What would it take to convince you that this entire line of inquiry is confused? Not just the quantum stuff, but the general idea that qualia are ontologically basic? Not just arguments, necessarily, experiments would be good, too.
If Mitchell is unable or unwilling to answer this question, no one should give him any amount of money no matter the terms.
Is this a reasonable request? What would convince you that this line of inquiry is not confused?
If we discover laws of physics that only seem to be active in the brain, that would convince me. If we discover that the brain sometimes violates the laws of physics as we know them, that would convince me. If we build a complete classical simulation of the brain and it doesn't work, that would convince me. If we build a complete classical simulation of the brain and it works differently from organic brains, that would convince me. Ditto for quantum versions, even, I guess.
And there are loads of other things that would be strong evidence on this issue. Maybe we'll find the XML tags that encode greenness in objects. I don't expect any of these things to be true, because if I did then I would have updated already. But if any of these things did happen, of course I would change my mind. It probably wouldn't even take evidence that strong. Hell, any evidence stronger than intuition would be nice.
There are a lot of reasons that people aren't responding positively to your comments. One of which I think hasn't been addressed is that this to a large extent pattern matches to a bad set of metapatterns in history. In general, our understanding of the mind has been by having to reject our strong intuitions about how our minds are dualist and how aspects of our minds (or our minds as a whole) are fundamentally irreducible. So they look at this and think that it isn't a promising line of inquiry. Now, this may be unfair, but I don't think it really is very unfair. The notion that there are irreducible or even reducible but strongly dualist aspects of our universe seems to a class of hypotheses which has been repeatedly falsified. So it is fair for someone to by default to assign a low probability to similar hypotheses.
You have other bits that make worrying signals about your rationality or level intentions, like when you write things like:
I don't mean that I'm suicidal, I mean that I can't eat air. I spent a year getting to this level in physics, so I could perform this task.
This bit not only made me sit up in alarm, it substantially reduced how seriously I should take your id...
One other bit of (hopefully) constructive criticism: you do seem to have a bit of a case of philosophical jargon-itis. I mean sentences like this:
I see the holism of quantum states as the first historical sign of an ontological synthesis transcending the clash between reductionism and subjectivity, which has hitherto been resolved by rejecting one or the other, or by uneasy dualistic coexistence.
As a philosopher myself, I appreciate the usefulness of jargon from time to time, but you sometimes have the air of throwing it around for the sheer joy of it. Furthermore, I (at least) find that that sort of style can sometimes feel like you're deliberately trying to obscure your point, or that it's camoflage to conceal any dubious parts.
Colours "exist" as a fact of perception. If you're looking for colours without perception, you've missed what normative usage of "colour" means. You've also committed a ton of compression fallacy, assuming that all possible definitions of "colour" do or should refer to the same ontological entity.
You've then covered your views in word salad; I would not attempt to write with such an appalling lack of clarity as you've wrapped your views in in this sequence, except for strictly literary purposes; certainly not if my intent were to inform.
You need to seriously consider the possibility that this sequence is getting such an overwhelmingly negative reaction because you're talking rubbish.
Some questions:
Chalmers' short comment in your link amounts to just Chalmers expressing enthusiasm for ontologically basic mental properties, not any kind of recommendation for your specific research program.
Of course you're right that some forms of work pay well. Part of what keeps me down is impatience and the attempt to do the most important thing right now.
To be frank, the Outside View says that most people who have achieved little over many years of work will achieve little in the next few months. Many of them have trouble with time horizons, lack of willpower, or other problems that sabotage their efforts systematically, or prefer to indulge other desires rather than work hard. These things would hinder both scientific research and paid work. Refusing to self-finance with a lucrative job, combined with the absence of any impressive work history (that you have made clear in the post I have seen) is a bad signal about your productivity, your reasons for asking us for money, and your ability to eventually pay it back.
the attempt to do the most important thing right now
No one else seems to buy your picture of what is most important (qualia+safe AI). Have you actually thought through an...
Perhaps the ultimate wrong turn would be a civilization which uploaded itself, thinking that it had thereby obtained immortality, when in fact they had just killed themselves, to be replaced by a society of unconscious simulations. That's an extreme, science-fictional example, but there are many lesser forms of the problem that could come to pass, which are merely pathologies rather than disasters.
Imagine you have signed up to have your brain scanned by the most advanced equipment available in 2045. You set in a tube and close you eyes while the machine recreates all the details of your brain, its connectivity, electromagnetic fields and electrochemical gradients, and transient firing patterns.
The technician says, "Okay, you've been uploaded, the simulation is running."
"Excellent," you respond. "Now I can interact with he simulation and prove that it doesn't have qualia."
"Hold on, there," said the technician. "You can't interact with it yet. The nerve impulses from your sensory organs and non-cranial nerves are still being recorded and used as input for the simulation, so that we can make sure it's a stable duplicate. Observe the...
Why not spend some time programming or tutoring math? If you work at Google for a year you can then live off the proceeds for several years in Bali or the like. A moderate amount of tutoring work could pay the rent.
If I ever go to work at Google it won't be to live off the proceeds afterwards, it will be because it's relevant to artificial intelligence.
Supposing you can work at Google, why not? Beggaring yourself looks unlikely to maximize total productivity over the next few years, which seems like the timescale that counts.
Which returns us to the dilemma: either "experiences" exist and part of them is actually green, or you have to say that nothing exists, in any sense, at any level of reality, that is actually green.
The third option is my favourite:
Good news everyone! There are all kinds of different things that you can permissibly call green! Classes of wavelengths, dispositions in retnas, experiences in brains, all kinds of things! Now we have the fun choice of deciding which one is most interesting and what we want to talk about! Yay!
"Green" refers to objects which disproportionately reflect or emit light of a wavelength between 520 and 570nm.
~(Solvent, from the previous thread.)
A few people talk about wavelengths of light, but I doubt that they want to assert that the light in question, as it traverses space, is actually colored green.
If your counterexample is already taken care of by the very second person in the previous thread, you should use a different counterexample. EDIT: I am not endorsing Solvent's definition in any "The Definition" sense - but ...
Things that my brain tells me are green, are green. Things that your brain tells you are green, are green. In cases where we disagree, split the label into my!green and your!green.
Now can we move on? This post is a waste of time.
The lifeworld is the place where you exist, where time flows, and where things are actually green.
What makes you think these all happen in the same place?
For what it's worth, I don't take dreams and hallucinations to involve seeing at all, so I don't believe I have anything to explain with regard to colour in dreams and hallucinations. I take the question "Do you dream in colour?" to be incoherent whereas the question "Have you dreamt of colour / coloured things?" is fine. The former question presupposes that perception involves seeing internal imagery rather than directly perceiving the world, which I deny, and that dreaming / hallucinating can therefore be said to be a form of perception also, something which obviously can't follow from my denial of mediating imagery.
I have a question and I think maybe your answer will make it easier for other people to understand what you are arguing.
What about people who are color blind? They see for instance red where in objective reality the objects wavelength is "green". What happens here in your view? In the persons experience he still see red, but it should be green... And eventhough we know approximately the processes that do that people are color blind, this seems to be a interesting question in your model.
As of a few minutes ago, my problems are solved for the next few months - which should be long enough for this situation never to recur. If I ever go fundraising again, I'll make sure I have something far more substantial ready to make my case.
Just to clarify, I don't really consider my position to be eliminative towards green, only that what we are talking about when we talk about green 'qualia' is nothing more than a certain type of sentient experience. This may eliminate what you think you are talking about what you say green, but not what I think I am talking about when I say green. I am willing to say that the part of a functional pattern of neural activity that is experienced as green qualia is identical to green in the sense that people generally mean when they talk about seeing something...
The most apparent way to talk about such topics here is to completely overhaul the terminology and canonical examples.
And then do something with the resulting referential void.
Certainly not a task for group of less than four people, and likely not a task for group of less than 40.
Is your attempt to single-handedly contribute, with all the costs it imposes, likely enough to give a significant positive result?
Apparently there is no guarantee return. Suppose that your theoretical assumptions are correct, then why people don't get it? I mean, if the explanations have some power, other physics will accept.
Maybe future neurobiology help us with the consciosuness debate. FAI is another helm.
A few people talk about wavelengths of light, but I doubt that they want to assert that the light in question, as it traverses space, is actually colored green.
Why not? If anything has color, it's light.
Previous articles: Personal research update, Does functionalism imply dualism?, State your physical account of experienced color.
In phenomenology, there is a name for the world of experience, the "lifeworld". The lifeworld is the place where you exist, where time flows, and where things are actually green. One of the themes of the later work of Edmund Husserl is that a scientific image of the real world has been constructed, on the basis of which it is denied that various phenomena of the lifeworld exist anywhere, at any level of reality.
When I asked, in the previous post, for a few opinions about what color is and how it relates to the world according to current science, I was trying to gauge just how bad the eclipse of the lifeworld by theoretical conceptions is, among the readers of this site. I'd say there is a problem, but it's a problem that might be solved by patient discussion.
Someone called Automaton has given us a clear statement of the extreme position: nothing is actually green at any level of reality; even green experiences don't involve the existence of anything that is actually green; there is no green in reality, there is only "experience of green" which is not itself green. I see other responses which are just a step or two away from this extreme, but they don't deny the existence of actual color with that degree of unambiguity.
A few people talk about wavelengths of light, but I doubt that they want to assert that the light in question, as it traverses space, is actually colored green. Which returns us to the dilemma: either "experiences" exist and part of them is actually green, or you have to say that nothing exists, in any sense, at any level of reality, that is actually green. Either the lifeworld exists somewhere in reality, or you must assert, as does the philosopher quoted by Automaton, that all that exists are brain processes and words. Your color sensations aren't really there, you're "having a sensation" without there being a sensation in reality.
What about the other responses? kilobug seems to think that pi actually exists inside a computer calculating the digits of pi, and that this isn't dualist. Manfred thinks that "keeping definitions and referents distinct" would somehow answer the question of where in reality the actual shades of green are. drethelin says "The universe does not work how it feels to us it works" without explaining in physical terms what these feelings about reality are, and whether any of them is actually green. pedanterrific asks why wrangle about color rather than some other property (the answer is that the case of color makes this sort of problem as obvious as it ever gets). RomeoStevens suggests I look into Jeff Hawkins. Hawkins mentions qualia once in his book "On Intelligence", where he speculates about what sort of neural encoding might be the physical correlate of a color experience; but he doesn't say how or whether anything manages to be actually colored.
amcknight asks which of 9 theories of color listed in the SEP article on that subject I'm talking about. If you go a few paragraphs back from the list of 9 theories, you will see references to "color as it is in experience" or "color as a subjective quality". That's the type of color I'm talking about. The 9 theories are all ways of talking about "color as in physical objects", and focus on the properties of the external stimuli which cause a color sensation. The article gets around to talking about actual color, subjective or "phenomenal" color, only at the end.
Richard Kennaway comes closest to my position; he calls it an apparently impossible situation which we are actually living. I wouldn't put it quite like that; the only reason to call it impossible is if you are completely invested in an ontology lacking the so-called secondary qualities; if you aren't, it's just a problem to solve, not a paradox. But Richard comes closest (though who knows what Will Newsome is thinking). LW user "scientism" bites a different bullet to the eliminativists, and says colors are real and are properties of the external objects. That gets a point for realism, but it doesn't explain color in a dream or a hallucination.
Changing people's minds on this subject is an uphill battle, but people here are willing to talk, and most of these subjects have already been discussed for decades. There's ample opportunity to dissolve, not the problem, but the false solutions which only obscure the real problem, by drawing on the work of others; preferably before the future Rationality Institute starts mass-producing people who have the vice of quale-blindness as well as the virtues of rationality. Some of those people will go on to work on Friendly AI. So it's highly desirable that someone should do this. However, that would require time that I no longer have.
In this series of posts, I certainly didn't set out to focus on the issue of color. The first post is all about Friendly AI, the ontology of consciousness, and a hypothetical future discipline of quantum neurobiology. It may still be unclear why I think evidence for quantum computing in the brain could help with the ontological problems of consciousness. I feel that the brief discussion this week has produced some minor progress in explaining myself, which needs to be consolidated into something better. But see my remarks here about being able to collapse the dualistic distinction between mental and physical ontology in a tensor network ontology; also earlier remarks here about about mathematically representing the phenomenological ontology of consciousness. I don't consider myself dogmatic about what the answer is, just about the inadequacy of all existing solutions, though I respect my own ideas enough to want to pursue them, and to believe that doing so will be usefully instructive, even if they are wrong.
However, my time is up. In real life, my ability to continue even at this inadequate level hangs by a thread. I don't mean that I'm suicidal, I mean that I can't eat air. I spent a year getting to this level in physics, so I could perform this task. I have considerable momentum now, but it will go to waste unless I can keep going for a little longer - a few weeks, maybe a few months. That should be enough time to write something up that contains a result of genuine substance, and/or enough time to secure an economic basis for my existence in real life that permits me to keep going. I won't go into detail here about how slim my resources really are, or how adverse my conditions, but it has been the effort that you would want from someone who has important contributions to make, and nowhere to turn for direct assistance.[*] I've done what I can, these posts are the end of it, and the next few days will decide whether I can keep going, or whether I have to shut down my brain once again.
So, one final remark. Asking for donations doesn't seem to work yet. So what if I promise to pay you back? Then the only cost you bear is the opportunity cost and the slight risk of default. Ten years ago, Eliezer lent me the airfare to Atlanta for a few days of brainstorming. It took a while, but he did get that money back. I honor my commitments and this one is highly public. This really is the biggest bargain in existential risk mitigation and conceptual boundary-breaking that you'll ever get: not even a gift, just a loan is required. If you want to discuss a deal, don't do it here, but mail me at mitchtemporarily@hotmail.com. One person might be enough to make the difference.
[*]Really, I can't say that, that's an emotional statement. There has been lots of assistance, large and small, from people in my life. But it's been a struggle conducted at subsistence level the whole way.
ETA 6 Feb: I get to keep going.