Hi John,



It seems like the way you think about intercellular interactions has great
utility.  I’m working to fully understand all this.  But when you bring the
word “qualia” into this discussion the way you do, to me, you make it
obvious that you don’t understand what the word “qualia” means.  You do use
the word, with an abstract definition.  But to most people, the word qualia
is not a word about anything abstract, in the way that you use it.



To better understand qualia, let us engineer 3 different robots that can
each pick a strawberry, experience harm, wounding and injury, and so on all
equally functionally well.



Let’s start with an easily falsifiable working hypothesis that the name for
the neurotransmitter glutamate, and all of our abstract mathematical
knowledge of how glutamate behaves in a synapse, are abstract mathematical
descriptions of the causal physical stuff that is physical glutamate we can
directly experience as having a redness quality.  The same for the
objective name glycine and subjective name greenness, being abstract names
for the same physical thing.



The first robot will represent its knowledge of the strawberry with
glutamate, that has a redness quality.  Knowledge of leaves will be
represented with glycine, which is directly experienced as greenness.  This
redness knowledge will enable this robot to distinguish and pick out the
“ripe” ones from the green ones.



The second robot will be a qualia invert
<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__en.wikipedia.org_wiki_Inverted-5Fspectrum&d=DwIFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=yzjrLVsDxe1Cvy4HRhbRax3mE6joxOo-cz0Y2oqaHnc&s=cNB9zCEznFOszytmCT2nHTTJbSQMUmxsN0nAKltlQI8&e=>.  It will represent its
knowledge of the strawberry with the glycine.  So, this robot’s knowledge
of the strawberry will be qualitatively like #1 robot’s knowledge of the
leaves.  Functionally, these robots will both pick strawberries,
indistinguishably well.  Actually, one and two can be identical, on just
wears red green inverting glasses.



Finally, robot #3.  Let’s engineer this robot’s knowledge to be abstracted
away from any physical qualities.  It will use the number “1” to represent
knowledge of red things, and “0” for knowledge of green things.  This robot
has multiple diverse kinds of interpreting mechanisms, so any different set
of physics can represent that “1”.  For example, when a disc is magnetized
one way, a specific interpretation mechanism will be able to get the “1”
from that magnetized disk.  A different set of hardware will similarly get
the “1” from +5 volts.  In other words, because of the additional
abstracting hardware, it doesn’t matter what physics is representing its
abstract binary knowledge.  An additional interpretation mechanism is
required to interpret the “1” as ripe, and “0” as not ripe.  Without these
interpretation mechanisms, this robot can not know what to pick and what to
avoid.  Like the previous 2 robots, you can’t tell the external functional
difference between this one, either.  The first 2 robots represent
knowledge of the strawberry directly on physical qualities, so they are
more efficient, since they do not require the additional abstracting
hardware this 3rd one requires.



John defines words like qualia and red only functionally, with terms like:
“Harm”, “Wounding?” and “Injury”.  There is no qualitative meaning in any
of these definitions.  All of the above 3 robots can experience “Harm”,
“Wounding”, and “Injury” in qualitatively very different ways, to which
John is qualitatively blind to.  That is what “qualia blindness” means.



On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 4:21 AM JOHN TORDAY <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Dear Brent and TOK, in putting together a brief talk on Consciousness, I
> had to reduce my cell biologic approach to the problem due to time
> constraints. So I decided to start with E=mc2 as the mathematical
> expression of the Singularity of the Cosmos (I assume we're all good on
> Einstein). Based on that 'logic', development of the embryo as cell-cell
> signaling is the conversion of 'mass' (growth factors) into 'energy' (the
> downstream interaction of the growth factor with its receptor (think 'lock
> and key'), triggering an intracellular cascade of high energy phosphates
> that ultimately affect growth and differentiation of the embryo,
> culminating in homeostatic physiology at birth. The aggregate of those
> cell-cell interactions is Consciousness, bearing in mind that the origin of
> the brain is the skin as a graphic. That would explain Qualia as the way in
> which experiences trigger consciousness, i.e. why seeing 'red' free
> associates with the physiology of the individual, bearing in mind that
> those homeostatic signaling cascades reference not only the physiology of
> the current individual, but their past experiences as a species as
> evolution too, so the Qualia go way back in the history of the organism. I
> hope that was helpful.
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