Detecting Qualia

Yeah, the goal here is to describe a theoretical framework that predicts how one might be able to bridge the explanatory gap and get Beyond this, and do this experimentally so, so you can prove to everyone what you’ve done.

Some of the things that’s causing lack of consensus in this field is people pointing out Qualitative question like, what is it like to be a bat? David Chalmers refers to the hard problem. And what did Mary learn? If you’re familiar with the Frank Jackson’s Mary story.

This is basically a brilliant scientist that’s raised in a black and white environment, and she has scientific observation hardware and she learns everything about red and she can predict when people are experiencing red. She can engineer redness and sh swap it with greenness. She can turn it on her own head and discover that she hasn’t doesn’t has herself has never experienced a redness experience. And then, for the first time, she walks out of the environment into a room and sees a red rose for the first time. She says. Whoa, now I know what red is really like.

And so one theory predicts she did learn something new, and the other theory predicts no, there isn’t anything. She already knew everything about redness. But the problem with that is it’s just a philosophy because there’s no way to test it. There’s no way to prove to everyone which one is right. So the goal here is to show a way to prove. Which one’s right, and if it is, which way is it?

And so the talk is about detecting qualia. Qualia is the plural term. For the singular qual. So if you have a red quale, that’s just the singular of qualia.

And of course, the word red does not have that quality there. And the um red square there does. So you need a functional mapping mechanism to get from the red to the redness experience itself. The red word red does not have it itself, and we call that zombie information because It’s some representation that can be interpreted as if it was this, but it’s not that itself. And so you have to, the input to the translation function has to be in zombie knowledge, and the output is the redness fun. The experience of redness and that qualitative there.

And so there’s a difference between and so this here. Has the redness quality, but the word red does not. This, the word red is just a representation. And so that’s detectable qualia is that redness And how do you detect that? And the word red is a representation of qualia, where if you have a mapping function, you can get one from one to the other.

And when you think about, when you’re aware of that redness there, you’re aware of it, and there’s something going on in your brain that is aware of us. And that’s the initial cause of you reporting that is red. I am aware of redness. And so that detect is by definition a detection process. Your consciousness is detecting. That redness quality. And the prediction is that you can discover that process and reproduce it.

And whether you think this redness quality is some kind of quantum effect, whether it’s Panpsychism, whether it’s some more accurate description, whatever you think it is, you still have to have that mapping. And the important part to discovering and detecting what that is and proving to everyone. That it’s which one of those theories is the right one is getting that mapping right.

And so you have to remember there are Multiple parts of the perception of that. There’s the initial cause of red. If you’re looking at a strawberry, it’s reflecting 650 nanometer light. That is the property that the strawberry has that is detectable when light reflects off of it. Then there’s the light itself that represents that, but it’s very different. It has a different set of fundamental properties that it has, so you have to interpret it back to get to the surface of the strawberry, the properties of the ripe strawberry. And that’s what our retina does. It interprets that. And then it goes through a whole bunch of neural processing. And the end result of that neural processing is our knowledge of the strawberry.

So, you have the final result of the perception process of the knowledge. And the testable prediction is that that redness quality you experience is a property of that knowledge. It’s a quality of that knowledge. And so, we need to look into our brain and detect that.

And so there’s the causal red, the zombie red, or all the intermediate representations that don’t have redness, but you can interpret them interpret them as if they did. And then the final result is your knowledge, which has the redness quality. And this is what we want to do. Detect is that final knowledge, and how do you tell if this is redness or is that greenness, and what’s the difference?

And so, what we want to do is find the necessary and sufficient set of Detectable properties, whatever those are, whether functional, material, whatever, and be able to detect if someone has those qualities in their mind or if they have a greenness quality in their mind. for someone to experience redness. So if you know that you can map the two together and you can reliably see when you see this set of properties, you know that person is experiencing red. When you see a different set of properties, you know reliably he’s predicting he’s experiencing red. In green.

And so Daniel Dennett and a lot of the other people like to point out the fact: oh, you’re predicting there’s redness in all that gray matter. No, obviously, there’s no redness in there. How does that disconnect and why is that a valid argument? But the point is, again, it’s a quala interpretation. It’s the interpretation. If you get the interpretation wrong, then it’s going to look like gray matter, but is that a false interpretation? When you’re looking at a rainbow, does the really the colors of the rainbow exist in there, but you’re just misinterpreting it to be gray matter.

And to better understand this, we want to describe a simplistic theory. And the purpose of this simplistic theory is a simplistic world, which, if scientists were in this Simple world, how would they bridge this gap and discover what redness really was and qualitative information was? And so, in this simplistic world, just think of it as it’s not real, but it’s just the simplistic world. To understand the qualitative gap and how you get around it. And the prediction is that the real theory that will predict the real world and what real qualities are is just a variation on that simple theory that gets across the gap.

And so in this world, there are neurotransmitters. There’s only three color properties, and there’s three different neurotransmitters in this world. There’s glutamate, and that represents the redness quality. So when you’re aware of this, you’re looking at the red there. Your brain is firing and dumping glutamate in its neurotransmitters, and that is what has that redness property. That’s the The necessary and sufficient properties of that redness is the glutamate.

And glycine is a different neurotransmitter. And in this world, it’s the glycine that has the greenness experience that’s responsible for your greenness. And aspartate has the white experience.

But in case you’re noticing a problem here, when you take that glutamate, when you experience the red, it’s dumping glutamate, and if you take all that glutamate out of your mind, put it in a pile there, it’s reflecting white light. And so your rev knowledge is representing that pile of whiteness with aspartate down here. And can you see there’s a mistranslation there? So you’re missing so in other words you’re thinking it’s a white one, it’s really redness. And the middle one’s glycine, it just happens to reflect green light. And so you make that connection there, but it’s just a coincidence.

In the bottom one, aspartate, it’s a chemically active substance. That can combine easily with other things. In particular, form, you get a spartem, which is sold in the form of NutraSweet. And there’s another mismatch there because when you taste NutraSuite, You represent that with a sweetness quality that is the same at least similar to the sweetness quality that represents our knowledge of sugar with. So, again, all those are just mistranslations, and the one that happens to be right just happened to be a coincidence.

And neuroscientists today are starting to get to the fundamental part of being able to detect conscious knowledge. And so can I get this video to play? Is that possible? Yeah, you can see.

So so basically what they do is they have they put people subjects in fMRI And this fMRI detects what’s going on in the brain. It detects their knowledge. And so it produces zombie information of what they’re detecting.

And so the problem is, so you have this black and white zombie information, and you have to produce a color image of So, this is the movie the subject’s seen, and this is what the fMRI is detecting in the brain. So, you have zombie information describing what’s in the brain. And you have to map that to the colors that are on this.

And so I contacted Jack Gallant, who was doing this research, and asked, well, how do you do that? And the first words out of his mouth, oh, we just false-colored it. They took the actual color image map from this video and mapped and used that for their translation mechanism to get from the zombie information to the color. So those colors there are artificially covered. From the source.

And so, to fully understand that problem, let’s take a similar experiment and move into the three-color world. So, this fMRI here is a little more advanced. world here, the fMRI does more than just detect the amount of um blood or amount of oxygen that’s being metabolized. This can actually detect the glutamate and the glycine. And since it is glutamate that has redness, you can see the redness in the brain is made of glutamate, and you can see the leaves are made of glycine, and the fMRI is detecting. That strawberry is made of glutamate knowledge and the leaves are made of glycine knowledge.

And so you come down here to the and so they come up with their translation mechanism and where they get the translation information is from the source of the And so you map glutamate to red, glycine to green, and that produces what the movies that we’re seeing of the knowledge. And if these translation mechanisms here in the brains, Are the same, then it’s a coincidence, and you have communicated that yes, those two people have the same thing.

But the theory predicts that you can invert. Someone’s translation mechanism, which produces this. And this can either, the prediction is that you can engineer this inside the brain, or you can do that as easily as some just putting on red-green inverting glasses. So someone’s. Just like we’re looking at the same strawberry here, but one the strawberry is represented with redness, and the other one the same strawberry is represented with greenness.

So if you didn’t know whether that person has inverting glasses or not, if you just had a machine to look into that, how would you know if they had the inverted quality or not? And so the problem is, is when it’s inverted, if you have this where you get the information from the red, you get a mistranslation. The glycine is mapping to red. And the glutamate is mapping to green, and it produces the same 6O. And so you fail to detect the qualitative difference. And that is the essence of the. Should I take questions after?

So the second slide is different from the first slide. That the first slide represents two brains that are the same, and the second slide represents Grade A and grade B which are both different. Yeah, then they have different mapping mechanisms functioning in the brain. Because one produces knowledge that Has inverted from the normal person. Their knowledge of the strawberry is more green, and the knowledge of leaves are made out of redness. And so, yeah, that’s the difference. And in that case, you use Glam’s method and you get this mistranslation. from one to the other. And so it makes you blind to the qualitative nature, and that makes you think that that’s just gray matter in the brain, and you miss the qualitative properties that are in the brain.

So, how do you get this translation right? The way you get it right is instead of taking it from there, you have to take the from the two sources of the mapping translation, and you have to have a double interpretation. So here you have to have the first translation has to match the translation in the first that you’re observing and you also have to have some information about the Observer’s insulate translation, so you can get that correctly too. And then, if you throw that double inversion there and then you invert the quality, what you’ve done is you’ve inverted this, and if this gets inverted, then you have to. inverse this too. And if you invert these two to match each other, then the communication takes place and you have effectively effed the ineffable. Detected that that person has inverted qualia from yourself in a scientific, demonstratable, provable way. So that’s the important thing: is getting it from there. And the trick to bridging the qualitative gap is just getting that translation right.

So, time list remains. So basically effing the ineffable, there’s different forms of effing the ineffable. There’s the weak form, which is what we just described, where you Get the mapping translations right, and you reproduce the same whatever is responsible for redness in both brains, whether it’s inverted or not.

Then a stronger one is required if there’s a new quality that you’ve never experienced before. Some people think about the song I’ve Never Seen Blue Like That Before or Some people are tetrachromats rather than just trichromats like most of us, and they have a fourth primary color that they represent the visual knowledge with. What is that color like? And then so you have to augment their brain, both their detection and awareness system, and then put whatever’s responsible for it into that detection system so that you can throw the switch and you for the first time, oh, that’s what that new quality is like. Wow, now I understand what it’s like. And so that’s a stronger form because it can communicate to you, F to you, what new experiences or the elemental qualities that you’ve never experienced before.

And the strongest form, so if you have knowledge of the strawberry in your left hemisphere and knowledge of the leaf in your right hemisphere, redness and greenness, somehow the corpus callosum connects those together and binds them together. So you’re aware of both of them at the same time. You can say, whoa, that greenness is way different than that redness. And I know that. But the strongest form is that you can do that between brains if you. Have a direct connection that’s doing whatever the corpus callosum does to connect that together, and that’s the strongest form of effing the ineffable. And so

So, when you think about Joseph Smith multiple times talked about all spirit is matter, and it says that in the scriptures. And when I was growing up, I kind of thought, oh, that matter is just some magical, undetectable. Spiritual stuff in some other world, and you can’t approach it. It’s not approachable via science. But when I started to do the survey project and figure out what everyone’s scientific consensus was,

When you think about qualia, qualia can be defined as spiritual properties. There’s elemental qualia and elemental redness. Elemental redness qualia, and then there’s composite qualia, which is all the other information bound into that and with that. There’s the warmth, the Taste of the strawberry, the anticipation of what it’s going to taste like, your knowledge of yourself, perceiving that redness, all that’s additional information that can be bound together. But the prediction is that you can reduce that into elemental qualias that which can be effed to each other’s brains, and that our consciousness is a bound together painting of all of that stuff when we’re of our and so our knowledge is a built-together painting. And um and so the prediction is that all of consciousness and all spirituality is just composite quality and can be reduced to a lowest level, elemental level, and that that can be effed and shared with At least in these three different ways.

And that, yeah, and that will be literally piercing the veil of perception and discovering the spiritual world, and discovering the spirit world. in our mind because the prediction is that we have a model of this world, a spiritual model of this world, which is our knowledge of the world, and at the center of that there’s our body, and at the center of that body inside of my head is my knowledge of myself. All that other knowledge has a referent in reality. I can see there’s a real referent out there, and I have knowledge that represents that. But the spirit, the knowledge of my spirit inside my head. Inside the knowledge of my head, looking out my knowledge of my eyes, doesn’t have a referendum reality, but just because it doesn’t have a referendum in reality, doesn’t mean it’s not real. But at one level, that could be a theoretical scientific description of what the spirit is. And along with that, it’s a testable description. It allows science to be able to discover what it is and what it is like.

Twelve seconds left for questions.