From: Brent Allsop (allsop@fc.hp.com)
Date: Mon Jun 04 2001 - 11:00:21 MDT
"John Clark" <jonkc@worldnet.att.net> claimed even if we can some day
eff, we will never be able to prove that effing works and replied to
Samantha Atkin's <samantha@objectent.com> response with:
> > I can prove it just as much as I can prove that you can know
> > what salt tastes like.
> That was my point, you can't prove either and never will. Subjective
> experience will remain subjective.
Your logic is suffering from the mistaken flaw that just
because to date all "Subjective experience" has been isolated and
trapped within our skull that it will always be this way. Once our
subjective conscious worlds begin to be enhanced and grow beyond what
is in our skull, once we eliminated the isolation by joining minds
into supper consciousness and shared subjective experience... effing
will become common place. Subjective worlds will remain subjective
worlds, but they will not always remain small, static, and isolated.
There must be some physical "neural correlate" that is
responsible for each of the many phenomenal quale we experience. When
one person is experiencing red, there is something in their brain that
is responsible for or has that phenomenal quality. The theory goes -
that we will discover this and that you will be able to produce the
same "neural correlate" such that it will always be the same "red"
regardless of what mind it exists in. Since this will be 100%
reliably reproducible, for all minds, including joined supper minds
that can share subjective experience, it will be common place
knowledge, that if this physical neural correlate is occurring in a
conscious mind, that mind will be experiencing red. We will know this
100% reliable correlation with as much surety as we know any other
reliable physical law.
We will discover that some physical phenomenal, for which we
already know in scientific detail, all of it's cause and affect, also
has some "pheonemal quality" to it which is more than just cause and
effect. It is also phenomenally "like" something. We will simply
know, 100% reliably, that that substance or phenomena simply has the
phenomenal quality that is red - and thereby is able to represent
conscious information. (Right now, most people think red is a
phenomenal quality of 700nm light reflecting off of somthing, but they
are grosely mistaken. These phenomenal qualites are properties of
something physical in our brain that has nothing to do with light,
other than our brain uses it to represent light.)
Sure, if you demand that your brain never be enhanced and
never be expanded and never wired to other minds so your subjective
experience can never escape your skull, you will never be able to eff.
But for everyone else, as their subject worlds grow, merge, get
shared... this kind of stuff will become a huge part of common every
day existence. They will look back at how primitive, ridiculous and
stupid we were about all this stuff which, in hind sight, will become
so utterly obvious.
Brent Allsop
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