----- Have received the following content ----- Sender: Roger Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-17, 10:03:03 Subject: Re: Re: Severe limitations of a computer as a brain model
Hi Craig Weinberg Bruno Marchal's Comment below on the possibility of digitally dealing with subjective experience has put a hold on my previous objections (such as you discuss at the bottom). BRUNO'S COMMENT __________________________________________________________________________ From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-15, 04:17:20 Subject: Re: Imprisoned by language (code) <SNIP> No problem for comp here. We have discovered that machine, when looking inward tend to perceive, or experience many truth which are beyond words. There is a logic (S4Grz) which formalize at the meta-level that non-formalizable (at the ontological level) informal process of though. I wrote (and published) recently a paper on this, (the mystical machine, in french) but it is what I try to explain here since a long time. Machines have already a non formalizable (by themselves) intuition. Indeed self-referentally correct machine have a rich, neoplatonist-like, theology. On my url front page, you can download my paper on an arithmetical interpretation of Plotinus, made possible (and necessary in some sense) by computer science. Bruno Roger , [email protected] 8/17/2012 Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so everything could function." ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-14, 21:13:06 Subject: Re: Severe limitations of a computer as a brain model On Saturday, August 11, 2012 3:01:41 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: Roger, You say computers are quantitative instruments which cannot have a self or feelings, but might you be attributing things at the wrong level? For example, a computer can simulate some particle interactions, a sufficiently big computer could simulate the behavior of any arbitrarily large amount of matter. The matter in the simulation could be arranged in the form of a human being sitting in a room. Does that mean that if I carefully scooped some salt or iron filings into a cymatic pattern, that we should have an expectation of a sound being produced automatically? Do you think this simulated human made of simulated matter, all run within the computer not have a self, feelings, and intuition? The simulated human won't even have an 'it'-ness. The simulation only exists for us because it is designed specifically to exploit our expectations. There is no simulation, just millions of little salt scoopers. After all, we are made up of material which lacks feelings, nonetheless, we have feelings. That's like saying that a photograph is made up of pixels which lack image. Since the nature of consciousness is privacy, we are not the best judge of non-human consciousness. There is no reason to trust our naive realism in assuming that non-humans lack proto-feelings. "Complex behavior is not confined to metazoans. Both amoebae and ciliates show purposive coordinated behaviour, as do individual human cells, such as macrophages. The multi-nucleate slime mould Physarum polycephalum can solve shortest path mazes and demonstrate a memory of a rhythmic series of stimuli, apparently using a biological clock to predict the next pulse (Nakagaki et. al. 2000, Ball 2008)." - http://www.dhushara.com/cosfcos/cosfcos2.html Where do you believe these feelings originate? Feelings may not originate, but like the colors of the spectrum are accessed privately but have no public origination. As long as we assume that experience is something which occurs as the product of a mechanism, then we are limited to making sense of the universe as a meaningless mechanism of objects. If we think of time and space as the experiential cancellations, I think we have a better chance of understanding how it all fits together. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/rfpVcQ4KDaEJ. 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. -- 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.
