<div dir="auto"><div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 1:28 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:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Mar 17, 2026 at 11:19 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">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="auto"><div><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 12:33 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">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><div>To me, all this talk is so completely objectivbely observable qualia blind, and ignoring what consciousness is (and how half of your consciousness is in the left hemisphere, and othe in the right.)</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">This statement was in Jason's essay:</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr"><span id="m_-8122224327855700799m_350748750550313951m_-7023013753653172329gmail-docs-internal-guid-2d86ad88-7fff-0a91-7fc2-779668d8fafe"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Libre Baskerville",serif;background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline"><font color="#0000ff">"The reason is that empirical science, being that which is practiced by way of objective experiments, cannot answer these questions in a satisfactory way. This remains true no matter how advanced technology becomes in the future."</font></span></p></span></div></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I should highlight that this statement in particular is unrelated to understanding qualia. Here I was writing only about the question of whether another mind subjectively survives an upload or if they subjectively die.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">There are personal subjective experiments you can perform to verify you do indeed survive (assuming you do). But there's no objective test another can perform to decide this question,</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Note that this does not rule out the sorts of personal subjective qualia experimentation that you advocate for.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><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"><div dir="ltr"><br><div>And Clark constantly makes similar statements all the time. But to me, this is evidence of how corrupting the neuro substitution argument (fallacy) is. Why would you give up faith and hope for consciousness being fully approachable via science?</div></div></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I don't, but there are certain classes of questions, like the problem of other minds, the question of the reality of the experienced world, questions of subjective survival, which can't be decided by empirical (objective) tests.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Do you acknowledge the limits of empiricism for these particular questions?</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>I do not acknowledge this. I have faith and hope that we are already fully observing the subjective mind.</div></div></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">But this is an entirely separate question from the types of questions I identified as being beyond objective empirical experiments.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">If you think that no experiment is beyond objective science, how would you propose testing the hypothesis that another's subjective identity has survived a destructive mind upload or destructive teletransportation using new matter to assemble the person at the new location? What exactly would you be testing for? What experiment would reveal the person survived vs. a new clone was created?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><div> The only thing we don't yet know are things like which of all our descriptions of stuff in the brain is a description of redness. Once we make that connection, it will all make sense, and we will know in 3 different ways, what it is like for other brains. (see: <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JKwACeT3b1bta1M78wZ3H2vWkjGxwZ46OHSySYRWATs/edit?tab=t.0" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">Three types of effing the ienffable</a>)</div></div></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Already we have the technology where you could show a picture of a red fish to a multimodal AI, ask it "what color is the fish in this picture?", then trace the causality of all the neural activations that ultimately leads to the AI saying "The fish is red."</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">But what would this test show (or not show) that a similar causal chain analysis of neurons in a human brain would show?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I think both tests would leave us either equally informed or equally dumbfounded. I don't see one test leading to some surprising answer. I think we would simply uncover the causal algorithms and functional patterns employed by the neural networks in both cases to build up a complex discriminated information state, and then tonfurther process the words to extract the required information from this discriminated state, yielding the answer "The fish is red." in both situations.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">What else could it be?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><div><br></div><div>Oh, and did I mention that neuro ponytails will disprove solipsism, and theories like we are brains in vats?</div></div></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I've seen you claim that, but I disagree. Since in all cases and at all times, you can only ever be aware of "a single conscious state," at any particular time, even if that state happens to be one that includes data from multiple sensory systems at once.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">So while the mind merging might give the strong intuition that you are connected to another mind, that impression doesn't prove there is indeed another mind rather than the simulation/vat deciding to give you this illusory experience.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><div> </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 dir="auto"><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"><div dir="ltr"><div>I added a statement to this effect, quoting the above statement, in the highest-level super camp "Approachable via Science."</div><div><a href="https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Theories-of-Consciousness/2-Approachable-Via-Science?is_tree_open=0&asof=review" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Theories-of-Consciousness/2-Approachable-Via-Science?is_tree_open=0&asof=review</a></div><div><br></div><div>You guys are completely ignoring the fact that in the near future we will be doing very significant neurohacking and re-engineering of our brain. </div></div></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I acknowledge the utility of such experiments. However I reserve some doubt they they will enable arbitrary minds to understand arbitrary qualia. For I think the mind in question defined the set of qualia accessible to it.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><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"><div dir="ltr"><div> One minor example is that most of us are trichromats, while others are tetrachromats, and some of us suffer from achromatopsia and experience no color qualities. Surely in the near future we will be able to fix issues like this and completely redesign our color knowledge to include 10, or perhaps even one hundred, primary color qualities that no human has experienced before.</div></div></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Yes, I agree with that.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><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"><div dir="ltr"><div> And we will be able to freely choose what qualities we use to represent what wavelengths of light on a whm. To say nothing about being able to increase the phenomenal resolution of our visual knowledge by thousands of times in both our current brains and in any avatar brain we might choose to do subjectivee mind merging with, similar to the way the left hemisphere is subjectively mergeed with the right.</div></div></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">But note that by modifying the brain in the manner you suppose, you are always creating a new mind which will have knowledge of the way some things are to it, but it can never simultaneously hold the way some things are to others who are not it. I don't see any way around this purely logical restriction. Any given vantage point will always see some things, but not others.</div><div dir="auto"></div></div><br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>See my other post in this chain where I refer to the youtube short where we'll be able to upgrade half, or small portions of our consciousness, to test them out, before we go full blown upgrade, and if we really want to, we'll be able to mind meld to previous copies of ourself, for nastalgia desires), to see how terrible consciousness is now, compared to what it will soon be like.</div></div></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">There are cases where a more complex mind can experience the qualia of a less complex mind, when the lower dimensional qualitiaive state exists as a point within the higher dimensional qualitative space. For example, both a color sighted person and a color blind person can both experience a monochromatic visual scene.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">But there are some qualitative states that don't commute, because they don't belong to the same space. For example, no matter how many primary colors one adds, no color translates to the taste of chocolate or smell of cinnamon.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Or consider the brain of an ant, it simply isn't capable of realizing the highly complex information states that a human brain can realize, owing to its comparative paucity of neurons. If you linked an ant brain and a human brain with such a ponytail, what could the ant brain know of the human mind?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Then consider incompatible qualitiaive states, like enjoying the smell of gasoline vs. hating the smell of gasoline. Can the same mind hold these two mutually inconsistent qualitative perceptions simultaneously? Or can it only hold one such qualitative state at a time, hence each state is unknowable to the other mind at the other time?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I share you desire for answers but my optimism is tempered by problems such as these.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Jason </div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><div></div></div></div>
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