[ExI] What is Consciousness?

[Giovanni Santostasi]

Brent is making a big difference between the "*direct"* perception of red
of a person and the derived recognition of a red stimuli by a robot (using
the RED word to describe that). But there is nothing direct about our
perception of red. It is also a derived experience. There are several steps
to go from the electromagnetic vibration of light to the recognition of red
in a human. At each step there is exactly a translation from a dictionary,
in a sense. It starts with the receptors in the retina that "translate" the
chemical reaction happening in a given receptor to a particular code based
on neuron spiking. This signal is transmitted to different parts of the
brain to be processed and redirected to other regions of the brain to be
further processed. At each step, there is a sort of translation made of
neurotransmitters and electrical impulses.
Yes, it is marvelous in the end we perceive something that we recognize as
red. It is the mystery of consciousness but it is not a mystery from a
scientific point of view (we understand most of the components and it is
just a matter of putting everything together in a coherent whole) but from
an existential point of view. Red feels as something because it is the way
for the brain to tell us something is happening. How else would it do it?
If it whispered the word "RED" it would feel also as something (of course
an absurd idea because the brain has no idea of English a priori but it can
and it does know how to manipulate neurons that create sensations). This
doesn't happen only with colors but basically any bodily sensation, yes, it
is fascinating we feel them and we aware of them but it is not science job
to explain how this happens besides what it is already doing and explain
the chain of event to make this happen. I have the FEELING that Brent is
asking for science to make us FEEL red by listening how experience of red
is processed by the brain. But that is not what science is about.





On Sat, Mar 25, 2023 at 12:05 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> I think you mean interpretations of sensations.  bill w
>
> On Sat, Mar 25, 2023 at 12:34 PM 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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