[ExI] What is Consciousness?

[Stuart LaForge]

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

> On Wed, Mar 22, 2023 at 4:34 AM Giovanni Santostasi via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Mar 21, 2023 at 10:47 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>> So following your rationale that consciousness requires "essential
>>> qualities" rather than "abstract data" then old -fashioned color film
>>> cameras were conscious:
>>>
>>
> Yes, this is a great first step towards understanding.  Some things in
> nature must behave the way they do, because of their intrinsic
> colorness quality.  It is theoretically possible that silver-nitrate
> crystals behave the way they do, because of their colerness quality.  The
> only problem is, there is no computation going on, with the film or in such
> a camera, just stand alone silver-nitrate crystals abstractly representing
> the picture.
> The next required step is computational binding.  In order to
> directly apprehend something's intrinsic quality, you need to be able to
> computationally bind it into the rest of your consciousness, so you can
> directly apprehend their quality, so you can compute with them, enabling
> you to say: "Oh THAT is what silver-nitride particles are like."

In order to computationally bind an intrinsic quality to  
consciousness, requires the quality to be changed into information  
that is to say digitization. Since the Polaroid camera produces a  
chemical photograph of the strawberry with the redness quality that  
can be scanned into the robot, it follows that the combination of the  
robot and the Polaroid camera is conscious like a human. At some  
point, whether it be in the eyeball or the brain, an essential quality  
has to become bits and bytes because that is what the computational in  
"computational binding" means right? Does it really matter where it  
happens?

You want to believe that the essential quality of redness somehow gets  
computationally bound to glutamate or some other physical molecule.  
But molecules are not essential, they are structures built of atoms.  
So if one non-essential structure can be computationally bound to the  
redness quality, then why couldn't some other non-essential structure  
serve equally well? Like the cellular structure in the brain that  
Rafal pointed out to you?The rosettes in the fusiform gyrus of the  
brain.

Stuart LaForge