<div dir="ltr"><b>my subjective experience is a 3D model<br></b>Your subjective experience happens because of a material substratum, and it is real, I agree with that. There are chemical reactions, electrical pulses, ions moved from one place to another, and electro-mechanical events like ion pumps closing and opening.<br><br> But that is NOT your subjective experience. It is what supports it. It is like going inside a computer and pointing to all the electrical activity, all the zeros and ones going on and off, and saying this is the video game I'm playing. Yes, it is but it is a trivial statement and doesn't help us understand what the video is about.<br><br> It doesn't give us any insight on the narrative of the video game, the rule of how to play it, the final objective. The material substratum is not where we are going to find consciousness. <br><br>It is in a sense irrelevant. Physiology has many alternative paths, if one doesn't work it finds another way. Also, every functionalist will tell you that I can substitute any of these physical processes with a digital equivalent and I should be able to obtain the same result. There are a lot of logical arguments and real experiments that show this is the case, it is not just a nice theory. <br><br> I never heard of anybody that makes these crazy claims that meat brains are necessary for consciousness explain exactly what is special about meat brains to sustain consciousness that a digital equivalent cannot do. <br><br>In fact, digital equivalents could do it better because they go to the essence of what is important to the phenomenon. I gave you the example of aerodynamics. <br><br>To me, somebody that insists that meat brains are essential for consciousness is like somebody that insists that feathers or flapping wings are essential for flight. They are not, these things are some of the solutions of natural selection related to the problem of flight but they are not ideal or optimal. Airplanes have no feathers or flapping wings and they are more efficient in flight than the best flying animals (there are some niche flying applications like hovering, flying backward and so on where we can learn from nature but you know what I mean). <br><br>There is much resistance in this group toward insisting on some particular material setup in the brain that is responsible for conscious experience because not just our intuition but our knowledge of neuroscience, physics, and computation is at odds with this particular notion. It is not that we don't believe stuff happens in the brain that underlies consciousness but this stuff is not essential in understanding what consciousness is. The secret of consciousness is not in the glutamate (or whatever) like the secret of flight is not in the feathers of birds. <br>Giovanni <br><br><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 7:34 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"><div dir="ltr"><br><div>Hi Giovanni,</div><div><br></div><div>Will gave some great advice. Everything I say is just my opinion. And I should especially be humble around all the people on this list, who are all so intelligent, in most cases far more intelligent than I. And I am clearly in the minority. So, what I say here, is just my opinion. I appreciate everyone's patience with me.</div><div><br></div><div>Giovanni, there are a bunch of ways of interpreting what you are saying here, and I don't know which interpretation to use.</div><div>It seems to me, when I look at a strawberry, my subjective experience is a 3D model, composed of subjective qualities. Are you saying that doesn't exist?</div><div>Are you saying that <a href="https://canonizer.com/videos/consciousness?chapter=the+world+in+your+head&format=360" target="_blank">Steven Lehar's bubble </a><a href="https://canonizer.com/videos/consciousness?chapter=the+world+in+your+head&format=360" target="_blank">world</a>, doesn't exist? And are you saying that when there is a single pixel, on the surface of the strawberry, switching between redness and greenness, there is not something in the brain, which is your knowledge of that change, and all the other pixels that make up the 3D awareness, which, yes, is a model that represents every pixel of the strawberry, out there?</div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 4:36 PM Giovanni Santostasi <<a href="mailto:gsantostasi@gmail.com" target="_blank">gsantostasi@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">Hi Brent,<div>There is something very wrong with your drawing. The arrow from Complex Perception Process (CPP) to the 3D model doesn't exist. I think that is the key to all our clashes (not just mine but almost everybody else on the list), also you don't need the language centers or just make it a bubble in the conceptual models' cloud. Language is just another conceptual model among the others. What you call a 3D model composed of subjective qualities is identical to that cloud of "conceptual models". I know it sounds weird to you but what you see with your eyes is in a sense a model, it is not made with words but images and colors and so on but that is the vocabulary of the visual system. It is another form of language. It is a model because it is re-created using some algorithm that interprets and manipulates the information received, it filters what is not needed and makes interpolations to make sense of the data. <br>Giovanni <br><br><br><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Apr 21, 2023 at 2:01 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"><br><div>Your model is based on a Naive Realism model.</div><div><br></div><div>Here is a representational model which will actually be possible without magic:</div><div><br></div><div><img src="cid:ii_lgr19o7j2" alt="image.png" width="562" height="282"><br></div><div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Apr 21, 2023 at 5:19 AM Ben Zaiboc 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>
Here is a diagram (because I'm generally a visual person, and can
usually understand things if I can draw them):<br>
<br>
<img src="cid:187a5985a0f3a0d3c3c1" alt=""><br>
<br>
A very general, high-level and crude diagram that tries to
illustrate the concept of 'symbol grounding' as I understand it,
from these discussions we've been having. Plus an arrow representing
output of speech or text, or anything really, that the system is
capable of outputting (obviously there's a hell of a lot going on in
every single element in the diagram, that I'm ignoring for
simplicity's sake).<br>
<br>
As far as I understand, the 'symbol grounding' occurs between the
conceptual models (built up from sensory inputs and memories) and
the language centres (containing linguistic 'tokens', or symbols),
as we've previously agreed.<br>
<br>
There are two arrows here because the models can be based on or
include data from the language centres as well as from the
environment. The symbols (tokens) in the language centres represent,
and are 'grounded in', the conceptual models (these are the object
and action models I've discussed earlier, and likely other types of
models, too, and would include a 'self-model' if the system has one,
linked to the token "I").<br>
<br>
The sensory inputs are of various modalities like vision, sounds,
text, and so-on (whatever the system's sensors are capable of
perceiving and encoding), and of course will be processed in a
variety of ways to extract 'features' and combine them in various
ways, etc.<br>
<br>
I didn't include something to represent Memory, to keep things as
simple as possible.<br>
<br>
So, could we say that this diagram illustrates, in a very general
way, what's going on in a human? in a LLM AI? Both? Neither?<br>
<br>
Would you say it's broadly correct, or missing something, or
incorrect in another way?<br>
<br>
Ben<br>
<br>
<br>
</div>
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