[ExI] Do digital computers feel?

Colin Hales col.hales at gmail.com
Sat Feb 11 00:37:41 UTC 2017


Yikes. I'm currently finding it hard to attend here... up to my armpits in
my cellular automata work. I'll try and be brief and attend to the comments
in a general sense. It's sat morn here downunder. Time out.

The big one.

I can use John Clark’s remarks as a launching place….



“Science is empirical, it's about observing behavior of people and matter,
if the behavior of 2 things is identical then it would be impossible by
definition to distinguish between them scientifically, …”



OK. Sorry John, but this is where my blood boils? Don’t take this
personally. I have been watching this issue in detail for 15 years. When is
the penny gonna drop? This very comment goes on and on and on and on in
many different forms all over the place ….and nothing ever shifts and the
same mistake gets made over and over and over. FFS.



<Deep breaths> quasi rant-time.



In exactly what way does this OBSERVING happen? It happens in the
subjectivity of the ‘scientific observer’. The first person perspective
(1PP) of the scientist. In the unique context of explaining qualia…. That
first person perspective is both presupposed (the observer is being
presupposed) and the explanandum!



You cannot have objectivity without subjectivity. Subjectivity SUPERVENES
on objectivity. What do you think you are objectifying an ‘object’ out of??
SUBJECTIVITY! (as contents of)



That being the brutal fact of being a scientist, you are then forced to
admit that subjectivity is actually _more_ ‘evidenced’ than anything else
in the history of science and has been evidenced in every scientific
observation ever made in the entire history of science. Furthermore the
“evidence” is more certain than any claim about the ‘objective observation’
(sorry ��) of the _contents_ of a 1PP.’



Can you (the group I mean) not see this? Isn’t it obvious?



==============METAPHOR

Claiming that qualia are not evidenced is EXACTLY like claiming that movies
don’t evidence a movie projector. Do you ‘see the movie projector’ when
imbued by a movie? Would you expect to? Of course not!!! Yet that projector
is evidenced nonetheless!



At the same time, the broken stupidity of the arguments say that the only
thing that is real is the _contents_ of the picture (say X) on the movie
screen! How stupid is this? The ‘scientific evidence’ of X provided in a
movie about X is less certain than the evidence that there is a movie
projector. In the case of qualia we are required to explain the existence
and nature of the movie projector … by observing the movie? Crazy crap. Why
is simply realising there is a movie not evidence of a movie? And that when
that projector is shut down, all evidence of X goes with it!! 100% every
time. Is this really that hard to get your brain around?



The projector is qualia physics and the movie is the represented contents
of the qualia.  ….. the scientific evidence and the ‘contents of scientific
observation’ part company! That’s all that happens.



At the very heart of this is utter bullshit: That somewhere engraved on a
cultural rock from on high, that no one is ever trained in, is not written
down, examined or reviewed – EVER – we identify ‘evidence’ with ‘contents
of the 1PP’. This is nothing but a blindly followed “Science is empirical,
it's about observing behavior of people and matter…”  unquestioned
acculturation.



Can you now see this? The group I mean. Is it really that hard?



END OF METAPHOR ======================



We go on and on and on about the ‘lack of observation of qualia’ while
demanding it be used on the pain of the science being thrown out (because
OBJECTIVITY didn’t happen) when the _evidence_ of an observer (and
therefore qualia) is completely missed … is the existence of the
possibility of objectivity in and of itself.



What does it take to out this bizarre blockage?



In the case of X = qualia there is an almost breathtaking confusion between
the existence of “scientific evidence of X” and the “existence of X as
contents of consciousness objectified out of consciousness”.



What would be the “evidence” of a scientific observer? That’s what the
evidence of qualia is. Of course the qualia are not observable as “contents
of the subjectivity of the assumed observer”.



But that does not mean they are not evidenced. SCIENTISTS are the
scientific evidence of qulia. Brutally reinforced with every observation
ever made. Not only that, it’s scientifically testable! The evidence is
‘laws of the appearances of nature by a presupposed observer utterly
dependent on subjectivity for observation’. Take the subjectivity away? NO
SCIENCE.



Scientists have to be evidence of something? Don’t we? FFS why are we NOT
evidence of qualia? Do we operate by magic? Must we have a sacred line
drawn around ourselves?



So infuriating! Do I really have to say this again? Isn’t it bloody
obvious? Is there something wrong with me? Why do I even have to say this?



The explanandum we seek is NOT OBSERVABLE but it  is DEFINITELY EVIDENCED.



OK. Repeating repeating over and over. Enough. ��



The real problem is the total lack of the self-governance of scientific
behaviour.






=====================

On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 5:23 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> On Thu., 9 Feb. 2017 at 8:34 am, Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> Hi Stathis,
>>
>> You said: "You talk about a 'detectably different behaviour awareness'
>> but you agreed above that the observable behaviour is the same."  But I
>> only said it would be the same for external behavior that can be qualia
>> blind, like, picking strawberries.  If you include the internal behavior or
>> the qualitative behavior of the knowledge itself that is required when
>> asking questions like: "Does your knowledge of red behave like my redness,
>> or like my greenness?" the behavior will be opposite for the invert.
>>
>
> You're contradicting yourself here because you previously agreed that the
> *observable behaviour* will be the same. Speaking is *observable
> behaviour*. This is why I have been labouring the point and emphasising it
> with asterisks! So the subject will not only pick the strawberries, he will
> also say the strawberries look red exactly as they did before the
> substitution, even if all or half of his visual qualia associated with the
> strawberries have turned green, or disappeared altogether leaving him blind.
>
> And since you will be able to tell the difference when half of the
>> glutamate has been replaced with glycene, before replacing the single
>> awareness neuron, all the glycene that has been substituted for glutamate
>> will have to be interpreted back to glutamate to be fed to the not yet
>> replaced binding neuron that binds all the knowledge together to make one
>> composite experience be the same.  As you said, you will not be able to
>> replace any of the glutamate, being fed to the binding system (as you will
>> be aware of the difference), until you replace the entire binding system
>> with something that knows how to interpret glycerine, and behave as if it
>> was glutamate.
>>
>> If the binding system that enables you to experience all your diverse
>> knowledge as one compositely experience is more complex than one neuron,
>> describe whatever different way you will achieve the singular composite
>> experience.  With that we will be able to predict in a falsifiable way,
>> exactly when the qualia will dance (until you  correctly provide
>> interpretation hardware that will interpret that which is not red, as if it
>> was), and you will only be able to finally reproduce the same external
>> behavior when the entire binding system has been substituted - resulting in
>> a detectable (via whatever binding system you use) qualia invert.
>>
>> Brent
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 8, 2017 at 11:40 AM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Thu., 9 Feb. 2017 at 4:25 am, Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Hi Stathis,
>>
>> You said:
>>
>> "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."
>>
>> I thought I have answered this many times, so thanks for letting me know
>> that I'm still not communicating.  Let me try to clearly answer this
>> specific question:
>>
>> Absolutely, yes, according to a qualitative blind definition of
>> "*observable behaviour*" the behaviour would be the same.  That is why I
>> always talk about two people behaving identically (finding and picking
>> strawberries), yet they have inverted red/green qualia.  Since the
>> "*observable behaviour*" is qualia blind, it sees the identical behaviour
>> of the two people behaving the same, but it is blind to the different
>> behaviors of the inverted qualitative awareness.
>>
>>
>> If changing the glutamate receptors changes red qualia to green, then
>> changing the receptors in half the brain should invert the qualia that half
>> of the brain is responsible for. So if the subject sees a field of
>> strawberries after the change, one half if the strawberries will look red
>> and the other half will look green. Yet the subject will not notice a
>> change, and will tell you that all the strawberries look red, just as
>> before. Or to change the experiment slightly, as a result of some neural
>> substitution all of the visual qualia disappear, but the subject doesn't
>> notice, continues to describe red strawberries as before, and is able to
>> pick the strawberries as before. Would you still insist that the qualia
>> have been inverted or eliminated even though the subject can notice no
>> internal difference and the experimenter can notice no external difference?
>> In what sense is a change in qualia a change if there is neither a
>> subjective nor objective difference?
>>
>> When you include in the system, the behaviour that is the redness
>> awareness, and the detectably different behaviour that is the greenness
>> awareness - the external behaviour is the same, but they are finding the
>> strawberry for inverted behavioural reasons or they are finding the
>> strawberry for qualitatively inverted initial causal behaviours.
>>
>>
>> You talk about a "detectably different behaviour awareness" but you
>> agreed above that the observable behaviour is the same.
>>
>> Again, what is required is some well defined or testable way to
>> qualitatively eff ineffable qualities.  What makes something ineffable is
>> the fact that an abstracted representation like the word red, does not have
>> a redness quality.  So without having some kind of way to  know how to
>> interpret an abstracted representation to get back to the original quality
>> of the composite knowledge being observed to know the intended qualitative
>> meaning of a word like red, one remains qualia blind.
>>
>> So, you must have some kind of minimal awareness behavioural requirements
>> like including two qualitatively diverse representations of knowledge, and
>> a way to bind them together to form a composite qualitative conscious
>> awareness.  This diverse composite qualitative awareness behaviour needs to
>> be the behavioural mechanism that enables the system to answer questions
>> like:  "No, my qualitative knowledge of red is more like your qualitative
>> knowledge of green."
>>
>>
>> That would be difficult, if I can't even notice when my own qualia change
>> or disappear!
>>
>> There are many testable theoretical ways one might achieve this kind of
>> detectably diverse qualitative composite awareness with materialist
>> theories.  I only use glutamate, because it is the simplest and most
>> straight forward to understand.  I've tried to find some functional way the
>> behaviour of redness knowledge could have distinguishable from greenness
>> behavioural properties, but not only can I not do it, it seems impossible.
>> You said: "I don't see why you should consider this 'miraculous'".  To me,
>> if it is impossible to come up with any theoretically testable way to to do
>> this kind of detectable effing of the ineffable within a functionalist
>> theory, then the only conclusion a reasonable person can come to is that it
>> is some kind of "miracle."  In order for one to not think it is simply
>> magic, someone must falsify the belief that it can't be done, by providing
>> any kind of theoretically possible way to observe qualitatively diverse
>> awareness behaviour in a detectable effing of the ineffable way.
>>
>>
>> You've said you don't find it problematic that qualia might be associated
>> with a substance but you do find it problematic that they might be
>> associated with a process. I don't see why you would have this intuition.
>>
>> --
>> Stathis Papaioannou
>>
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