[ExI] Is Artificial Life Conscious?

[Stuart LaForge]

Quoting Brent Allsop:

> It is a necessary truth, that if you know something, that knowledge must be
> something.
> And if you have knowledge that has a redness quality, there must be
> something in your brain that has that quality that is your conscious
> knowledge.

I think what you have done with your color problem is entangle the
hard problem of consciousness with the millennia old problem of
universals. Does redness actually exist at all? Does redness exist
only in the brain? Can something have the redness quality without
actually being red? Does it have the redness quality when it is
outside of the brain? Can abstract information have the redness
quality? Is something red if nobody can see it?

> This is true if that stuff is some kind of "Material" or "electromagnetic
> field" "spiritual" or "functional" stuff, it remains a fact that your
> knowledge, composed of that, has a redness quality.

It seems you are quite open-minded when it comes to what qualifies as
"stuff". If so, then why does your 3-robot-scenario single out
information as not being stuff? If you wish to insist that something
physical in the brain has the redness quality and conveys knowledge of
redness, then why glutamate? Why not instead hypothesize that is the
only thing that prima facie has the redness property to begin with
i.e. red light? After all there are photoreceptors in the deep brain.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnana.2016.00048/full#:~:text=The%20existence%20of%20multiple%20opsin,for%20photoreception%20in%20particular%20regions.

Stuart LaForge