On 08 Oct 2012, at 13:19, Roger Clough wrote:
Hi Bruno,
There are two different things,
1) a description of a living experience (publicly available to any
persons)
and
2) the living experience itself (only available personally, that is,
to a particular person.)
No problem with this. The first person indeterminacy is missed by
people missing that distinction.
To feel being in Washington instead of Moscow has to be a purely
personal living experience, only available by the copy in Washington,
as from outside the person is in both Washington, and Moscow.
It is easy to get these confused and I no doubt have sometimes
confused them myself.
Computers can deal with descriptions of experience (2), but not an
experience itself (1),
Only if you consider the reductive view of what is the computer.
because
a) as Leibniz says, perception of any kind must be a unity of the
many in
the one, just as in Plato's All.
No problem with this.
b) anything in code or symbolic form is a description, not an
experience.
Absolutely true. But irrelevant to claim that a computer cannot be
conscious. In the math part: this becomes a theorem, as the "soul" of
the machine is defined formally by the conjunction between the belief
of the machine, which admit a symbolic code, with truth, which is
provably not describable in the language of the machine, and it is
shown that the machine can be aware of this, and will also believe
that she is not a machine for that reason and experience, making comp
necessarily counter-intuitive for her, and seemingly false from the
machine point of view.
I think you have just decide that a machine cannot have a soul, as
*you* are confalting the amchine experience, and what happen in the
computer. Yet, with the simplest definition of Soul (from Theaetetus,
Plotinus and the mystics) machine have souls, and can have "spiritual
and non communicable mystical experience", indeed and consciousness,
by comp, is the simplest of those experience.
Also, the step 8 explicitly forbid to conflate the experience with
anything (be it mathematical or physical) third person describable. So
in many ways, the UDA and the AUDA illustrates the conflation mistake.
But machine can understand exactly that, and so your argument against
comp is not valid.
1) Anything written in words or code cannot be a living experience.
I agree completely.
2) One reason for this is that words are multiple, but
an experience (such as in the reading of the words) is unitary,
is the meaning of the many words as one. I now see
that this is what I meant by saying that consciousness
produces"order" out of chaos. It collapses the many into the one,
perhaps as Penrose envisions consciousness to be, the
collapse of the quantum form of the brain states into one
I agree, except Penrose believe that this is special to QM, but comp
shows it to be "banal" and explainable without the quantum.
I was just trying to formulate my view of subjectivity into
terms you use, like 1p, but I only seem to have confused things.
Apparently 1p is not the state of living subjectivity, at best it is
a description of that.
1p is *associated* (not identified!) to the personal memory. In UDA
it takes the form of the personal diary, which is annihilated together
with the candidate of teleportation. The 1p itself is then proved to
be impossible to have *any* description. So we agree, except that you
seem to decide that computers cannot manifest those non describable
things. On the contrary computer science explain why computer are
confronted to such things all the time.
True, I may not be able to prove that the computer is not conscious.
For I certainly cannot be sure if another person is conscious.
For the computer, I can say however, that it would need
a self to be consciousness, a singular unitary entity into
which the many can be experienced as one.
Yes it needs a self, and then as I told you the computer can have a
self (by the Dx = "xx", of by non foundation axioms in set theory if
you want make things more complex). But this give a third person
notion of self only. That is why the Theaetetus definition is a tour
de force in knowledge theory, and then Gödel's incompleteness justify
entirely that such a definition makes sense for the machine, and by
the machine.
This makes the computer mystic as it realizes that it cannot define
his first person self, which is indeed nothing describable in any
first person way. So we agree, and we agree with the ideally correct
self-referential universal machine.
BRUNO: This is not necessarily the case, as physics is Turing
universal. The
problem is that physics has to be derived from comp.
Bruno
<SNIP>
ROGER: You might be able to derive physics from comp.
I can derive the comp-physics (the physics when redefined through the
UD Argument). This is complex to do, but technical, and then we can
test comp. It is the problem to which the consciousness/matter problem
is reduced.
But physics
can only deal with the extended (objects in spacetime) and anything
extended cannot deal with meaning, mind or philosophy or thought,
since these are outside of spacetime, because inextended.
I agree completely, that is why I reduce physics to arithmetic.
Physics cannot handle those spiritual things, but arithmetic and
computer science can, even if negatively, like the theology of the
mystics and Plotinus.
Anything extended is an object, can only be treated objectively.
Yes.
Because anything extended is in spacetime, while consciousnes and
mind,
being inextended must be subjective (are outside of spacetime),
Numbers are also immaterial and not extended, but numbers are no mind
either. They have mind (relatively to universal numbers), but such
mind should not be identified with numbers. No need, and no
possibility to do that.
.In short:
extended= objective = in spacetime= contingent= cannot be necessary
But this does not follow either (but digress from the topic).
inextended = subjective = outside of spacetime= can be sometimes
necessary, sometimes contingent
This is not correct either. Numbers are inextended, but are not
subjective.
You put equalities, where there are only overlapping.
Also, however, now I see that Universal Turing machines can simulate
consciousness--
which all that you want.
That's only what I fear. But it is coherent with non-computationalism,
as it makes philosophical zombie possible.
But it is impossible to prove that anything that
simulates consciousness is actually conscious.
Indeed. But this does not entail that something simulating
consciousness is necessarily not conscious. Again I insist that it is
not the computer which is conscious, but the person supported through
infinities of computations. Then *one* computation supported by a 3p-
body-computer relatively to you, will make possible for that person to
manifest its consciousness relatively to you. The person is not the
computer, like a person is not a brain: it owns a brain or it owns a
computer, in a relative way.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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