<mega snip> (a) Phenomenal awareness (experience inclusive of a self model) And (b) Psychological awareness (knowledge inclusive of a self model) <more snip>
Brent Meeker wrote: > Maybe...with some more explication. You're saying that phenomenal awareness (a) is perception that > includes a model of oneself as the percipient. (a) _may_ include phenomenal depiction of self. 'Self' is also implicit in the location of the experiencer within the phenomenal depiction - eg your vision feels like it's generated by your eyes - in reality you're 'being' an occipital lobe persiscope. The periscope effect centres the visual field apparent locus at your eyeballs. Imagine your own visual field depicting you from your dog's perspective. Imagine your own visual field with everything in it except your own body (look in a mirror - you are not there are you a vampire? :-) ). These 'self' aspects are optional implicit/explicit constructs in your visual phenomenal life. They are, in effect, collections of intrinsic knowledge... knowledge that is 'known' through the act of experiencing it. The presence or absence of 'self' in this knowledge is moot. >But I don't see what (b) is?...knowing you're six foot tall and live in California? Yes... but in the way that you 'know' an old phone number... no experience until recall, and an ability to use the number on recall - to behave in response to the holding of that knowledge. > Have you read any of John McCarthy's > essays (see his website) on making a conscious robot? My main goal in life is Artifical General Intelligence. Making a concious robot is entirely what I am about. I know John McCarthy's stuff. He's one of my AI heroes. BUT....He has the traditional computationalist/functionalist/eliminativist views "if it look like an X, acts like an X then it must be experiencing what X's experience". WRONG. Like all computer scientists J McC forgets that the physics of phenomenal consciousness (a) does not exist as a body of knowledge. Nobody can make a scientifically justified statement as to the causal basis or predict the actual experiential life of a rock, computer, scientist, the internet or anything else. Computer science is particularly deluded that real artifical general intelligence (AGI) can arise without the role of the AGI's phenomenal life being sorted definitively. > If a robot knows where it is (say via GPS) and > senses its surroundigs > (say by IR cameras) then it's got consciousness (a). No. There is no phenomenal (visual) field here. There are photons hitting a semiconductor array. Outer electron shells being perturbed, causing a cascade of electronic causality within which a deductive electronic analysis is enacted based on a-priori rules. Similarly, in a real retina the photons cause a protein isomerisation and a different electrical causality cascade (an action potential pulse train)...this too has nothing directly to do with the generation of the visual experience - which happens elsewhere in cortex. Whatever the physics of biology has that generates a visual experience in brain material - that physics is justifyably proven absent in the discussed robot electronics. Not even close! There may be experiential content, but whether this is even remotely like a visual experience science cannot say. It could be the experience of a hot silicon rock. If not, why not? If so, why so? > If it also knows it weighs 5000lbs and has > enough fuel to go 200miles it's got consciousness (b) Side note: I'd say (b) was not consciousness at all. Nevertheless.... Experiencing something proportional to weight is (a) _but_ Behaving because you have data corresponding to weight is (b) > (I'm not just making these up - they're things > a vehicle in the DARPA challenge would have). > > Now suppose that it also has a memory of what obstacles it crossed in the past and which ones it > failed to cross; and when it detects a new obstacle it uses this memory to decide whether to go around or not. > What kind of consciousness is that? (b) = it's just a bunch of learning rules installed based on the a-priori knowledge of beings who used phenomenal experience (a) to create the rules, abstract them and make a type (b) zombie-critter live by them. --------------- The existence and use of phenomenal fields is no natural and omnipresent in humans it's hard to see them even though it's all there is to see. They are seeing! Close your eyes. Your visual phenomenal field is radically altered (assuming you have eyelids!). Imagine you had 'eyelids' on your entire body surface touch-field (this field is actually generated in your anterior parietal lobe or was it posterior frontal...no matter).... You would go numb all over when you 'closed' them. The subtlety with (a) consciousness is, I think, it's actual role in biological critters that combine (a) and (b) or more specifically use (a) to generate (b). (a) was clearly found necessary by evolution or we wouldn't have it. So what role has it got? My guess is that in providing the source of all derived knowledge (b), it actually serves the purpose of handling novelty. Generate all the rules you want... unless you have rules for handling arbitrary levels of novelty your critter is going to eventually crash and burn. Symbolic grounding... that's why I think (a) was found so compelling by evolution. No amount of abstracted (as-if) computation can replicate the 'natural world' computation of (a) consciousness. IMO (a) consciousness is raw physics-as-computation and it's application in the construction of 'self' is just an option commensurate to its need. You only need a model of self to behave intelligently in relation to self - a survival imperative. I can imagine a servile AGI that had a radically complex phenomenal life (say one that experiences neutrinos directly) but almost no explicit self model. I'm not sure how useful it would be, but it seems very possible. cheers colin hales --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
