[ExI] Do digital computers feel?

[Brent Allsop]

Stathis, I’m still having troubles trying to communicate with you.  You
keep getting distracted on irrelevant things, and missing what is important.
Let me try the following to see if that helps.



Let’s go back to our simple system that has 3 components.  Or better, three
sets of important functionality.  There are two representations of
knowledge, and a binding system that can bind the two representations
together – to create a composite qualitative conscious experience.  The two
representations of knowledge can be done with something that functions with
a redness (like glutamate) or greenness (like glycine) qualities.  The
binding system puts them together so you can be aware of both of them at
the same time as a diverse composite qualitative experience.



Now, when you do the neural substitution on this system, just like you can
do with big or little endian representations, you can fallaciously (for
obvious reasons) argue that the redness or greenness functionality cannot
exist at the hardware (or even functional level - as long as you include
the function of redness and grenness qualities)  level – but must only
exist at the abstracted computational level.



You also said: “The ‘hard problem’ is the question of why there should be
any qualia at all. If you show that redness is associated with glutamate,
you have not answered this question.” Which is again, getting miss directed
away from what is really important here.  Of course we don’t know why there
is gravity, we just know what has gravity and how it performs, allowing us
to fly in space.  The same is true with qualia.  We don’t need to know why
whatever “has” a redness experience function – gives us the qualitative
experiences it does, we just need to know what has this functionality, so
we can detect it and use it to eff the ineffable and greatly expand our
qualitative conscious experience abilities.





Oh, and John, glutamate and glycine only have qualities we can experience
in the hypothetical simplified qualitative world I talked about here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHuqZKxtOf4 .  How would conscious beings
in such a simplified hypothetical world “see” and detect these qualities in
others brains.  Once you understand the qualitative theory in this
simplified hypothetical world, you can apply the same qualitative methods
to apply it to our obviously more complex world – to detect whatever it is
that has a redness functionality, interpret it qualitatively correctly when
you do detect it, eff the ineffable, and so on.





On Mon, Jan 30, 2017 at 8:57 AM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 29, 2017 at 10:59 PM, Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> ​> ​
>> Remember, that it is glutamate that has the redness quality.
>
>
> ​
> No molecule has the redness qualia or any other qualia, they are far too
> simple for that. Glutamate may be able to produce the redness qualia but
> only in association with certain specific brains organized in certain
> specific ways. In other brains organized in different ways
> ​​
> glutamate
> ​ ​
> could produce the blueness qualia or the pain qualia or no qualia
> whatsoever.
> ​
>
>  John K Clark
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20170203/73df5f1d/attachment.html>