[ExI] Digital Consciousness .

Stathis Papaioannou stathisp at gmail.com
Mon Apr 29 07:01:52 UTC 2013


On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 04:11:44PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>> It's difficult if you try to define or explain qualia. If you stick to
>
> Then there is something quite severely wrong with the term.
>
>> a minimal operational definition - you know you have an experience
>> when you have it - qualia are stupidly simple. The question is, if a
>> part of your brain is replaced with an electronic component that
>> reproduces the I/O behaviour of the biological tissue (something that
>> engineers can measure and understand), will you continue to have the
>> same experiences or not? If not, that would lead to what Brent has
>> admitted is an absurd situation. Therefore the qualia, whatever the
>> hell they are, must be reproduced if the observable behaviour of the
>> neural tissue is reproduced. No equations, but no complex theories of
>> consciousness or attempts to define the ineffable either.
>
> Qualia are an internal view of a measurement process.
>
> I don't understand why people raise such a ruckus about
> so trivial a thing, which is an emergent property of
> a particular type of physical systems.

The peculiar thing about qualia is that you can understand everything
objectively about how they are generated but still have no idea what
they are like, like a blind man who is a scientific expert on vision.
But this, in itself, does not mean that qualia are magical or not
reproducible by a computer.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou



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