On 20 Apr 2009, at 14:50, Brent Meeker wrote:
> > Jason Resch wrote: >> I think in regards to conscious, you can't have one without the >> other. >> Both information and computation are needed, as the computation >> imparts meaning to the information, and the information accumulates >> meaning making each computation and its result more meaningful. >> >> If I sent you an arbitrary binary string, it would have no meaning >> unless you either knew in advance how to interpret it or how it was >> produced. Either interpretation or understanding of how it was >> produced can be described with computer programs, but without that >> foreknowledge the binary string is meaningless because there would be >> an infinite number of ways to interpret that string. >> >> To understand how information "accumulates" through successive a >> computations, consider how today's most common processors can only >> consider 32-bit numbers at a time, yet like any Turing machine they >> are nonetheless capable of performing any computation, including >> those >> involving numbers much larger than can be expressed in 32-bits. >> >> Consider what the neurons do (at least artificial ones), essentially >> they only multiply and add (multiply the strength of a received >> signal >> by the connection strength, then sum the received signals to >> determine >> if they met the threshold to fire). At a low level the additions >> might correspond to the intensity of one color for one pixel in a >> visual field, say the brightness of red. Another neuron might then >> sum the intensities of red, green, and blue colors to arrive at a >> color for that pixel, while another one aggregates a collection of >> those results into a field of colors. Finally this field of colors >> might be processed by an object identification part of the neural >> network to identify objects. Whether or not an object is identified >> as a cat or a dog, might ultimately be determined by the firing of >> just one neuron, yet at every stage the same basic computation is >> done >> (multiplication and addition). The only difference is the >> consequence >> of the computation at each stage; how it is ultimately interpreted by >> the next level. >> >> So the question comes down to where does the consciousness lie: >> during >> the computation of information, the computed result, or in the >> computations upon the computed results. Maybe it requires a loop of >> such hierarchies as Douglas Hofstadter suggests. I don't have an >> answer but it is something I too wonder about. >> >> Jason >> > > I think "meaning" ultimately must be grounded in action. That's why > it's hard to see where the meaning lies in a computation, something > that > is just the manipulation of strings. People tend to say the meaning > is > in the interpretation, noting that the same string of 1s and 0s can > have > different interpretations. But what constitutes interpretation? I > think it is interaction with the world. If you say, "What's a cat?" > and I point and say, "That." then I've interpreted "cat" (perhaps > wrongly if I point to a dog). A computation is a sequence of numbers (or of strings, or of combinators, etc.) as resulting by an interpretation. For such an interpretation, you don't need a "world", only an "interpreter" that is a universal system, like elementary arithmetic for example. If you invoke a world you will run in the usual "physical supervenience" trouble. If you abstract from the interpreter you run into the confusion between a computation and a description of a computation. It is useful to fix once and for all the universal system. Then a computation can then be defined by a sequence of numbers, but there is a implicit universal system behind. The concept of information could be a little too much quantitative and static in this setting, and plays probably a bigger role in the notion of the content of specific consciousness experiences. The key notion to define "computation" if the notion of Universal system or machine. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---