[ExI] What is Consciousness?

Sat Mar 25 20:07:38 UTC 2023

*Quality: a distinctive attribute or characteristic possessed
<https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1VDKB_enUS1016US1016&sxsrf=APwXEdcX-UhXnwssciI3bTRnvWOs4iKJdQ:1679773907321&q=possessed&si=AMnBZoFEI0LGJdD1jElhAGFwRnmoqNWfRxj4VqmaGL_owiGx0NHwDrm9_E3ZqLkCXszlUtYx5HS0ycDRRozPZ7k36v6cksluTg%3D%3D&expnd=1>**
by
someone or something.*

Imagine there are 2 things, for example 2 strawberries with a redness
quality. Can we say one strawberry is more red than the other? Yes, we can.
We could for example measure using a spectrometer the spectrum of the light
coming from the strawberry when exposed to natural light and sum the
intensity of the peaks in a given region we agree that correspond to red
(that is going to be arbitrary anyway). One strawberry would be more red
than the other for sure. We can organize a bunch of strawberries in that
way according to their redness "quality". If one is worried about machine
vs human perception we can ask people to do the ordering of the
strawberries in terms of their redness (and probably found out that is not
identical but very similar to the one done by the machine).
Anyway, the purpose of the above exercise is to make a claim that actually
what we call a quality is in fact a quantity, that can be measured. The
word quality at most tell us what we are trying to measure (a certain range
of light frequencies intensity). Notice that there is nothing intrinsic in
this quality and it is associated to the characteristics of the object.
Now if you are interested in the subjective experience of red then you can
do exactly the same experiment measuring some kind of correlate that
corresponds to the perception of red that how it has been pointed out is
understood pretty well from a neuroscience point of view. The complication
here would be that individuals respond similarly to stimuli but with
noticeable individual differences and by doing this experiment we would
also understand that variation in individual response given the same
stimuli.  This is all there is to understand from a scientific point of
view about red.
If one insists that there is an "explanation gap" it is because they don't
understand how science works and what science is all about.
It is a map of the universe, not the universe.
A map is not useful when it represents 1-1 to the territory.
What Brent is complaining about is that the map is not the territory (we
cannot EVOKE the experience by using science). Of course is not and it
should not be, because if it was doing that it would be useful as a model
of the world.
Models are not necessarily true, but they need to be useful to be good
models.

Giovanni

On Sat, Mar 25, 2023 at 10:34 AM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, Mar 25, 2023 at 9:00 AM Gadersd via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> Can anyone give a better (non circular) definition of a quality?
>>
>>
>> A quality is a particular configuration of particle interactions. We do
>> not know which configuration of particle interactions corresponds to your
>> perception of red because that must be experimentally determined.
>>
>
> Close, but  No, this is still circular.  "perception" is an abstracting
> process that requires senses, like eyes or ears.  It is a long chain of
> causal physical properties, none of which need to be 'redness' but all can
> be interpreted as representing 'redness' with a dictionary.  Perceptions
> are just interpretations of interpretations, none of which define what
> redness means.
> [image: 3_functionally_equal_machines_tiny.png]
>
> All 3 of these systems can perceive 'red'.  But only the first to know
> what redness is like (the second one's redness is like your greenness.)
>
> For each point of conscious knowledge on the surface of that strawberry,
> the first one has  something in its brain that has a redness quality.  The
> second one has the same, the difference is, each point has something that
> has your greenness quality.  The 3rd one has a bunch of pixel
> representations, each of which is represented by something abstract, like
> the word 'red'.
>
> You don't 'perceive' redness, you directly apprehend it as a quality of
> your computationally bound conscious  knowledge.  A quality is a physical
> property of which conscious experience is composed.  Redness is the final
> result of perception.
>
>
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