On Wed, 24 May 2023 at 15:37, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> 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
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).
The replaced part must of course be functionally identical, otherwise
both the behaviour and the qualia could change. But this does not mean
that it must replicate the functional organisation at a particular
scale. If a volume of brain tissue is removed, in order to guarantee
identical behaviour the replacement part must interact at the cut
surfaces of the surrounding tissue in the same way as the original. It
is at these surfaces that the interactions must be sufficiently
fine-grained, but what goes inside the volume doesn't matter: it could
be conventional simulation of neurons, it could be a giant lookup
table. Also, the volume could be any size, and could comprise an
arbitrarily large proportion of the subject.
