And there is no mystery: even a machine as dumb as a theorem prover can discover that difference which (if I'm correct) is related to the inescapable difference, discovered by Godel, between proof (which concerne 3-person description ) and truth (which really is a pure 1 person notion), as I have try a little bit to explain yesterday (the difference of logic between Bp and Bp & p)
Bruno
Le 18-mai-05, � 08:26, Stathis Papaioannou a �crit :
I was using the term "information" loosely, to include what is commonly termed qualia, subjective experience etc. I agree that if a physical system is fully specified, then that is all you need in order to duplicate or emulate the system. The new system will do everything the original one did, including have conscious experiences. It's worth stressing this point again: you don't need any special, non-physical information to emulate or duplicate a conscious system; you don't need God to provide it with a soul, you don't need to purchase a mind-body interface kit, you don't need to meditate and wave quartz crystals around, and you don't need to have 1st person knowledge of its subjective experiences. All you need is a few kilograms of raw materials, a molecular assembler mechanism, and the data which indicates where each bit goes. Once the job is finished, you automatically have a system which talks, eats, and is conscious. Psychology and biology have been reduced to physics and chemistry. Consciousness has been shown to be just be an emergent phenomenon in a particular type of biological computer. Agree so far? OK: having said all that, and assuming at this point that we know the position and function of every atom in this newly created system, I *still* would wonder what it feels like to actually *be* this system. My curiosity could only be satisfied if I were in fact the duplicated system myself; perhaps this could be achieved if I "became one" with the
new system by direct neural interface. I don't have to go to such lengths to learn about the new system's mass, volume, behaviour, or any other property, and in *this* consists the essential difference between 1st person and 3rd person experience. You can minimise it and say it doesn't really make much practical difference, but I don't think you can deny it.
--Stathis Papaioannou
From Lee Corbin: Jonathan contrasts descriptions and what the descriptions describe:
> > Stathis: Your post suggests to me a neat way to define what is special
> > about first person experience: it is the gap in information
> > between what can be known from a description of an object and
> > what can be known from being the object itself.
>
> But how can "being an object" provide any extra information? I don't see
> that information or knowledge has much to do with it. How can "being an
> apple" provide any extra information about the apple?
Let's remember some naive answers here. First, for a fixed physical object, there exist infinitely many descriptions. It's a common belief that beyond a certain amount of accuracy, differences don't really matter. For example, one ought to be quite happy to teleport even if there is one atomic error for every 10^20 atoms.
Second, a common interpretation of QM asserts that beyond a certain accuracy, there is *no* additional information to be had whatsoever. That is, that there exists some finite bit string that contains *all* an object's information (cf. Bekenstein bound).
Still, the naive answer is that a description (or even a set of descriptions) of a physical object is different from the physical object itself: a physical object is a process, and a set of descriptions is merely a set of bits frozen in time (and here we are back again, you know where).
However, I hold with these "naive" answers, as do a lot of people. And so therefore I proceed to answer the above question thusly: "Being an apple" provides *no* information beyond that which would be provided by a sufficiently rich description. Even if an emulation of a person appreciating the sublime, or agonizing to a truly horrific extent, or whatever----no information obtains anywhere that is not in principle available to the experimenters, i.e., available from the third-person.
You could make the experimenter *hurt*, and then say, "now you know what it feels like", and given today's techniques, that might very well be true. But this is only a limitation on what is known and knowable today; it says nothing about what might be knowable about a human subject of 20th century complexity to entities living a thousand years from now.
(We ignore the possible effects on the experimenter's value system, or possible effects on his incentives: we are just talking about information as bit-strings, here.)
> Obviously there is a difference between *an apple* and *a > description of an apple*, in the same way there is a difference > between *a person* and *a description of a person*, but the > difference is one of physical existence, not information.
Yeah, that's the way it seems to me too.
Lee
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