> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matt Mahoney [mailto:[email protected]]
> 
> Brier also seems mystified by phenomenal consciousness (qualia). Do you
> have any comments on my previous post where I explained why we evolved
> to believe that such a thing exists? Do you understand or agree with my
> explanation of how this belief works?
> 

Well, I assume some possibility of it being true. There are some issues when 
you talk about Wolpert's theorem related to self-modelling and self-reflection. 
These can be done fuzzily or probabilistically or neutrosoficly... Also with 
consciousness really I don't see who's talking about breaking the laws of 
physics. And your reference to a soul is rather off I would say, I won't 
elaborate there.

Your description of the illusion of free will and the encoded belief, I can 
lend *some* credence yet many things can arise out of belief especially on an 
evolutionary time-scale. Beliefs cause something to come out of nothing. That's 
part of the reason why I was throwing around ideas related to system to system 
interconnectedness built out of belief relationships like the DIS freeways and 
gnorspic functions. I'm more of an engineer looking for tools to build stuff, 
like when you search for software libraries and components to assemble a larger 
application. I don't think algorithmic information theory alone gives us all 
the tools. And I don't think we need to wait for a particular hypothesis to be 
proven or a theory to be popularly accepted to take action. For example if 
you're going to build consciousness in a virtual world do we need a proven 
theory of human consciousness? Or even for AGI. 

Building a type of consciousness that you describe might be a good exercise. It 
might be good enough for a simple robot or software agent but human 
consciousness is way more than that... You might be able to distill it down but 
you'd have to throw away much of the human systems complexity.

John




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