<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:#000000">My question is; what IS a fundamental quality and how do you know that something is one? And what difference does that make? If you think that a fundamental quality is one that is not processed but goes straight to consciousness, I think that you are wrong; that everything is processed through memory etc. bill w</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, May 16, 2023 at 2:05 PM Dylan Distasio <<a href="mailto:interzone@gmail.com">interzone@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">I'm not sure if I'm just too simple, and apologies if I am misrepresenting your position as it is not my intention, but I have never understood how you can be so confident that redness is a fundamental quality (qulia) of the human nervous system. It would appear to me it's abstractions all the way down until you get to the bare iron of the sensory system.<div><br></div><div>I have been listening to a lot of lectures by the biochemist Nick Lane lately. Although he is not focused on consciousness per se in his research, he tends to believe it runs on a gradient in biological organisms, so that even the first organisms like prokaryotes that have the ability to detect a change in the electrical field of their membrane are slightly conscious and can react to their environment. Once eukaryotes arose and mitochondria opened up a much larger genetic landscape to explore, predators/prey could develop and sensory systems expanded, along with the capabilities in terms of consciousness in higher level organisms and where they lie on the gradient.</div><div><br></div><div>Despite all the cartoons, I am still not sure why redness has to exist as a fundamental quality somewhere in the brain. Your eyes have receptors that trigger electrical impulses based on the wavelengths they're capable of capturing. This gets abstracted away and an image is created with various colors that have been assigned labels by human beings. Everything is likely an abstraction beyond the initial receptor change in the rods/cones. Red looks red because of the interaction between the rods/cones and photons.</div><div><br></div><div>I happen to be color blind so some reds look the same as some greens to me because I have a defect in my rods/cones. With other shades of red and green, I can clearly see the difference. This is all being driven at its root by the initial signals in the receptors interacting with photons. I know what blue looks like because as a child someone showed me objects reflecting those wavelengths and told me they were blue, etc. You can call it whatever you want to but it's still just an abstraction of photons hitting receptors in my eyes that at its root depends on the physics of light and the physics of the receptors in my eyes. I just can't imagine how a general purpose nervous system would evolve any other way. These different levels of abstractions provide huge benefits and flexibility despite your argument that a dictionary is somehow inefficient compared to the qualia theory.</div><div><br></div><div>Despite many attempts to understand your position, I'm not sure why any model of the brain would need to incorporate redness as an actual fundamental unit hiding somewhere in the physical system. Redness needs to be nothing more than what a photon of a certain wavelength interacting with a receptor looks like when a full image of the field of view is assembled by the brain at a higher level of abstraction. </div><div><br></div><div>There doesn't need to be a fundamental "red" hidden somewhere in the brain to be able to know what red is, decompose a field of vision into different objects, and identify the strawberry as red.</div><div><br></div><div>Is there a shred of physical evidence that redness is actually located as a distinct unit in the brain? It seems an enormous leap of faith to maintain your current theory when all existing evidence (to my knowledge) points to the idea that everything downstream of the photon hitting the receptor is an abstraction of one sort or another. I don't see high level how this is much different from how a computer with a camera and a convolutional neural network breakdown an image into its components and assign RGB values to it based on the sensor outputs. </div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, May 16, 2023 at 12:25 PM Brent Allsop <<a href="mailto:brent.allsop@gmail.com" target="_blank">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"><br><div>This is the key to the issue. You are saying "even the functioning as a gear is not accessible to the conscious system." But redness is a quality of something, like a gear or glutamate or something, and those properties are what consciousness is composed of. If a single pixel of redness changes to greenness, the entire system must be aware of that change, and be able to report on that change. You are saying, or assuming, or just stating, that nothing can do that. But, without that, you can't have composite subjective experiences composed of thousands of pixels of qualities like redness and greenness, where the entire system is aware of every pixel of diverse qualities, all at once.</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, May 15, 2023 at 7:25 PM Stathis Papaioannou <<a href="mailto:stathisp@gmail.com" target="_blank">stathisp@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 dir="ltr"><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, 16 May 2023 at 10:41, Brent Allsop <<a href="mailto:brent.allsop@gmail.com" target="_blank">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"><div dir="ltr"><br><div>Hi Stathis,</div><div>Functionality wise, there is no difference. There are lots of possible systems that are isomorphically the same, or functionally the same. That is all the functionalists are talking about. But if you want to know what it is like, you are talking about something different. You are asking: "Are you using voltages, cogs, gears or qualities to achieve that functionality?"</div><div><br></div><div>And capability and efficiency is important. Voltages are going to function far better than cogs. And computation directly on qualities is more efficient than systems which represent information which is abstracted away from what is representing it, doing the computational binding with brute force discrete logic gates. Motivational computation done by an actual physical attraction which feels like something is going to be much more robust than some abstractly programmed attraction, that isn't like anything.</div><div><br></div><div>And then, there is the simple: "What is fundamental?" question. What is reality, and knowledge of reality made of? What are we. How is our functionality achieved? What is reality made of? How do you get new qualities, to enable greater functionality, and all that.</div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>What if there are no "qualities" accessible to the conscious system other than the qualities generated by the system? A brass gear has a certain mass, feels cool to the touch, even has a certain brassy smell. But if it is part of a conscious system, none of that is relevant. The only relevant thing is that it functions as a gear. Furthermore, even the functioning as a gear is not accessible to the conscious system: all it knows is that it is able to experience red qualia, which it could do regardless of what the gear was made of. Is there any reason why this model should be wrong?<br></div></div><br clear="all"><br><span>-- </span><br><div dir="ltr">Stathis Papaioannou</div></div>
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