Q U A L I U M

Trauma is almost universally maladaptive and fitness decreasing, so why hasn't evolution removed it from the population? The only way it could persist is if it were a non-selected side-effect of an adaptation that were of sufficiently high utility to more than compensate for the occasional failure-mode of Trauma. And moreover, Trauma would have to be a fundamental consequence of this high utility adaptation – there's an evolutionary pressure to fix maladaptive spandrels (non-selected traits) when it's possible.  So what could this Trauma associated adaptation be?  Well, many of the things we learned in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness were inherently unpleasant.  Learning social rules involved experiencing various kinds of disapproval from tribe-mates, parents, and peers.  As a child, the cost of not learning a particular social rule was mockery and rejection by peers and punishment by parents and older tribe-mates.  We're remarkably conformistic, so ...

  Let us start from a position of ontological agnosticism and absolute skepticism. In this spirit, we are not going to make the assumption that the defining ontological assumptions of the two metaphysical systems that we are going to examine -- objective idealism and materialism -- are internally coherent enough in their implications to be consistent with the existence of any possible world. We will endeavor to regard our preferred ontology not as the fleshed-out world-picture that we have come to attach to the set of ontological commitments that constitute its minimal definition, but purely as a list of ontological commitments that we will logically examine in a first-principles manner with the goal of determining whether or not it allows for the properties that our fleshed-out world-picture must have. As a part of this skeptical exercise, I ask the reader to temporarily suspend their belief that their preferred set of ontological commitments is identical to - or even logically ...

  If the world is one vast gestalt qualia computer and, as Hoffman demonstrated with his evolutionary game theory simulations, the material world that we take as objectively real is just an evolved user interface representing fitness payoffs in the most actionable manner possible - something plays the same role relative to the qualia computing occurring in basement level reality as Windows or iOS plays in regard to the processing occurring in the countless logic gates that constitute the causal basis of the operating system - then what are all the biochemical processes that constitute the body and influence the mind? Gestalt qualia computation in drag. Biomolecular interactions are what the causal structure of gestalt qualia computation looks like when rendered in three dimensional space, as discrete objects with identifiable spatial boundaries. Its patterns and regularities are just partial isomorphisms (pattern overlaps) with much more sophisticated patterns occurring at the leve...

Take a moment to reflect on what reality would be like without similarity. Reality would be composed of absolutely unique qualitative identities with nothing at all linking them together into categories or types.  You would be unable to experience a headache at the internal imponderability of such a reality, because the similarity between distinct low-valence qualities that we label pain simply would not exist to unite distinct pain qualia into a single coherent self-similar sensation.   Indeed, there would be very little left that's familiar:  Quale types, valence types, and form types simply would not exist. It would be a universe with no possibility of general terms and concepts, because absolutely everything in existence would have a completely unique and non-overlapping identity. And thus, it would be a universe about which we could have no knowledge, because concepts are contingent upon the existence of similarities between forms and between qualia that they ca...

I'm beginning to suspect that conscious general intelligence works because it speaks the same qualitative language as the ontological substrate of reality. If this is true, we aren't going to see general intelligence out of zombies with remotely the same adaptability, nor with remotely the same solution efficiency as we see in gestalt qualia computers. Conscious minds have direct ontological access to the underlying qualitative dynamics of reality, along with countless qualitative and form universals that have intrinsic computational properties that are optimally suited to solve problems generated by the very same qualitative dynamics and universals. In a universe in which causality is always mediated by intrinsic quality - pain repelling, pleasure attracting, etc -  it would follow that blindness to all form and quality deprives us of a first principles understanding of reality, which is necessary to "pilot it into the most ideal regions of possibility space" in the ...