[ExI] Digital Consciousness

[Brent Allsop]

Hi Ben,

I predict that within the next 25 years the following will be discovered 
and demonstrated, via science to all of us.

They will demonstrate that something in my right hemisphere is reliably 
responsible for my redness experience, which I represent strawberries 
with, and also something responsible for my greenness experience, which 
enables me to qualitatively distinguish my knowledge of the leaves from 
the strawberries with.  And they will discover that the same will be 
true for my other hemisphere.  They will discover what this binding 
system is, and how it works, which will explain why I am able to know, 
absolutely, more than I know anything, what my redness and greenness 
/feel/ like, in both hemispheres, and that they are qualitatively and 
reliably correlated with the same underlying physics.

I predict that Ben is a my redness zombie, and has never experienced my 
redness before.  They will achieve the ability to duplicate this binding 
process which the corpus callosum does between my hemispheres, between 
Ben's and my brains, so that Ben will be able to experience, for the 
first time, what my redness is like - just as reliably as my two 
hemesphers knows that each have the same redness.  This will reliably 
prove to him, and to me, that everything he was saying about 
consciousness, was completely true, that Ben does not have a redness 
quality to his knowledge, but that this is only true for his brain.  And 
he he'll be saying something like: "Oh my God, I have never experienced 
anything like that in my life!  Now I am no longer a Brent's redness 
zombie!"

So, those are all very falsifiable predictions, which could prove me 
wrong if they do not come to pass, as predicted.  So, Ben, can you make 
an equally compelling prediction, which if demonstrated by science, will 
force me to admit that my current working hypotheses about consciousness 
are falsified, the way this will surely force you into my camp?

Non of this is theological or philosophical.  It is all theoretical 
science, making very real predictions about reality and the kinds of 
experiments that need to be done to force us all into the same camp.  
And soon, depending on the quality and progress of our theoretical work, 
science will force us all, evidently some of us naively kicking and 
screening, into accepting the one true theory that science will prove 
effingly works.  The goal with Canonizer.com, is to rigorously measure 
this, as what could arguably become the greatest discover in physics - 
ever: The discovery of the reliable relationship between ineffable 
qualitative properties or /feelings/, and their underlying physics.

I believe we are already way beyond the neural scientific understanding 
required to achieve such a demonstrable science, the only remaining 
problem standing in our way, is an effing communication problem.  We 
simply need to find some way to comunicate to everyone that there is 
something we (or at least some of us) know absolutely to be important, 
which we should be looking for: Qualitative properties, or what things 
/feel/ like. We need to know where to look for these: Not on the surface 
of the strawberry, not in the light, the retina... and not thinking that 
when we see something like glutamate reflecting 'white' light, that it 
has a whiteness quality to it, or worse, that there can't be any 
qualitative properties correlated to it's causality, at all.  And 
finally, how do we demonstrably, reliably, and objectively detect and 
share these things: By simply getting around the quale interpretation 
problem, by correctly grounding the qualitative meaning in the 
abstracted information our detectors are detecting, and thereby finally 
effing the ineffable.

Brent Allsop





On 5/5/2013 4:12 AM, Ben Zaiboc wrote:
> Gordon <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> Ben Zaiboc <bbenzai at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Gordon, I have a question for you.
>>
>>> Do you agree or deny that a digital computer could, in principle, run a simulation that imitated,
>>> in every way, a human mind, including referring to itself, reporting that it has internal states
>>> like emotions, and displaying all the intelligence of a human mind?
>
>> I'm inclined to agree, Ben. Some clever programmer will one day write a program that passes the Turing test. I might be fooled into thinking it is actually conscious.
>
> Excellent.  That's good enough for me.  It goes way beyond the formal Turing Test of course, but the principle is the same.
>
> If an information-processing system is good enough to fool other people into thinking that it's a conscious mind, then it can probably fool itself too.  That's really all we can ask.  After all, we do it ourselves all the time, and nobody can truly answer the question "are other people really conscious?".  I don't suppose non-organic-machine minds that act exactly as though they were conscious will be any better at answering this question than we are.
>
> Let's leave the metaphysics to the theologians.  I don't actually care if we have souls or not.  It makes no practical difference one way or the other.
>
>
> Ben Zaiboc
>
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