On 27 Jan 2014, at 06:28, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Sunday, January 26, 2014 5:18:53 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 25 Jan 2014, at 15:35, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Saturday, January 25, 2014 1:41:30 AM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:
On 25 January 2014 00:26, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Tell me what you believe so we can be clear:
>>
>> My understanding is that you believe that if the parts of the
Chinese
>> Room don't understand Chinese, then the Chinese Room can't
understand
>> Chinese. Have I got this wrong?
>
>
> The fact that the Chinese Room can't understand Chinese is not
related to
> its parts, but to the category error of the root assumption that
forms and
> functions can understand things. I see forms and functions as
one of the
> effects of experience, not as a cause of them.
But that doesn't answer the question: do you think (or understand, or
whatever you think the appropriate term is) that the Chinese Room
COULD POSSIBLY be conscious or do you think that it COULD NOT
POSSIBLY
be conscious?
NO ROOM CAN BE CONSCIOUS. NO BODY CAN BE CONSCIOUS. NO FORM CAN BE
CONSCIOUS.*
I agree.
Cool.
*Except within the fictional narrative of a conscious experience.
Puppets can seem conscious. Doors, door-knobs, and Chinese rooms
can SEEM to be conscious.
You do the Searle error. The fact that the room/body form is not
conscious does not entail that the narrative is fictional. If the
room simulates the person at its right level, it can manifest the
real abstract person related to the narrative.
That makes perfect sense to me, but it makes more sense that it is a
mistake. It assumes the information-theoretic ground of being in
which simulation is possible.
That is arithmetic. yes we assume things like 0+1=1, etc.
My understanding is that this is not only precisely the opposite of
the whole truth, which is that all awareness is grounded in the
unprecedented, unrepeatable, and unique,
If you know the truth; there is nothing we can do for you.
but that the inverted assumption of comp is actually incapable of
detecting its own error.
The point is that it can, but not by introspection. Just by comparing
the comp physics and the inferred physics.
This blindness is what is being reflected in its projections of
first person machine denial of mechanism.
?
To be clear, 1p is not denied. It plays indeed the key role in the
whole UDA.
Then the math recover it Through the arithmetical translation of
Theaetetus idea, and this is made possible by machine's incompleteness.
There is no level of simulation, because simulation itself is a
theory which mistakes local sensory approximation for universal
interchangeability.
Well, that is the comp bet. You just assert non)comp here, without an
argument.
It makes the mistake of imposing the specially blunted aesthetics of
functionalism onto the aesthetic totality.
That's no better than Jacques Arsac argument: "i am catholic, so i
can't believe that a machine will ever think".
With your body or form is a sort of zombie. It does no more think
than a car. But the owner of the body can think, and use his body to
manifest his thinking (which is really "done" in platonia)
relatively to its most probable continuations in Platonia.
I think that the owners of my body look like cells to me. I am a
contributor to their experience, and other, greater owners of my
lifetime likely contribute to my experience.
Or do you claim that the question is meaningless, a
category error (which ironically is a term beloved of positivists)?
If
the latter, how is it that the question can be meaningfully asked
about humans but not the Chinese Room?
Because humans are not human bodies.
We agree on this.
Ok
We don't have to doubt that humans are conscious, as to do so would
be to admit that we humans are the ones choosing to do the doubting
and therefore are a priori certainly conscious.
OK.
Bodies do not deserve the benefit of the doubt, since they remain
when we are personally unconscious or dear. That does not mean,
however, that our body is not itself composed on lower and lower
levels by microphenomenal experiences which only seem to us at the
macro level to be forms and functions....they are forms and
functions relative to our perceptual-relativistic distance from
their level of description. Since there is no distance between our
experience and ourselves, we experience ourselves in every way that
it can be experienced without being outside of itself, and are
therefore not limited to mathematical descriptions. The sole
purpose of mathematical descriptions are to generalize measurements
- to make phenomena distant and quantified.
No problem with this.
Ok
> I like my examples better than the Chinese Room, because they are
simpler:
>
> 1. I can type a password based on the keystrokes instead of the
letters on
> the keys. This way no part of the "system" needs to know the
letters,
> indeed, they could be removed altogether, thereby showing that data
> processing does not require all of the qualia that can be
associated with
> it, and therefore it follows that data processing does not
necessarily
> produce any or all qualia.
>
> 2. The functional aspects of playing cards are unrelated to the
suits, their
> colors, the pictures of the royal cards, and the participation of
the
> players. No digital simulation of playing card games requires any
aesthetic
> qualities to simulate any card game.
>
> 3. The difference between a game like chess and a sport like
basketball is
> that in chess, the game has only to do with the difficulty for
the human
> intellect to compute all of the possibilities and prioritize them
logically.
> Sports have strategy as well, but they differ fundamentally in
that the real
> challenge of the game is the physical execution of the moves. A
machine has
> no feeling so it can never participate meaningfully in a sport.
It doesn't
> get tired or feel pain, it need not attempt to accomplish
something that it
> cannot accomplish, etc. If chess were a sport, completing each
move would be
> subject to the possibility of failure and surprise, and the end
can never
> result in checkmate, since there is always the chance of weaker
pieces
> getting lucky and overpowering the strong. There is no Cinderella
Story in
> real chess, the winning strategy always wins because there can be
no
> difference between theory and reality in an information-theoretic
universe.
How can you start a sentence "a machine has no feeling so..." and
purport to discuss the question of whether a machine can have
feeling?
> So no, I do not "believe" this, I understand it. I do not think
that the
> Chinese Room is valid because wholes must be identical to their
parts. The
> Chinese Room is valid because it can (if you let it) illustrate
that the
> difference between understanding and processing is a difference
in kind
> rather than a difference in degree. Technically, it is a
difference in kind
> going one way (from the quantitative to the qualitative) and a
difference in
> degree going the other way. You can reduce a sport to a game (as
in computer
> basketball) but you can't turn a video game into a sport unless
you bring in
> hardware that is physical/aesthetic rather than programmatic.
Which leads me
> to:
The Chinese Room argument is valid if it follows that if the parts of
the system have no understanding then the system can have no
understanding.
You aren't listening to me - which may not be your fault. Your
psychological specialization may not permit you to see any other
possibility than the mereological argument that you keep turning to.
I don't argue for comp. I just invalidate your argument against
comp. It is circular.
But my argument against comp is that if consciousness/sense is
primordial,
But it is not primordial. Consciousness is the 1p, which unavoidably
emerge when we define the machine's notion of belief.
then only circular arguments can reveal the truth about it. Comp,
being the near-perfect impostor of sense, is the one case where we
have to look through the logic of argument to the sense of feeling.
The only true Voight-Kampff/Turing test/Gom Jabbar is free from all
argument and rationality. It is entirely aesthetic and intuitive.
Yes, non-comp is as much a bet than comp. But comp exists, and non-
comp theories does not yet exist, or are too much unclear without any
prediction. Better to reason and make experience than "knowing the
truth".
You always use your primitive notion of sense, which makes no sense
to me, except in segregating among the possible creatures.
Why wouldn't I use the primitive notion of sense if it is true?
If that is not begging the question!
Why would you not send me 1000 $ if it is true that you have to?
You do have some time some strange way to justify your point.
Nobody knows the truth or falsity of comp. You argument is circular.
Of course the whole can have properties that the parts do not have,
that is not what I am denying at all. I am saying that there is no
explanation of the Chinese Room which requires that it understands
anything except one in which understanding itself is smuggled in
from the real world and attached to it arbitrarily on blind faith.
OK. That is why it is nice that incompleteness provides a bridge
(the Bp ==> Bp & p definition of Theaetetus) between the machine and
the real world (arithmetic). machines quickly realize that the
arithmetical reality kick back.
I haven't known machines to realize anything.
Because you don't listen to them.
It is pointed out (correctly) by Searle that the person
in the room does not understand Chinese, from which he CONCLUDES that
the room does not understand Chinese,
Rooms don't understand anything. Rooms are walls with a roof. Walls
and roofs are planed matter. Matter is bonded molecules. Molecules
are sensory experiences frozen in some externalized perceptual gap.
and uses this conclusion to
support the idea that the difference between understanding and
processing is a difference in kind, so no matter how clever the
computer or how convincing its behaviour it will never have
understanding.
The conclusion is just the same if you use the room as a whole
instead of the person. You could have the book be a simulation of
John Wayne talking instead. No matter how great the collection of
John Wayne quotes, and how great a job the book does at imitating
what John Wayne would say, the room/computer/simulation cannot ever
become John Wayne.
Then there is something magical in John Wayne's body. What? Not a
first person soul, as machines have them too. It has to be
something noin Turing emulable, and not FPI recoverable, so what is
it, and wy postulating this for carbon based creature, and not
silicon creature?
It's not his body, it's the totality of the unique sense of his life
and its relation to all life, order, and history of the universe.
Like the machine's 1p, then. OK. But that does not distinguish a
silicon machine, from a carbon machine. they both have bodies and
histories, here or in arithmetic.
It's not emulable or reproducible, its the opposite. Emulation and
reproduction are expectations within awareness, which cannot be
emulated or reproduced at all.
That is a subtle point, and you are right. But again that is provable
on machines, and by machines on themselves.
Emulation is a theory about theory being reality.
The exact contrary. Comp is made consistent because we distinguih
arithmetical truth from any possible effective theory.
It cannot be disproved theoretically,
Perhaps. But it can be disproved experimentally.
but in reality, it doesn't work because theory is always less than
the reality which inspires it.
Theories can work even when not complete.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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