[ExI] Do digital computers feel?

Sun Feb 19 00:48:27 UTC 2017

Yay, I got this in my in box, with a message from gmail saying: "This 
message was not added to your spam folder because of a rule you 
created."  Thanks, everyone, for helping me to resolve this problem.

Hi Ben,

Thanks for telling me more about the way you think about things. That 
will make communication much easier.

I think it is true that "If you know something, there must be something 
that is that knowledge."  Would you agree?

For example, you pointed out that you can produce an after image 
experience by starring at cyan for a while and then quickly looking at 
white.  I think it is very telling about what you are ignoring in this 
example, in that you didn't actually say the result was a redness 
experience.

You say it is: " 'conjured up' by our visual system."  But I ask you, 
what is it, that is conjured up?  Is it not knowledge that has a redness 
quality which you can experience as the final result of the processing 
of your visual system?

Brent Allsop

On 2/18/2017 3:46 PM, Ben wrote:
> Brent Allsop wrote, in various responses:
>
> > in summary, a "red" property is something that reflects 650 NM 
> light, and a "redness" quality is a quality of our knowledge of such.
> For all we know, my redness could be more like your greenness - both 
> of  which we only say represents the same "red".
>
> > Would you agree with that, and does that help?
>
> Yes, and No.
>
> I agree, but it doesn't help. As various other people keep pointing 
> out, a difference that makes no difference is not actually a 
> difference at all.
>
> You are not addressing my assertion that there is no such thing as 
> 'plain and simple redness', that can somehow exist separate from 
> memories and perception. 'Redness' /is/ a perception. It makes no 
> sense to take it away and still have it exist.
>
> I will ask again: Can you show that 'redness' exists outside a human 
> mind? You claim that it's a fundamental thing, so it can't be 
> dependent on, or composed of, something else. Please show us what it 
> is, if not patterns of information in a mind.
>
>
>
> > for Ben's sake: in this simplified world there are "red and green 
> signals in the optic nerve" that can be easily inverted.
>
> Then this simplified world is so far away from reality as to be 
> useless. You can't just wave away the way something actually works in 
> order to present a 'simplified version' of how it works. That's just 
> making things up.
>
> We look at complex systems and extract simplified models so that we 
> can cope with thinking about them, and make testable predictions. No 
> matter how simplified they are, though, they still have to be /based 
> on reality/. If not, they're worse than useless, they're misleading 
> and a total waste of time.
>
> Disregarding the fact that there are no inherent red and green signals 
> in the optic nerve is not a simplification, it's a falsification.
>
> Here is my (very) simplified version of sensory processing of a 'red' 
> object:
>
> A red ball causes receptors in the retina to produce three types of 
> spatially-mapped signals in the optic nerve (red-green, luminance and 
> blue-yellow, according to colour-opponency theory) that are sent 
> (mainly) to specific locations in the thalamus, which routes them to a 
> set of different visual maps in the cortex. (note that these signals 
> have no intrinsic meaning on their own. Their meaning is determined by 
> their origin and destination. 'Line Labelling').
>
> What we know as the concepts 'colour', 'shape', 'brightness', 'size', 
> 'location', etc., are created by a complex set of cross-associations 
> between these and other sensory maps, combined with previously-stored 
> memories and modified by the specific architecture of the individual's 
> brain. Only at this point, after literally thousands of neuronal 
> events, does the concept of 'big red ball right in front of me' come 
> into being. Up to then, something like 'redness' simply does not 
> exist, any more than Keanu Reeves' nose exists at any point between a 
> movie camera and your television screen. In fact, less so, due to the 
> positional coding used in the visual nervous sytem.
>
> At all the intermediate points, between the rods and cones of the eyes 
> and the conscious perception, all that exists is a set of spike-trains 
> in a bunch of axons, setting off another bunch of spike trains (by 
> what means is irrelevant), in a great big network. They represent all 
> kinds of things, but the only differences between them is the timing 
> of the spikes, where they come from and where they are going. There is 
> no redness, greenness, bigness, leftness, roundness, etc., etc., in 
> any of the individual signals. This is what the science tells us. This 
> is what we have to work with when coming up with philosophical 
> theories of how we perceive things.
>
> It's a bit like numbers. There is no "Pi quality" in the number 2, is 
> there? Neither is there any 'redness quality' in ||||||  ||| |||| 
> (that's supposed to be a simplified representation of a spike-train. 
> Not a real one).
>
>
> The key point, I think, is that perception, despite how it appears to 
> us, is not a passive process of transmitting existing signals (or 
> 'properties') to an internal observer, but a dynamic process of 
> creation. We don't so much see the red ball as create it in our minds. 
> It's that very process of creation that we call 'conscious 
> perception'. And this explains a ton of perceptual illusions, like for 
> instance seeing a giant monster on the horizon for a second, before 
> adjusting our experience to our memories, and seeing a tiny spider on 
> the window. Or feeling the non-existent backwards motion of your car 
> in stationary traffic for a second, when the cars next to you start 
> moving forwards. For that second, the false backwards motion is as 
> real to you as anything else. You may even move forward in reaction to 
> the backward movement of the car. Then your mind updates itself, and 
> your reality changes.
>
> So, there is no 'essence of red' which winds its way from your eyes to 
> your conscious experience. Instead, the experience of a red thing is 
> the endpoint of a complex series of events, none of which can be said 
> to be 'red' in any meaningful and consistent way. The Taj Mahal is 
> made from bricks, but not a single brick has the least bit 'Taj Mahal 
> quality' about it. They're all just ordinary bricks.
>
> When you stare at a cyan square for about 30 seconds, then look at a 
> blank white area, what do you see? Why? Do you understand that that 
> experience is 'conjured up' by our visual system? How could that be 
> the result of an 'elemental red quality'?
>
>
>
> > But it may not help if you believe there are not elemental qualities 
> out of which our brain builds or paints composite qualitative 
> experiences with
>
> Belief has nothing to do with it. There is simply no support for the 
> idea of sensory experiences being 'elemental qualities', and no need 
> for it. It's sheer fantasy. Our brains build experiences by processing 
> and combining information from many different cortical and 
> sub-cortical regions, in the form of patterns of action potentials 
> travelling down millions of interconnected axons. These patterns of 
> information have meaning in relation to our interactions with our 
> internal and external environments.
>
> Here's another argument against the concept of 'elemental redness': If 
> redness is elemental, what about purpleness? Bluey-greyness? 
> yellowish-brownness? How many colours can we percieve? Can they all be 
> 'elemental'? And what about all the other things we are capable of 
> perceiving? Does it really make sense that you can call something that 
> there must be potentially more of than there are particles in the 
> universe, 'elemental'? Things just don't work that way. Enormous 
> numbers of different things are built up from smaller numbers of 
> simpler things. There's no reason why our perceptions shouldn't be the 
> same.
>
>
>
> > Obviously, an abstracted word like 'red' does not have a redness 
> quality we can experience.
>
> What? are you saying that the word "red" can't trigger the production 
> of the experience of redness? I don't know about you, but I can 
> produce that experience whenever I want, including on hearing the 
> words "red", "scarlet", and many more. In fact words like "postbox", 
> "Matador's cape", "sunset", and so-on can do it.
>
> If you're saying something as obvious as "the word red is not red", I 
> don't know why that's worth saying. The word Buffalo is not a Buffalo, 
> we all know that. It's just as true that 650nm light is not a 
> particular set of action potentials in a particular set of neurons, 
> nor is it the RGB colour code #FF0000.
>
> The qualitative difference in how knowledge (or any information) is 
> represented is irrelevant. I really don't care if my copy of 
> Beethoven's 9th symphony is on a CD or a .wav file or grooves in a 
> plastic disc, it's the same symphony. A book with references to 'red' 
> can have all those words replaced with a little red square, and the 
> book still has the same meaning (as long as the reader has colour 
> vision). So I don't actually think that it matters whether an 
> information-processing system represents red as #FF0000 in a register 
> or as a specific set of voltages on a specific set of wires, or a 
> certain pattern of neural spike trains in a certain set of axons, it 
> can all mean the same thing. What matters is how those representations 
> relate to the system as a whole, not what form they take.
>
>
> Ben Zaiboc
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat