experiences (qualia) in response to 700 nm light, and many neural architectures, while capable of detecting 700 nm light striking their visual sensors, may generate no phenomenal conscious experience in response thereto at all.</div><div><br></div><div>The question of what a phenomenal conscious experience is, what generates it, how it is generated in response to photons of a specific energy striking a sensor, and what causes it to be one thing and not something else, is all under the umbrella of Chalmers' "hard problem" of consciousness.</div><div><br></div><div>The first hard thing about the hard problem of consciousness is convincing some people that it exists. Or as someone (it may have been Yudkowskyor Scott Alexander) pointed out, p-zombies are indistinguishable from normal humans, /except/ in the specific case where they happen to be philosophers writing about phenomenal conscious experience and qualia.. :)</div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Apr 8, 2023 at 11:51 AM Brent Allsop 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"><br><div>I keep showing this image, attempting to communicate something:</div><div><br></div><div><img src="cid:ii_lg89ae9w0" alt="3_functionally_equal_machines_tiny.png" width="320" height="118"></div><div>Sure, our elementary school teacher told us the one on the left is red, the one in the middle is green, and the one on the right is just the word 'Red'.</div><div><br></div><div>But it is evident from all these conversations, that nobody here understands the deeper meaning I'm attempting to communicate.</div><div>Some people seem to be getting close, which is nice, but they may not yet be fully there.</div><div>If everyone fully understood this, all these conversations would be radically different.</div><div>Even if you disagree with me, can anyone describe the deeper meaning I'm attempting to communicate with this image?</div><div>What does this image say about qualities, different ways of representing information, and different ways of doing computation?</div><div><br></div><div>How about this, I'll give $100 worth of Ether, or just USD, to anyone who can fully describe the meaning attempting to be portrayed with this image.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Apr 8, 2023 at 10:27 AM Gordon Swobe 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 dir="ltr"><div><br><span style="color:rgb(80,0,80)">On Sat, Apr 8, 2023 at 9:31 AM Jason Resch <</span><a href="mailto:jasonresch@gmail.com" target="_blank">jasonresch@gmail.com</a><span style="color:rgb(80,0,80)">> wrote:</span><br></div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="auto"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote" dir="auto"><span style="color:rgb(80,0,80)"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Apr 8, 2023, 10:45 AM Gordon Swobe <<a href="mailto:gordon.swobe@gmail.com" target="_blank">gordon.swobe@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div><br></div><div><span style="color:rgb(80,0,80)">On Sat, Apr 8, 2023 at 3:43 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></span><div class="gmail_quote"><span style="color:rgb(80,0,80)"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr"><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="auto"><div><br>There is phenomenal consciousness. That I would call awareness of first person non-sharable information concerning one's internal states of mind.</div></div></blockquote><div dir="auto"><br></div></span><div dir="auto">It is this phenomenal consciousness to which I refer. If you do not think there something it is like to be a large language model then we have no disagreement.</div></div></div></blockquote></div><span style="color:rgb(80,0,80)"><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I believe there is something it is like to be for either the LLM, or something inside it.</div></span></div></blockquote><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Not sure what you mean by something inside it. A philosopher named Thomas Nagel wrote a famous paper titled something like “What is it like to be a bat?” That is the sense that I mean here. Do you think there something it is like to be GPT-4? When you ask it a question and it replies, is it aware of its own private first person experience in the sense that we are aware of our private experience? Or does it have no awareness of any supposed experience?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">-gts</div></div></div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex" dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"></div></div></blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex" dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"></div></div>
</blockquote></div></div>
</blockquote></div></div>
_______________________________________________<br>
extropy-chat mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a><br>
<a href="http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat</a><br>
</blockquote></div>
_______________________________________________<br>
extropy-chat mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a><br>
<a href="http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat</a><br>
</blockquote></div>
_______________________________________________<br>
extropy-chat mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a><br>
<a href="http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat</a><br>
</blockquote></div>
_______________________________________________<br>
extropy-chat mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a><br>
<a href="http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat</a><br>
</blockquote></div>