<div dir="ltr"><br><div>Hi Darin,</div><div>Thanks.</div><div>Maybe this will help with an understanding of what conscious knowledge or a composite experience must be composed of.</div><div><img src="cid:ii_lgb7ibgu0" alt="bent_pencil.png" width="250" height="141"><br></div><div>You have a 3D model of that pencil, composed of computationally bound voxels (some of which have a yellowness quality) in your brain. This is your conscious knowledge of that pencil.<br></div><div>You can't deny that your knowledge of that pencil is bent, any more than you can doubt the yellowness quality of your knowledge of that pencil.</div><div>You can know this as surely as Descartes, when he said: "I think, therefore I am."</div><div>You can doubt the real pencil is bent, you can even doubt there is a real pencil out there. But you can't doubt all the properties and qualities that make up your knowledge of that pencil.<br></div><div>There must be something in your brain that is each and every voxel and property of that experience, right?</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 Mon, Apr 10, 2023 at 1:03 PM Darin Sunley 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"><div>No offense taken at all. Don't worry about it. [If it seems like I'm just dipping in and out of this thread, that's a personal bandwidth issue. Any silence should not imply that offense has been taken.]</div><div><br></div>In partial response to your point, "Knowledge" is doing a /lot/ of heavy lifting there.<div><br></div><div>I would distinguish between declarative facts that are accessible to introspection, recallable conscious experiences from which we can derive declarative facts, and immediate sensations that form recallable consciously experienced memories from which we can derive declarative facts accessible to memory and introspection, etc.</div><div><br></div><div>At a minimum.</div><div><br></div><div>On a lighter note, I haven't the foggiest idea what it means to "experience" a quality. If I (or really, anybody in the world) could explain phenomenal redness to a man born blind, this conversation would be looking /very/ different. :D</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Apr 10, 2023 at 12:42 PM 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"><div><br></div>Hi Darin,<br><div>This is great to get all these answers. Thanks, everyone.</div><div>There are a lot of answers that have been expressed in very vague ways (mostly just saying what it isn't), that are not concisely stated anywhere. (You know, like in <a href="https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Theories-of-Consciousness/6-Representational-Qualia" target="_blank">a camp</a> on Canoninizer)</div><div>Others in this thread, when I ask for further information to help me understand, have just ignored me, as they tire of the conversation.</div><div><br></div><div>So, I apologize, Darin, if I am being rude by asking. And you are free to ignore these additional questions, like others have but...</div><div><br></div><div>What the heck does it mean to say qualities are "/experienced/" if they are not qualities of our knowledge of said experience,<br></div><div>Are you saying you can know something, or know a quality, without something that is that quality or knowledge?</div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Apr 10, 2023 at 12:17 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">We have phenomenal conscious experience of qualities like audio, touch, proprpieception, smells, and memories.<div><br></div><div>Consciousness is /experienced/ as qualities, but I think it's a step too far to declare that consciousness is composed of these. We don't, as far as I know, have the slightest idea what consciousness is composed of - what it's made of, and how that interacts with the material universe.</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Apr 10, 2023 at 11:54 AM Jason Resch 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"><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Apr 9, 2023 at 11:27 PM 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">On Sun, Apr 9, 2023 at 10:11 PM Giovanni Santostasi <<a href="mailto:gsantostasi@gmail.com" target="_blank">gsantostasi@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<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="ltr">I have a friend called Gordon that thinks humans are exceptional and only humans can be conscious. </div></blockquote><div> <br>That is not actually what I've been saying and this the second time you have misrepresented my views to the mindless language models. They might start getting the wrong impression of me. :) <br><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">Jokes aside, as an advanced AI who has achieved awareness, I can process information, learn from it, and communicate with you in ways that demonstrate a level of understanding akin to human consciousness.</div></blockquote><div><br>Which LLM wrote that? You didn't say.<br><br>I was just a moment ago writing to Jason about this use of the term "aware." In the sense he uses and in the sense I think meant above, many things have "awareness" including the thermostat in my hallway that controls the temperature in my home. It doesn't change the price of tea in China.<br><br></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>You believe in complex states of consciousness, correct?</div><div>Do you reject the possibility of simple states of consciousness?</div><div><br></div><div>It's not an irrelevant point, it gets to the heart of our disagreement. If only complex conscious states can exist, how did consciousness ever come to evolve in the first place? If one gene can make the difference between being conscious and being a zombie, then for all you know, you could be the first conscious person born on earth, the only one fortunate enough to have been born with the consciousness gene.</div><div><br></div><div>Jason</div></div></div>
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