[extropy-chat] Qualia Bet

[gts]

On Tue, 22 Nov 2005 23:53:40 -0500, Brent Allsop <allsop at extropy.org>  
wrote:

>  From what you describe of “Pan-psychism” here it doesn’t sound  
> reasonable.

Certainly no less reasonable than simply positing the existence of  
phenomenal properties of matter that arise inexplicably in the brain but  
not elsewhere. Why not say they exist in all matter? Doing so simplifies  
the problem, and allows you to escape the hard question that you cannot  
answer. :)

Really we are discussing two questions here: 1) how does awareness arise  
 from seemingly "dead" matter? And, 2) how might what you call "effing" be  
possible? It might be possible to answer the second without answering the  
first.

> We just know absolutely what red is like,

But we don't! You know what red is like to you, I know what red is like to  
me, but short of a vulcan mind meld we cannot prove our experiences of red  
to be identical.

> You must not be paying attention.  When or if we discover what part of  
> matter, in what state, has these phenomenal properties – we will be able  
> to reliably tell when someone is experiencing red or green...by causally  
> observing the particular correlates of matter that have those phenomenal  
> properties.

We would be able to determine that a person is experiencing something he  
calls red or green, but we cannot know his actual subjective experience of  
the colors  -- his qualia. It might be a reasonable inference that his  
experience matches ours but how can it be proved? For all we really know,  
he experiences green as red and red as green. Merry Christmas. :)

-gts