On 15 Jan 2012, at 19:33, John Clark wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> wrote:
> If computationalism argues that zombies can't exist, therefore
anything that we cannot distinguish from a conscious person must be
conscious, that also means that it is impossible to create something
that acts like a person which is not a person. Zombies are not
Turing emulable.
Maybe. Zombie behavior is certainly Turing emulable but you are
asking more than that and there is no way to prove what you want to
know because it hinges on one important question: how can you tell
if a zombie is a zombie? Brains are not my favorite meal but I don't
think dietary preference or even unsightly skin blemishes are a good
test for consciousness; I believe zombies have little if any
consciousness because, at least as depicted in the movies, zombies
act really really dumb. But maybe the film industry is inflicting an
unfair stereotype on a persecuted minority and there are good hard
working zombies out there who you don't hear about that write love
poetry and teach at Harvard, if so then I think those zombies are
conscious even if I would still find a polite excuse to decline
their invitation to dinner.
> This to me reveals an absurdity of arithmetic realism. Pinocchio
the boy is possible to simulate mechanically, but Pinocchio the
puppet is impossible. Doesn't that strike anyone else as an obvious
deal breaker?
I find nothing absurd about that and neither did Evolution. The
parts of our brain that so dramatically separate us from other
animals, the parts that deal with language and long term planing and
mathematics took HUNDREDS of times longer to evolve than the parts
responsible for intense emotion like pleasure, pain, fear, hate,
jealousy and love. And why do you think it is that in this group and
elsewhere everybody and their brother is pushing their own General
Theory of Consciousness but nobody even attempts a General Theory
of Intelligence?
There are general theory of learning, like those of Case and Smith,
Blum, Osherson, etc. But they are necessarily non constructive. They
are not usable neither for building AI, nor for verifying if something
is intelligent. It shows that Intelligence (competence) is an
intrinsic hard subject with many non-comparable degrees of intelligence.
Intelligence is not programmable. It is only self-programmable, and it
interests nobody, except philosophers and theologians. When machine
will be intelligent, we will send them in camps or jails. Intelligence
leads to dissidence. We pretend appreciating intelligence, but we
invest a lost in preventing it, in both children and machine.
The reason is that theorizing about the one is easy but theorizing
about the other is hard, hellishly hard, and because when
intelligence theories fail they fail with a loud thud that is
obvious to all, but one consciousness theory works as well, or as
badly, as any other.
See the work of Case and Smith. It is not well know because it is
based on theoretical computer science (recursion theory) which is not
well known. Those are definite interesting result there, even if not
applicable. The "non-union theorem" of Blum shows that there is
something uncomputably much more intelligent than a machine: a couple
of machine. The theory is super-non-linear.
Consciousness theories are easy because there are no facts they need
to explain,
What? With comp, not only you have to explain the qualia, but it has
been proved that you have to explain the quanta as well, and this
without assuming a physical reality.
but there is an astronomical number of things that need to be
explained to understand how intelligence works.
Not really. It is just that intelligent things organize themselves in
non predictable way, at all. The basic are simple (addition and
multiplication) but the consequences are not boundable.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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