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

Fri Mar 17 19:27:32 UTC 2017

On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 2:03 PM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>> 
>> Since my brain works that way it is a reasonable hypothesis that your
>> brain does too, but I'm not able to prove that and never will be able to.
>>  john
>
>
>
> > 
> 'Prove' must mean something different to you than it does to me.
>

I don't think so.

> > 
> To me it just means test
>

You can't test for consciousness, you can only test for observable
behavior.

> 
> My point is that you can do the same test thousands of times with
> different subjects and keep getting the same results.
>

And none of those results will tell you anything about consciousness
unless you use the axiom that consciousness is a unavoidable byproduct of
intelligence, because unlike consciousness I can directly detect
intelligence in people and things other than myself.

> 
> Say you show them a red rose.  All except the male color blind will
> respond 'red'.  A fMRI will show much the same firings in their brains
> from the same areas.  Thus prediction of what they say and what went on in
> their brains is nearly 100% accurate.
>

And if I type R-E-D into a Speak and Spell from the 1980's it 
will say "red", maybe you're no more conscious than that old toy was. I
will never be able to find any evidence for or against such a theory. Or
maybe that old Speak and Spell was as conscious as I am.  I will never be
able to find any evidence for or against that theory either.

> > 
> A fMRI will show much the same firings in their brains from the same
> areas.  Thus prediction of what they say and what went on in their brains
> is nearly 100% accurate.
>

I don't see how a fMRI machine would be any better at directly detecting
consciousness than we are. And I can predict what a Speak and Spell will
say nearly 100% of the time, but that is no evidence it's conscious.

> 
>  Now I agree that one cannot show that the experience is exactly the same
> (but similar, that I would assume),
>

Your brain is similar to mine but it is not identical, if it were then you
would be me. My working assumption is that those differences are not
critical for the formation of consciousness but I don't know that for a
fact. So although my hunch is that its not true the possibility remains
that John K Clark is the only conscious being in the universe; I would
estimate that possibility to be about the same as the possibility a
computer will never pass the Turing Test.    

 John K Clark
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