[ExI] Do digital computers feel?

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Wed., 8 Feb. 2017 at 2:56 am, Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> Hi Colin,
>
> Thanks for jumping in, and your input is worth much more than $0.02 to
> me.  I really like what I think you might be saying but I don't yet fully
> understand it.  I have the same question Stathis has.
>
> Also, there is something I think everyone is missing, it has to do with
> how might we do qualitative observation, or eff the ineffable?  Stathis
> always only thinks about "*observable behavior*" which is not qualitative
> observation/comparison and assumes a miracle will happen and quali will
> arise in some way.  He never includes critically important functionality in
> the system, and just swaps the critically important parts out, with neural
> substitution, and thinks the problems will resolve themselves in some other
> super natural or miraculous way.
>


I think the critically important part is the behaviour of the system, not a
particular substance or physics. Intuitively, this seems more likely
because consciousness has evolved with information processing, a behaviour
of the system rather than isolated components of the system.  Brains
evolved with what materials happened to be available, and could have
evolved with completely different neurotransmitters, for example, or even a
completely different chemistry. It seems implausible that through luck we
ended up with the only materials that lead to consciousness.

And I don't see why you should consider this "miraculous" but have no
problem with qualia being attached to particular substrates such as
glutamate, which you said when commenting on the "hard problem" in an
earlier post that you would simply accept as a brute fact.

Anyway, these are peripheral considerations to the central argument. I have
asked you to state what you think would happen if a substitution were made
with a component that has the same *observable behaviour* as the neural
component you think is essential for particular qualia. By "what you think
will happen" I mean both what do you think the behaviour of the person with
the brain will be like - will it change or stay the same? - and what do you
think the qualia of the person will be like - will they change or stay the
same? Surely I have put this question in a clear enough way (if not, tell
me), and surely with all the thinking you have done on this subject you
will have an answer, even if you think the question is unimportant or
misses the point.

You mentioned "compare/contrast behavior of" various systems. But this
> doesn't include any method of effing the ineffable.  For example, you could
> compare and contrast all the functions of two people's brains as they pick
> strawberries.  But how would you know if one person had red/green inverted
> qualia from the other.  This is the important functionality Stathis neural
> substitutes away in a qualia blind way.
>
> In order to qualitatively observe things or eff the ineffable, you have to
> be able to do things like ask: Is your redness more like my redness, or is
> it more like my greenness?  There must be qualitative representations of
> knowledge, and there must be some way to bind multiple qualitatively
> different things together in a way that they produce a composite awareness
> of all of the qualities representing the leaves and the strawberries.
>
> You seem to be leaning towards qualia being dependent on brain physics in
> some way, as do I.  But I think we must remember that glutamate being what
> reprsents redness knowledge in our conscious experience is just a temporary
> hypothetical simplified example that provides the required functionality in
> a falsifiable way (qualitative representations of knowledge being bound
> together into a composite or comparable qualitative experience).  There are
> lots of other things you can substitute for glutamate in an effingly
> testable way, possibly including something like stathis is proposing.  I
> would give anything if I could replace glutamate with some other
> "functionally emergent?" neural correlate of a redness quality that was
> consistent with the way Stathis thinks about things.  The only problem is,
> as far as I can see, it is logically impossible to proved the required
> functionality with what stathis is describing - i.e. detectable qualitative
> representations of knowledge, and a binding system that can combine them
> into qualitatively divers composite conscious experience.  Stathis never
> provides a way to not be qualia blind, he never provides a way to eff the
> ineffable, and really, there is no detectable qualia in Stathis system, so
> there is no way to falsify his way of thinking, or know way to know if
> something is picking the strawberries because they are represented with
> greenness, or because they are represented with redness.  Within stathis
> way of thinking, there is no way to scientifically eff the ineffable or
> qualitatively observe anything, resulting in his theory being not
> qualitatively testable / comparable.
>
> --
Stathis Papaioannou
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