On 01 Jan 2012, at 01:23, meekerdb wrote:
On 12/31/2011 3:35 PM, Pierz wrote:
When you write things like that I'm left with the impression that
you think one's
consciousness is a thing, a soul, that moves to different bundles
of computation so there
are some bundles that don't have any consciousness but could have
if you "jumped to them".
Not to wish to pre-empt Bruno's reply, but I think you're mixing up
1-
p and 3-p. From 3-p, all branches are conscious, but I only
experience
myself on one branch at a time, probabilistically according to the
measure of computations. There's no individual soul, just in one
sense
a single consciousness that experiences every possible state.
As for Mars Rover I'm curious to know this: If we programmed it to
avoid danger, would it experience fear?
If we programmed it to sacrifice other important values (like
conserving power, or keeping all its parts) I'd speculate that it,
in some sense, "felt fear".
Until we understand the
qualia, you're as in the dark as we are on this question. You assume
the affirmative, we assume the negative. That's why I sigh. Such
arguments go nowhere but a reassertion of our biases/intuitions, and
the result is unedifying.
And that's why I think questions of consciousness will ultimately be
overtaken-by-events. The interesting questions will be how danger
is recognized and avoided, how relations to others are managed,
etc. And we will probably talk about them as if the AI is conscious
just by analogy to ourselves while at a lower level we know which
module is doing what and how changing it will change behavior. But
nobody will ask "where's the consciousness" any more than they ask
"where's the vis viva" of their automobile.
I disagree. The vis viva is really useless. Consciousness exists, and
it has a fundamental role in the handling of highly complex self-
referential relations, some of them being responsible for the
selection of physical realities. Consciousness is somehow the mother
of all qualia, including the sharable quanta. That comes from the
ontological reversal. You don't need anything magic, just the ability
of some numbers to infer the existence of anything. Consciousness can
be approximated by the first person true belief in something. It is
somehow the zeroth "mystical state", but we are blase because without
it, there would be no knowledge at all, nor even any "physical
reality": just third person truth about numbers/finite things.
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.
