On Thu, Sep 21, 2023 at 3:00 PM Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
> *By its own definitions IIT is not falsifiable, for it proclaims that a > computer program that gave identical behavior in all situations to another > conscious system, would not be conscious. But since it has identical > behavior there is no objective way to prove this assertion of IIT (that one > system is conscious while the other is not).* > Exactly, and that's why I can't prove that IIT is wrong but I can prove it's a silly theory. *> So is it pseudoscience? I don't know if I would call it that * I would. *> This also implies the possibility of philosophical zombies (which IIT > proponents freely admit), which also implies consciousness is > epiphenomenonal,* > If Darwin is right, and I think he is, then consciousness must be epiphenomenal, a side effect of intelligence, because random mutation and natural selection cannot detect consciousness and yet it managed to produce it at least once (in me) and probably many billions of times, and the only reason it was able to do that is because Evolution COULD detect intelligent behavior. It also implies that either philosophical zombies are impossible or it would be easier to make a conscious Artificial Intelligence than an Artificial Intelligence that was not conscious. So if you observe a computer behaving intelligently your default position should be that it's conscious, which is the exact same position we take when we observe one of our fellow human beings behaving intelligently. *> I do find some strengths in some of the ideas that have come out of it, > in particular how a system must be capable of affecting itself for it to be > aware of its consciousness.* > It's pretty obvious that being able to affect yourself is a necessary condition for consciousness, but is it sufficient? A thermostat can affect itself but .... * > I also think it is right to put the focus on information.* > That is also pretty obvious, I don't need to read an ITT paper to know that. *> I think where it errs is in confusing a logical-informational state with > a instantaneous physical state. This leads to the mistaken belief that a > parallel computation is more conscious than a serial computation, even when > they compute the exact same function* > I strongly agree with you about that. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> gms wen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0h9pF-y3%3DkEgbpmzjrZfu1H1hnP3qExyE4b28iE-fyEQ%40mail.gmail.com.
