From: Brent Allsop (allsop@fc.hp.com)
Date: Sun Jun 03 2001 - 23:22:02 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
> You know very well that only a small number of people (at
> present) accept your ideas about effing.
Maybe, but if we're talking numbers we should try a survey.
I've seen lots of people either change their mind, or indicate they
believe it will be possible to some day do something like communicate
to another conscious being what the taste of salt is like. Marvin
Minsky is one of my favorite examples, we've had some great
discussions along these lines. In fact, I bet you can't find very
many people at all these days that will demand that we will never have
the ability to do something like communicate to another conscious
being what the taste of salt is like.
> Many people agree with Dennett that you'd endup up having to change
> all of a person's unconscious and conscious associations before the
> "effs" would be valid.
First off, let me ask you a question. What is it that these
"associations" are made between? At the fundamental level there has
to be something that does the representing of conscious information
that can be associated with something else, what is this?
Anyone who argues like this is talking about something
entirely different than what I am talking about. I'm talking about
the fundamental and phenomenal representations that anything we
consciously know is made of. To often people only consider
voluntarily created higher level cognitive "ideas" and think this is
the only thing in our mind. This is the fatal flaw so many people
make which prevents them from understanding reality. One must realize
that there are involuntary representations which we do not control,
which are directly produced by our senses. Red, salty... and so
forth. No matter how many different things you happen to cognitively
"associate" with the taste of salt, it will always remain just that:
salty. You can use it to represent anything you want, our mind
happens to use it to represent sodium chloride, but salty will never
change. (Note: our brain uses an entirely different set of qualia to
represent our knowledge of salt when it is in our hand from what it
uses when it is in our mouth. The Sodium Cloride hasn't changed, only
our brain's conscious representation of it has.)
From: Samantha Atkins <samantha@objectent.com> said:
> From small experiences through meditation I don't think effing is
> inconceivable at all. Nor do I see any scientific or neurological
> problems necessarily with it. Changing a person's unconscious and
> conscious associations is not so much needed as allowing the person
> to switch sets of such associations very quickly. As the brain
> moves on faster and more capable hardware this should not be a huge
> problem.
Switching the same sensory stimulus to produce a different
quale is certainly a possibility but is by no means the best way.
When you look at a rainbow, you experience all of the visible colors
at the same time. You can compare and contrast them all at the same
time. It's not that hard to believe that some day we will be able to
enhance both our retina and our primary visual cortex. Making our
retina able to detect electromagnetic radiation outside of the old
visible spectrum, and wiring this additional different stimulus to an
enhanced primary visual cortex which can produce arbitrary different
and new colors that no human has ever experienced. In other words,
effing to us what these new colors are phenomenally like, so we can
experience the new colors at the same time, and right next to, all the
other old colors.
Due to our current brain makeup, It's currently harder to
imagine experiencing more than one taste at the same time like this.
So perhaps at first switching between different taste qualia might be
like testing different things one after another, without actually
putting anything different in our mouth, and only altering the way
our brain is working. But if the brain can make us aware of multiple
colors at the same time, what would prevent us from engineering a mind
that can taste multiple tastes at the same time? At least we can
experience red at the same time as we experience salty. Everyone
must agree these are two drastically different qualia.
Brent Allsop
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