[ExI] What is Consciousness?

Sat Mar 25 20:27:19 UTC 2023

*You don't 'perceive' redness, you directly apprehend it as a quality of
your computationally bound conscious  knowledge.*

That is not true at all. There is nothing direct about "apprehending"
redness. The perception of red by the brain is a translation of an
electromagnetic wave properties (its wavelength and intensity in a given
region of the light spectrum) into the language of the brain that is
physical sensations.
There is no difference from what happens in the computer.

On Sat, Mar 25, 2023 at 1:22 PM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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