Hi Will,
It's not an easy thing to fully internalise the implications of quantum
degeneracy. I find physicists and chemists have no trouble accepting it,
but in the disciplines above that various levels of mental brick walls
are in place. Unfortunately physicists and chemists aren't usually asked
to create vision!... I inhabit an extreme multidisciplinary zone. This
kind of mental resistance comes with the territory. All I can say is
'resistance is futile, you will be assimilated' ... eventually. :-) It's
part of my job to enact the necessary advocacy. In respect of your
comments I can offer the following:
You are exactly right: humans don't encounter the world directly (naive
realism). Nor are we entirely operating from a cartoon visual
fantasy(naive solipsism). You are also exactly right in that vision is
not 'perfect'. It has more than just a level of indirectness in
representation, it can malfunction and be fooled - just as you say. In
the benchmark behaviour: scientific behaviour, we know scientists have
to enact procedures (all based around the behaviour called
'objectivity') which minimises the impact of these aspects of our
scientific observation system.
However, this has nothing to say about the need for an extra information
source. necessary for there is not enough information in the signals to
do the job. This is what you cannot see. It took me a long while to
discard the tendency to project my mental capacity into the job the
brain has when it encounters a retinal data stream. In vision processing
using computing we know the structure of the distal natural world. We
imagine the photon/CCD camera chip measurements to be the same as that
of the retina. It looks like a simple reconstruction job.
But it is not like that at all. It is impossible to tell, from the
signals in their natural state in the brain, whether they are about
vision or sound or smell. They all look the same. So I did not
completely reveal the extent of the retinal impact/visual scene
degeneracy in my post. The degeneracy operates on multiple levels.
Signal encoding into standardised action potentials is another level.
Maybe I can just paint a mental picture of the job the brain has to do.
Imagine this:
You have no phenomenal consciousness at all. Your internal life is of a
dreamless sleep.
Except ... for a new perceptual mode called Wision.
Looming in front of you embedded in a roughly hemispherical blackness is
a gigantic array of numbers.
The numbers change.
Now:
a) make a visual scene out of it representing the world outside: convert
Wision into Vision.
b) do this without any information other than the numbers in front of
you and without assuming you have any a-priori knowledge of the outside
world.
That is the job the brain has. Resist the attempt to project your own
knowledge into the circumstance. You will find the attempt futile.
Regards,
Colin
William Pearson wrote:
Hi Colin,
I'm not entirely sure that computers can implement consciousness. But
I don't find your arguments sway me one way or the other. A brief
reply follows.
2008/10/4 Colin Hales <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Next empirical fact:
(v) When you create a turing-COMP substrate the interface with space is
completely destroyed and replaced with the randomised machinations of the
matter of the computer manipulating a model of the distal world. All actual
relationships with the real distal external world are destroyed. In that
circumstance the COMP substrate is implementing the science of an encounter
with a model, not an encounter with the actual distal natural world.
No amount of computation can make up for that loss, because you are in a
circumstance of an intrinsically unknown distal natural world, (the novelty
of an act of scientific observation).
.
But humans don't encounter the world directly, else optical illusions
wouldn't exist, we would know exactly what was going on.
Take this site for example. http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/
It is impossible by physics to do vision perfectly without extra
information, but we do not do vision by any means perfectly, so I see
no need to posit an extra information source.
Will
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