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.
