Is it really possible to discuss reality and perception and experience and intelligence without consciousness?
We are discussing perception and something must perceive. I think that this is currently the crux of why most machine intelligence efforts fall short of being considered intelligence - there is nothing inside - no ego of any kind. I don’t subscribe to the soul but I do think that there must be a personal frame of experiential reference. I really can’t conceive of an intelligence without this.
The “meh” aspect is that for any agent that has this personal frame of reference it will be personal and not accessible. We can create artificial agents where we have considerable control of the relationship between the defined ego and the senses and even know that a second one will be identical to the first to the point where we can say that they have identical experiences but we human will never know what they experience.
In the example that I have given you allude to self reporting so different that comparing our attempts to self report deviate to the point where we know that something must be different.
Point taken.
How do I self report what my perception of a color looks like to me and what is your frame of reference to interpret that? I can use color patches to develop a continuum and similarity, I can certainly say that this color is almost the same as that one. I can’t say what that perception redness feels like in any what that allows you absolutely know that you are feeling the same thing. People have tried and failed.
Perhaps you are familiar with color calibration. It’s a big thing in painting and people spend a lot of effort in trying to make sure that what the customer sees and approves in the digital presentation is the same thing that will roll off the production line. In this case we can control the wavelengths emitted and the sensing on the calibration equipment. I have pages of color swaths and we use them in presentation. Even with all that - it is very hard to account for the perception differences in transmitted vs reflected light. The spectrum of the illumination is a huge factor. I work in quality control and getting two painted items to look the same in all lighting conditions is fiendishly difficult. If two items on the same machine look very different it can make the final product look cheap or defective. I do know that there are people that can see difference that I can’t. As the QC manager in my company I find these people to be very annoying.
It is only relatively recently that human self reporting and testing has closed in on Monochromacy, Dichromacy, Tetrachromacy, and Pentachromacy. This is just in the perception mechanism. We still really don’t have the tools to understand how these senses are registered in the brain.
If we are defining the precise vocabulary to create machine intelligence then precision in definition is absolutely correct and desirable.
If we are trying to apply those definitions to the human condition the current state of the art is not up to the task. There may come a time were we can capture the exact patterns that define our perception and transmit them to a brain where the individual whorls and wiring are different and know that we will still capture the red of redness but until that day my focus will stay closer to the utility of the consensus value as the most important parameter in humans.