To add some clarification, I do not think spreading Alice's logic gates across a field and allowing cosmic rays to cause each gate to perform the same computations that they would had they existed in her functioning brain would be conscious. I think this because in isolation the logic gates are not computing anything complex, only AND, OR, NAND operations, etc. This is why I believe rocks are not conscious, the collisions of their molecules may be performing simple computations, but they are never aggregated into complex patterns to compute over a large set of information. Jason
On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 12:50 PM, Jason Resch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 5:59 AM, Bruno Marchal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> >> >> Does everyone accept, like Russell, that, assuming COMP and MAT, Alice >> is not a zombie? I mean, is there someone who object? Remember we are >> proving implication/ MAT+MECH => <something>. We never try to argue >> about that <something> per se. Eventually we hope to prove MAT+MECH => >> false, that is NOT(MAT & MECH) which is equivalent to MAT implies NOT >> MECH, MECH => NOT MAT, etc. >> >> (by MAT i mean materialism, or naturalism, or physicalism or more >> generally "the physical supervenience thesis", according to which >> consciousness supervenes on the physical activity of the brain. >> > > Bruno, I am on the fence as to whether or not Alice is a Zombie. The > argument for her not being conscious is related to the non causal effect of > information in this scenario. A string of 1's and 0's which is simply > defined out of nowhere, in my opinion cannot contain conscious observers, > even if it could be considered to encode brain states conscious observers or > a universe with conscious observers. To have meaningful information there > must be relations between objects, such as the flow of information in the > succession of states in a Turing machine. In the case of Alice, the > information coming from the cosmic rays is meaningless, and might as well > have occurred in isolation. If all of Alice's logic gates had been spread > over a field, and made to fire in the same way due to cosmic rays and if all > logic gates remained otherwise disconnected from each other, would anyone > consider this field of logic gates be conscious? > > I have an idea that consciousness is related to hierarchies of information, > at the lowest levels of neural activity, simple computations of small > amounts of information combine information into a result, and then these > higher level results are passed up to higher levels of processing, etc. For > example the red/green/blue data from the eyes are combined into single > pixels, these pixels are combined into an field of colors, this field of > colors is then processed by object classification sections of the brain. So > my argument that Alice might not be conscious would be related to the > skipping of steps through the injection of information which is "empty" (not > having been computed from lower level sets of information and hence not > actually conveying any information). > > Jason > > ) I do not believe is > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
