Yea, I think all that stuff is great.  They mentioned others that have been doing similar interfaces, like the “Utah Array” helping blind people see and so on.  And of course, as they always say: “You aint seen nothing yet.”  And as he said:  “The future is going to be ‘weird’.  We think our lives are very different from people that live a few hundred years ago, before automobiles and so on.  But because of accelerating work like Neuralink, the difference between our lives, and the lives of people 100 years ago, will be indistinguishable from our lives and people living 50 and 100 years in the future.  (i.e. no death, uploading, avatars, amplified intelligence/memory…, traveling to space without needing space suits...)

 

But what continues to blow me away is how much neural progress like this continues while everyone is doing all this in only the abstract domain.  People only use one word for all things red.  (i.e. qualia blind.)  Qualia are intrinsic qualities of something in the brain, so if you want to objectively observe/discover intrinsic qualities, you need to use multiple words, red (something that reflects or emits red light) and redness (the intrinsic quality of knowledge of red things.);  How are you going to be able to get someone to see a spot of redness, vs greenness, let alone know if someone’s redness is like someone alse’s greenness.

 

It just seems so absurd to me that not only can nobody tell us the intrinsic colorness qualities of anything in this world, even the brilliant people like Elon Musk, and the world's most brilliant neural researchers and physicists, don’t realize we don’t know this.  All peer reviewed work, today, is completely qualia blind, and basically just uses one word for all things red.

 

To better understand qualia blindness, see if you can pass the ‘Are you qualia blind’ test.

And if you agree with the importance of this, please help communicate this to the masses by signing or joining the "Representational Qualia Theory" camp, or one of it's supporting sub camps which most closely aligns with whatever you predict qualia will turn out to be.


On Sat, Aug 29, 2020 at 2:47 PM Cole Butler <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi all,

Wondering your thoughts on Elon Musk’s NeuraLink device. Seems super cool to me! He talked about a lot of the long-term theoretical applications on his last appearance on Joe Rohan’s podcast, but this video is a great highlight of a first iteration.

https://youtu.be/CLUWDLKAF1M

Best,

Cole
--
Cole Butler
Research Coordinator
Project Coordinator: Treating Parents with ADHD and their Children (TPAC)
SUCCEEDS Coach
University of Maryland
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