[ExI] Quantum consciousness, quantum mysticism, and transhumanist engineering

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 11 March 2017 at 06:59, Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> Hi Stathis and John,
>
>
>
> It seems to me that there is a clear reason you guys are struggling with
> all this, and I can’t understand why you guys can’t see (or at least you
> don’t show any evidence of understanding) what seems so obvious to me.
>
>
>
> A critical part of consciousness intelligence is the ability to be
> simultaneously aware of lots of diverse qualitative experiences.  In
> addition to redness and greenness, we are also aware of lots of other
> qualitative pieces of information, such as sweet good tasting strawberries
> are red(the ones we want to pick), and green ones are bitter/not yet ripe
> (the ones we don’t want)…  The only way to do equivalent things with not
> bound together discretely binary components is to have large inefficient
> rapid search mechanisms that can do the same kind of functionality through
> lots of isolated digital data, to perform the same kind of intelligent
> behavior.  Not only is the way we consciously do it, by being aware of
> all of it at once, much more efficient, it’s easy to see why evolution used
> this much more efficiently intelligent system that is aware of everything
> bound together instead of large searches over large sets of discretely
> isolated data representations, the way we need to inefficiently do it with
> current computers..
>
>
>
> Again, as I’ve been saying, a minimal example of this kind of efficiently
> powerfully intelligent qualitative conscious functionally is something that
> is doing a redness function, something that is doing a greenness function,
> and something that is able to functionally bind these two (and lots of
> other stuff) so we can be aware of both of them at the same time.  And if
> you provide any such minimal set of functionality in any proposed
> theoretical system, whether the theoretical redness experience is substrate
> independent or not, how to do all three types of week, strung and strongest
> forms of effing of the ineffable, will also be obvious.  (John, I know
> you’ll object to this so see below)  And also, if you provide such
> minimal necessary qualitative functionality in your theory, how you can do
> neural substitution in such a way that you can swap out the redness, for
> greenness, or redness for abstracted representations of the same (i.e. a
> qualia less abstracted computer that only falsely claims it knows what red
> is, as can be proven to all by effing the ineffable.  Stathis, I don’t
> see any evidence that you understand any of this, nor the implications it
> has on the how it is possible to do neural substitution in an incorrect way
> (resulting all the “hard problems” some of which you and John are
> struggling with), and how you can do it in a correct way, where there are
> no hard problems and everything is expected, understandable, sufficiently
> accounted for, effable and provable, and no hard problems.
>


I see no evidence that you understand the idea that with any possible
system, if you swap a part for another part that interacts with its
neighbours in the same way, the system as a whole will behave in the same
way. It is irrelevant what the system does or how complex it is. The
correct way to do the substitution is to make sure that the new part
interacts with the rest of the system in the same way as the original part
did, and you don't need to understand anything about what the system does
in order make this substitution.


> Oh, and John, I anticipate that you are going to still object to any kind
> of “effing the ineffable”, but this doesn’t work for me.  Because even if
> your theory doesn’t have any type of elemental levels of qualitative
> experience that would be “easy” to eff as I predict, you will still be able
> to “eff the ineffable” by binding two brains together in a kind of meta
> conscious system that is bound together (similar to the way your right and
> left hemispheres are bound) that can both fully experience “Johns redness”,
> and “Brent’s redness” in the same kind of bound together way so you can
> qualitatively completely compare the two, in a way allowing you to know
> which parts of the qualitative experiences are similar, and which parts are
> not.
>


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
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