On 7/28/2011 12:27 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 10:41 AM, Craig Weinberg
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Jul 28, 4:29 am, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> We have made the big discovery of the universal digital machine, and
> we do have good reason to find highly plausible that a brain is a
> biological universal machine.
I agree, but the brain is also more a lot more than that because it
hosts human experience. A machine cannot have an experience, it is the
container, it is that which is experienced, but it has no capacity to
experience anything as an abstract design. A silicon chip can
experience that machine, but it experiences it as a single large
molecule. Maybe we make a giant cell out of a mutant jellyfish and
superimpose the machine on that - then you get a different range of
possible experiences and sensitivities.
Materials don't have experiences, minds have experiences. I think you
have taken reductionism to an extreme, and are trying to explain
perceptions and thoughts in terms of the periodic table. If the
material is important to perceptions, you must show how the material
creates macroscopic effects which manifest as different behavior for
the mind. You would have to show that the words "I see yellow" bubble
up from effects of carbon to affect the evolution of the neural
network (since the utterance comes from neural signals). This seems
magical to me, and against what is known about neurology. Neurons are
known to be affected by other neurons, they are not not known to be
affected by neurons own feelings which stem from the feelings of the
atoms which compose them.
I think your hypothesis can be disproved by an argument from
information theory:
How many states can a carbon atom be in?
How many experiences can a human mind have?
The latter is much larger than the former. Therefore the feelings of
carbon atoms cannot be the explanation of human experience. If the
range of possibilities for some phenomenon is large, then that
phenomenon must be explained in terms of something having at least
that many states. You cannot say something with 1,000,000 possible
states is explained by something with only 5 possible states. Lets
only consider the human visual experience. Let's assume a person can
see roughly a million colors and a million pixels. This is equivalent
to 1,000,000^1,000,000 possible visual experiences. For this range of
experiences to be possible, there must be some physical system having
at least this many possible states. It won't come from something
small, unless you consider the combination of a large number of
individual components as one large state (but this is
anti-reudctionist). This leads to the idea that a mind or a
perception is a large structure of inter-related pieces, not
individual atoms or molecules.
> To assume the contrary leads to the need to introduce non Turing
> emulable element in the brain, and we have no clue at all if that
> exist, nor any clue why this would put any light on the mind-body
> problem.
I do have a clue that it exists. I am it. I live it. Yellow is not
Turing emulable and I can imagine yellow anytime I want.
Just because you don't know how the experience of yellow is emulated
doesn't mean it is not emulable.
Jason
--
Hi Jason,
I don't think that I have yet seen a better example of a straw man
than what you wrote here! Obviously the number of states of a carbon
atom is a much smaller number than the number of experiences that a
human mind can have. Why don't you compare apples to apples! Something
like the number of states of a human brain to the number of human
experiences. What ever the case, this argument of yours here is non
sequitur of Craig's point, but I think that Craig is not expressing his
ideas well in that post.
IT is one thing for a computation to emulate another if and only if
we can compare inputs to inputs and outputs to outputs, but in the case
of human consciousness we do not have a I/O system like we have for
computers so that we can establish the bisimilarity of the pair of
computations as a physical fact. My point is that since we cannot know
what computation we are (even if consciousness is computation) it
follows that we cannot make claims that imply that an emulation occurs.
We can only, to quote Bruno, "bet" that it is or is not.
Onward!
Stephen
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