On Sun, Jul 25, 2021 at 4:44 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List < everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:
*> And you have no way of knowing what it will feel like to be John K Clark > tomorrow, but you have a pretty good theory about it. * > Yes, and tomorrow I will be able to definitively know if yesterday's theory about what it will be like to be John K Clark today turned out to be correct or not. * > Similarly, you probably have a better theory about what it would feel > like to be Brent Meeker than to be DeepMind. * > No, there's nothing similar at all about it because tomorrow I will STILL have absolutely positively no way of knowing if yesterday's theory about what it will be like to be Brent Meeker or DeepMind today turned out to be correct or not, in fact I will NEVER know if it's correct > *Consciousness is imagined be an impossibly hard problem because it's > posed as being able to predict conscious thoughts from monitoring a brain. * > The hardest part of the "hard problem of consciousness" is clearly explaining exactly what "the hard problem of consciousness" is, it's not at all clear to me exactly what sort of explanation would satisfy the consciousness gurus. *> But that's like saying gravity is a hard problem because we can't > predict the motion of all the stars in a galaxy (or even three bodies).* > I can make exact Newtonian predictions in a few very special situations but in general you're right, I can't make an exact prediction of the motion of 3 particles, but I can make some very good approximations, and by using The Virial Theorem I can even make a good approximation for the motions of millions of bodies. However I don't know, and will never know, if my predictions about a consciousness other than my own is even approximately correct. And that's why consciousness theories are so easy to dream up, and that's also why they're such a colossal bore. *> the fact that you can say the consciousness of DeepMind might be so > different you have no way of knowing what it would be like implies that > there can be qualitatively different kinds of consciousness. * > Yes. I only have experience with my own consciousness but I know for a fact that depending on the time of day my consciousness can be qualitatively different, and I've known that for a long time. Back when I was a student taking a calculus exam my consciousness had reached a high-level but later that same night when I was falling asleep it was at a much lower level and just a little later it fell all the way to zero, and then what seemed instantaneous but actually took 8 hours it started up again. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> 0o0o -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv2mxNZd8m_P4Z6ggdV2sgmV3BmjC8DGViuLacwO8ZVoJQ%40mail.gmail.com.
