[ExI] More thoughts on sentient computers

Thu Feb 23 06:38:43 UTC 2023

Brent,
Qualia is a problem made up by philosophers. It is not a problem at all.
Listen, I can make problems like that all day long. Why is there a
universe? Why is the mass of an electron what it is? Why there are
electrons or a certain number of particles and so on. Some of these
problems can have a deeper answer in how the universe came about (for
example from nothing) and the mass of the electron is what it is because of
some physics we don't know yet. But this problem of why we have an
experience is not a problem, the explanatory gap is nonsense. What is there
to explain?
The other day I saw an old skit somebody posted online somewhere, kind of
Monty Pythonish, It was about an officer showing a higher up the territory
conquered by the troops that week or something like that.
The officer was showing to the general a chunk of ground that was literally
sitting on a small table. The general came close to the chunk of ground (it
had grass growing on it, some stones and other features) and he was
thinking it was some kind of representation of the conquered territory, to
some scale, like a diorama. But, not that it was literally the conquered
territory.
I think the point of the joke was that they didn't conquer much at all, but
there is another important point to this joke.

The territory is not the map and vice versa.

A map CANNOT be the territory, if it is then it is not a good map because a
map needs to be a simplification of the territory, it needs to show the
essential features, it needs to use symbols to represent the main relevant
objects in the territory like roads, rivers and so on. It does it using
symbols that are different from the reality of the "EXPERIENCE". The river
is not wet in the map, the road is not dusty and so on.

The people that insist on things like qualia or redness of red (that is
exactly the same crazy idea) complain that the map is not the territory. Of
course, it is not and it should not be.
These people have no clue what is a good scientific explanation of
something. They are not good at math or they don't understand
scientific thinking. Galileo was all about cutting the nonsense and
focusing on how not why.
Why will have to wait until we understand how.

A good scientific explanation of reality (including a theory of
consciousness) cannot have the same richness of the experience because it
is a simplification and a codification of symbols of that experience. But
you know what? The experience itself is also a map of the real word, a map
that our brain made up.

The redness of red is the symbol that the brain created in its own language
for interacting with the object that produced the experience. It is the
brain's way to tell you it has received a certain kind of stimulus. What
are you expecting the brain to do besides creating some kind of physical
sensation? Send you a cartoon of redness? A song?
The brain has access to neurotransmitters, electrical impulses so tell
itself I see this color it simply creates a sensation. What is the mystery
in this? I don't get it.

Have you seen children learning how to associate these experiences of
colors to words? You have to repeat to them many times that this thing is
red, give them many examples, it doesn't click immediately. That word is a
label on top of another label. There is nothing special about the redness
of redness it is just an experience like the others, everything is qualia
and so nothing is qualia. Philosophers fixate on the wrong things, this is
why we made more progress when we adopted the scientific method in few
hundred years than in 1000s of years of philosophizing on how many angels
can dance on a pin head.
Giovanni

On Wed, Feb 22, 2023 at 9:16 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> Hi Giovanni,
>
> On Wed, Feb 22, 2023 at 5:28 PM Giovanni Santostasi via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> Brent you are fixated with Qualias.
>> Qualia is one of the silliest idea ever.
>>
>
> I admit the term Qualia is silly, and SOOO misleading, since what we're
> talking about are real physical intrinsic color qualities, themselves.  Physicists
> Don't Understand Color
> <https://www.dropbox.com/s/k9x4uh83yex4ecw/Physicists%20Don%27t%20Understand%20Color.docx?dl=0>
> .
> For example, let me ask you this: What is it in this world that has a
> redness quality (What behaves the way it does, because of its redness
> quality)?  Nobody, including you, knows that most simple and most
> fundamental question about the nature of colored physical reality.
> All you know of things is the color they seem to be, all falsely colored
> by your brain for various different reasons to make us more intelligent and
> motivated.  (i.e. our brain wants the red things to stand out, so it
> represents them with a particular physical quality)
> Consciousness isn't the problem.  What color are things is the real
> problem.
>
> Consciousness isn't a 'Hard Problem' it's a color problem
> <https://canonizer.com/videos/consciousness?chapter=Representational_Qualia_Theory_Consensus>
> .
>
>
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