[ExI] What is Consciousness?

[Stuart LaForge]

Quoting Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>:

> If you can understand the basic idea of how our knowledge of red
> things is represented by a redness quality, and you can clearly understand
> how this is very different than the way an abstract system just uses the
> word 'red' (requires a dictionary) to represent knowledge of red things
> with, then you can take the general idea of conscious knowledge being like
> something, and this is what is most important about what consciousness is,
> and how this is very different than the kind of abstract computation
> computers do.

So following your rationale that consciousness requires "essential  
qualities" rather than "abstract data" then old -fashioned color film  
cameras were conscious:

Old-fashioned analog color film camera, like the polaroid are more  
like the human visual system than a robot's (non-digital, wet  
chemicals, not solid-state, etc). The camera's photographic negative  
represents its redness quality like your greenness. The photographic  
process involves no dictionaries or data, just silver-nitrate crystals  
having a phenomenal-experience of red light. Therefore the photograph  
has a redness quality and is the knowledge of redness produced by the  
conscious experience of the camera.

Therefore the camera is conscious in the same way as a human being,  
but the robot has an abstract consciousness.

I have attached a figure of yours I have modified for you so as to  
include the camera.

Stuart LaForge



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