On 9/24/2013 9:45 PM, LizR wrote:
On 25 September 2013 16:39, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Right. "Idle" isn't exactly the right word. I think that like "life"
consciousness
will be seen to be different things and there will be distinguished
different kinds
of consciousness and we'll design robots to have more or less and this kind
or
that. And we'll design drugs and brain implants to change and augment
human brains
based on our understanding of these different things that we now tend to
lump under
"consciousness".
Yes. that's my feeling. Arthur C Clarke and uniting into the "Overmind" as a sort of
worth-wide-web of human brains, for one example. But more likely, and less mystically,
time-sharing on each other's brains and swapping sense feeds and so on, so ego
boundaries become blurred and what it means to be "me" dissolves ... I'm hoping I get to
see / experience some of this!
So that answers Russell's question, at least from your point of view as (I assume) a
"primary materialist", and (interestingly, IMHO) equally answers the criticism (if it
was intended as such) that Craig leveled against comp.
As I understand Bruno's theory it also 'dissolves' the hard problem by
reducing it
to a property of certain logics, namely a computational system is (or can
be)
conscious if it is Lobian, i.e. if it can prove Godel's incompleteness about
itself. This seems too narrowly technical to me (does it actually have to
have done
the proof, or just be potentially able to do it?), but I can see that it
would be a
facet of intelligence that would contribute a certain aspect of
consciousness.
I assume that it merely has to be capable of doing it (a bit like Penrose's rather
derided ideas in "The Emperor's new Mind"). Otherwise we have the unlikely scenario that
only mathematicians and logicians are conscious!
Of course Bruno proposes that the logic (as in arithmetic for example)
exists in
platonia and that the physical world is just an aspect of relations in arithmetic.
I'm not sure about that, but I suspect that if fully worked out the derivative
physical world will prove necessary for the logic to produce consciousness
- so
physics is maybe not so derivative.
Comp explicitly denies the need for a physical world (if I understand it correctly) so
if that did turn out to be necessary, I think it would disprove comp?
Bruno gives that impression sometimes, but when pressed he explains that he only means
that the physical world not fundamental, it is derivative or emergent, not that it is
unnecessary. I like to think of it like this,
NUMBERS -> "MACHINE DREAMS" -> PHYSICAL -> HUMANS -> PHYSICS -> NUMBERS
which was originally suggested by Bruno, but he later said he wasn't serious. If you
think of it in terms of explanations or modeling, instead of causality, then I think the
circle can be virtuous IF it's big enough to take everything in.
Brent
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