On Jul 25, 1:57 pm, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > On 25 Jul 2011, at 15:23, Craig Weinberg wrote:
> > If they can only function for a few minutes, then that function may > > not be 'normal' to anything except us as distantly removed observers. > > This like saying that a plane which crashes at 10 pm, was not really > flying before. > That a car which would break at 120 km/h is not really riding when at > 100 km/h. Not exactly. I'm saying that a plane that is crashing might be a sign that the engines don't work. If it's an experimental plane that has never flown before, it might be a sign that the theory of behind the design can never work. If you copy the shape of a plane and observe that the turbines spin because the plane is going fast through the air, you might assume that the plane doesn't need engines at all and build a plane with to drop from 30,000 feet and assume that it's going to fly. > You assume, or talk like if you were assuming that the level is > infinitely low. Is the substitution level of fire infinitely low? Think of consciousness like fire. It's a potential that already exists in many materials under specific conditions but it cannot be emulated by itself. The whole premise of a substitution level for consciousness is presuming something that I reject, because I see that awareness cannot be anything other than an inherent potential of all physical phenomena, so it's just a matter of deciding how closely you want that awareness to be to our own. You might be able to synthesize emotion- level experiences on silicon, but I have no reason to assume that. Instead I see that thought is relatively easy to mimic with 3-p a- signifying symbol manipulations, whereas understanding and feeling cannot be accessed symbolically because they are 1p phenomena which do not arise from a function, but are the interior sense of a physical material. > Indeed, only in that case you can affirm systemically > (for blocking the consequences of the thought experience) that "there > may be a lot more input which we have no way to understand from our > perceptual distance which gets amputated". > To make the level infinitely low, is a way to introduce an infinite > complexity, which, if well chosen can contradict the "natural" > infinities we get from the computationalist assumption. The "well > chosen" can be very complex. You might need to diagonalize against the > whole of computer science. > > All that for not bringing a steak to my sun in law who survived some > fatal brain cancer with a computer? Haha. It's not that the level is infinitely low, it's that there is no level. Everything from chlorophyll to starfish to Britney Spears has the same essential ability to be what it is and sense what it is to be that thing. A computer is no different, except that the software you impose on it is not it's own software so it has no idea that it's normal routines are being hijacked for a purpose it can never understand. It doesn't mean you can't run a simulation of Britney Spears on a chip, and it may fool everyone including Britney Spears and your son in law, but to the chip, it has no idea what Britney Spears is. Craig -- 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.
