On 5/23/2023 10:37 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Wed, May 24, 2023, 1:15 AM Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com>
wrote:
On Wed, 24 May 2023 at 04:03, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com>
wrote:
On Tue, May 23, 2023 at 7:15 AM Stathis Papaioannou
<stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, 23 May 2023 at 21:09, Jason Resch
<jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
As I see this thread, Terren and Stathis are both
talking past each other. Please either of you correct
me if i am wrong, but in an effort to clarify and
perhaps resolve this situation:
I believe Stathis is saying the functional
substitution having the same fine-grained causal
organization *would* have the same phenomenology, the
same experience, and the same qualia as the brain with
the same fine-grained causal organization.
Therefore, there is no disagreement between your
positions with regards to symbols groundings,
mappings, etc.
When you both discuss the problem of symbology, or
bits, etc. I believe this is partly responsible for
why you are both talking past each other, because
there are many levels involved in brains (and
computational systems). I believe you were discussing
completely different levels in the hierarchical
organization.
There are high-level parts of minds, such as ideas,
thoughts, feelings, quale, etc. and there are
low-level, be they neurons, neurotransmitters, atoms,
quantum fields, and laws of physics as in human
brains, or circuits, logic gates, bits, and
instructions as in computers.
I think when Terren mentions a "symbol for the smell
of grandmother's kitchen" (GMK) the trouble is we are
crossing a myriad of levels. The quale or idea or
memory of the smell of GMK is a very high-level
feature of a mind. When Terren asks for or discusses a
symbol for it, a complete answer/description for it
can only be supplied in terms of a vast amount of
information concerning low level structures, be they
patterns of neuron firings, or patterns of bits being
processed. When we consider things down at this low
level, however, we lose all context for what the
meaning, idea, and quale are or where or how they come
in. We cannot see or find the idea of GMK in any
neuron, no more than we can see or find it in any neuron.
Of course then it should seem deeply mysterious, if
not impossible, how we get "it" (GMK or otherwise)
from "bit", but to me, this is no greater a leap from
how we get "it" from a bunch of cells squirting ions
back and forth. Trying to understand a smartphone by
looking at the flows of electrons is a similar kind of
problem, it would seem just as difficult or impossible
to explain and understand the high-level features and
complexity out of the low-level simplicity.
This is why it's crucial to bear in mind and
explicitly discuss the level one is operation on when
one discusses symbols, substrates, or quale. In
summary, I think a chief reason you have been talking
past each other is because you are each operating on
different assumed levels.
Please correct me if you believe I am mistaken and
know I only offer my perspective in the hope it might
help the conversation.
I think you’ve captured my position. But in addition I
think replicating the fine-grained causal organisation is
not necessary in order to replicate higher level phenomena
such as GMK. By extension of Chalmers’ substitution
experiment,
Note that Chalmers's argument is based on assuming the
functional substitution occurs at a certain level of
fine-grained-ness. If you lose this step, and look at only the
top-most input-output of the mind as black box, then you can
no longer distinguish a rock from a dreaming person, nor a
calculator computing 2+3 and a human computing 2+3, and one
also runs into the Blockhead "lookup table" argument against
functionalism.
Yes, those are perhaps problems with functionalism. But a major
point in Chalmers' argument is that if qualia were
substrate-specific (hence, functionalism false) it would be
possible to make a partial zombie or an entity whose consciousness
and behaviour diverged from the point the substitution was made.
And this argument works not just by replacing the neurons with
silicon chips, but by replacing any part of the human with
anything that reproduces the interactions with the remaining parts.
How deeply do you have to go when you consider or define those "other
parts" though? That seems to be a critical but unstated assumption,
and something that depends on how finely grained you consider the
relevant/important parts of a brain to be.
For reference, this is what Chalmers says:
"In this paper I defend this view. Specifically, I defend a principle
of organizational invariance, holding that experience is invariant
across systems with the same fine-grained functional organization.
More precisely, the principle states that given any system that has
conscious experiences, then any system that has the same functional
organization at a fine enough grain will have qualitatively identical
conscious experiences. A full specification of a system's fine-grained
functional organization will fully determine any conscious experiences
that arise."
https://consc.net/papers/qualia.html
But this is literally false, unless one also specify that the system
exists within, or includes, what one refers to as "its environment".
Experience begins with perception and perception implies things to perceive.
Brent
By substituting a fine-grained functional organization for a
coarse-grained one, you change the functional definition and can no
longer guarantee identical experiences, nor identical behaviors in all
possible situations. They're no longer"functional isomorphs" as
Chalmers's argument requires.
By substituting a recording of a computation for a computation, you
replace a conscious mind with a tape recording of the prior behavior
of a conscious mind. This is what happens in the Blockhead thought
experiment. The result is something that passes a Turing test, but
which is itself not conscious (though creating such a recording
requires prior invocation of a conscious mind or extraordinary luck).
Jason
Accordingly, I think intermediate steps and the fine-grained
organization are important (to some minimum level of fidelity)
but as Bruno would say, we can never be certain what this
necessary substitution level is. Is it neocortical columns, is
it the connectome, is it the proteome, is it the molecules and
atoms, is it QFT? Chalmers argues that at least at the level
where noise introduces deviations in a brain simulation,
simulating lower levels should not be necessary, as human
consciousness appears robust to such noise at low levels
(photon strikes, brownian motion, quantum uncertainties, etc.)
--
Stathis Papaioannou
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