From: Brent Allsop (allsop@fc.hp.com)
Date: Wed Jun 27 2001 - 21:59:41 MDT
Folks,
I was hoping to have a chance to meet Ray and ask him a few
questions at Extro-5. But given his short time there, and his
popularity, it became obvious that such was not going to be possible.
So I've drafted these questions and am planning on e-mailing them to
him. But before I do I'd love to get any feedback any of you might
have on how I might best go about this.
Thanks!
Brent Allsop
===================================================================
To: Ray Kurzweil
Subject: Thanks for Extro-5!
--text follows this line--
Ray,
You signed my copy of your book "The Age of Spiritual
Machines" (one of my favorite books) at extro-5. Thank you so much
for all you do, and your support of extropians! I wanted to ask you a
question or two but you were obviously swamped at the conference with
everyone wanting to have a chance to talk with you.
I think you have a brilliant ability to see the future and I
eat up everything you have to say about it. I use any chance I get in
writings and speeches I give to various groups, to use your material.
But there is one, to me obvious, thing that seems painfully missing
from much of what you say. And this is the significance of qualia to
consciousness and the drastic implications the discovery of such will
surely have on the nature of the world 50 years down the road and
beyond.
Let me ask you this: If an AI you were designing was asked:
"What is the taste of salt like?" how should it answer? Would it be
lying if it said it knew what the taste of salt was like? Will we
ever be able to "eff" such ineffable sensations to others and to "AI"s
- perhaps causing them to say something like: "Oh THAT's what salt
tastes like!"?
I'm working on a paper which answers all of these questions
and describes what it means to "eff" the ineffable in this way. I
describe what future mechanisms must be like in order for us to be
able to do this kind of "effing" and much more. I describe how this
will enable the solving of phylisophical conundrums such as "the
problem of other minds". I describe how effing will become a key
feature of the future of increasingly expanding and growing conscious
minds. Conscoius minds that are finally no longer subjectively lonely
and trapped within the walls of our skull.
I'm calling this paper "A Qualia Theory of Consciousness". In
it I briefly criticize the way you envision our achievement of
understanding of the human brain and our ability to reverse engineer
it and ultimately improve upon it. It is my belief that within the
next 10 to 20 years, due to the technological achievements you
describe, there must be a scientific discovery made that will cause a
fundamental paradigm shift in science. This will be to finally
include the search for, discovery and classification of whatever
natural physical process there are that have or produce the
"phenomenal properties" of the "qualia" which our brain uses to
represent conscious information. In other words this will be the
discovery of the stuff conscious information is made of. If this
theory is true, this discovery which is about to be made will surely
be the most significant scientific discovery by far to date.
I attempt to show how this theory must be true for simple and
obvious reasons. The implications of this will be a future that is
quite a bit different than what you describe. Most of what you say
will still be true, but you will have been missing the most
significant properties of the world and of ourselves as we grow and
expand into this future.
A draft of my paper is available here:
HTML version: <URL: http://www.frii.com/~allsop/qualia.htm>
MS Word version: <URL: http://www.frii.com/~allsop/qualia.doc>
I would love to get your feedback on what I'm attempting to
say here. I would love to find out if you think a qualia theory of
consciousness like this will turn out to be significant in any way to
our future.
Do you think we will ever be able to eff the ineffable?
Thanks again!
Brent Allsop <allsop@extropy.org>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:08:19 MST