On 16 Jan 2012, at 19:50, John Clark wrote:
On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>
wrote:
"So you believe that the theory according to which consciousness is
a gift by a creationist God is as bad as the theory according to
which consciousness is related to brain activity?"
If creationists could explain consciousness then I would be a
creationists, but they can not.
We agree on this.
Brain activity does not explain consciousness either.
But it addresses the problem, and the theory is not bad at all. The
theory is that brain has some role in consciousness. My point is that
a theory can be better than another one, even if it does not solve
completely the riddle.
A theory is not supposed to provide an answer. When a problem is
complex, we can be glad if a theory can help to formulate the problem.
That's what is nice with computationalism: it transforms the mind-body
problem into a body problem in arithmetic. It meta-explains also why
consciousness is felt as not entirely explainable.
I don't know how but I believe as certainly as I believe anything
that intelligence causes consciousness.
I agree, but we might not use the terms here in the exact same senses.
Intelligence and consciousness are almost identical notion, for me. I
use the term competence where you are using intelligence. Competence
can be partially evaluated. Intelligence cannot.
I have a simple theory of intelligence-in-a-large-sense:
A machine is intelligent if it is not stupid. And
a machine is stupid in two circumstances, when she asserts that she is
intelligent, or when she asserts that she is stupid.
(it can be shown that a machine which asserts that she is stupid is
slightly less stupid than the one which asserts its intelligence).
Those recursive definition of intelligence admits arithmetical
interpretations. They make sense. But this should not been taken too
much literally: you might become stupid by doing so!
I believe this not because I can prove it but because I simply could
not function if I thought I was the only conscious being in the
universe.
I don't see the relation with what you say above. Someone can believe
that consciousness is not required for all forms of intelligence, but
only for more special sort of intelligence.
" the quanta does not exist primitively but emerge, in the comp
case, from number relations."
What sort of numbers, computable numbers or the far more common non-
computable numbers? And what sort of relations.?
All the numbers I talk about are natural numbers (and thus computable,
by the constant programs). The others are represented by functions
from N to N.
The quanta emerges from the computational relations going through my
actual computational states. "actual" is defined by the self-
referential tools provided in arithmetic/computer science (mainly
discovered by Gödel 1931). This should follow easily from UDA step1-7.
"This means that indeed we can write simple program leading to
intelligence"
I don't know what that simple program could be, but I have already
given a example of a simple program leading to emotion.
OK. I gave you other samples, too.
"My whole point is that intelligence is not a constructive concept,
like consciousness you cannot define it."
Intelligence is problem solving; not a perfect definition by any
means but far far better than any known definition of consciousness.
That is not intelligence, but competence. In that case, it can be
shown that there are no universal problem solver, and that the problem
solving abilities can be put on a lattice type of partial order. So,
some machine can be very competent for some (large) class of problems,
and utterly incompetent for other (large) class of problems.
Case and Smith have shown that if you allow an inductive inference
machine to say enough bulshit, and to change infinitely often its mind
on working theories (!), then they give rise to universal problem
solving strategies. Harrington showed that such machine are
necessarily only theoretical, yet the principles in play might have a
role in long computations, like evolution might illustrate.
Examples are better than definitions anyway, intelligence is what
Einstein did
This will not help a lot.
and consciousness is what I am.
This is too short, and literally untrue, or unclear. Consciousness is
what many different people are, then, yet consciousness might be
unique or not (open problem in the mechanist theory).
But defining consciousness by the mental state of any machine having
self-developed some belief in some reality, can explain why machines
are puzzled by consciousness, why machine cannot define it, and at the
same time cannot ignore precisely what it is. Above all, it explains
where the quanta comes from, including the laws to which they have to
obey, making it into a refutable (scientific) theory.
It also gives a role of consciousness: to speed up the reaction of
person relatively to their most probable computation(s). Such theory
suggests also that consciousness has been relatively and locally
incarnated by self-moving creatures, to accelerate the anticipation on
the dynamical environment (due to self-moving). The theory explains
also why consciousness is lived as an immediate self-integration. It
shows also why quale logic extends quantum logic.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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