On 27 Jan 2014, at 22:59, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Monday, January 27, 2014 6:15:35 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
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.
I think that 0+1=1 already requires consciousness. If we assume that
from the start, then all further argument is begging the question.
If something can 'equal' something else, then consciousness is
unnecessary.
Comp explains the role of self-consciousness. It is a relative
accelerator. Non self-consciousness is harder to explain.
The understanding of 0+1=1 certainly requires consciousness and
attention, but the fact that it is the case that 0+1=1 does not a
priori.
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.
I'm not asking for anything to be done for me.
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.
Physics is measurement though. Awareness can't be located that way.
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.
That version of 1p is a behaviorist silhouette though.
That would be the case if it was formally describable. But it can't.
A behaviorist has no means to see the difference between Bp and Bp &p.
They proves exactly the same propositions of arithmetic, and for that
reason, have the same 3p behavior. But the math shows that they obey
quite different self-referential logic.
It is a 1p which has no function but to pad the 3p math so that the
unknown can be taken into account. It does not specify the nature of
the unknown or link it to qualitative awareness.
It does. But you might need to follow the explanation I am given to Liz.
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.
There can't be an argument, because the argument has to begin with
sophistry. We can only argue for comp if we allow ourselves to doubt
what cannot really be doubted.
But I don't argue for comp. I just invalidate arguments against comp.
That is NOT arguing for comp.
And also, I agree we should not doubt what cannot be doubted. But I
know only consciousness to be undoubtable. All the rest, in fact all
public beliefs can be doubted.
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".
It's the argument that makes the most sense, given the assumption
that sense is primordial and function is derived.
Then you do phenomenological hermeneutics. I am OK with this, unless
you use it to deny comp, as this cannot work. What you think and feel
cannot be used against the idea that some others feel or does not feel.
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.
Nothing can 'emerge' from anything without sense.
Prime numbers and computations emerge from + and *, without invoking
sense.
There is no 1, there is no p, there is no belief or machine without
the meta-context of aesthetic relation and presence.
Are you sure we need not the Virgin Mary too?
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".
That's exactly what the impostor must say. "No time for nuanced
understanding, we must rush into foolish assumptions now!"
It is the only way to progress. Science is the courage of being wrong.
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!
But this is my version of saying yes to the doctor. If we accept
that sense is primitive, then all of our experience with
consciousness, machines, information, and physics fall perfectly
into place.
Trivially, as you take the data as the explanations.
If we do not accept sense,
?
Comp is based on the existence of sense (but neutral, at the start, if
sense is primitive or not, like for matter). Comp is that sense will
be invariant for some substitution. Then the reasoning makes it non
primitive.
then there is no plausible argument for its emergence from
computation of physics.
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.
The falsity of comp is not something to know, it is something to
understand. The nature of comp is that it is itself made of argument
- it is made of theory.
It is the content of the theory. This used sense. If we ask only
zombie (about "yes doctor"), the answer will be meaningless.
Theory can exist only as a representation within some presented
experience.
Indeed. Like surviving with a prosthesis.
If you try to prove that with an argument, it is like trying to
prove that a song will sound good without listening to the song.
Indeed. But "yes doctor" refers to a conscious experience (surviving
an opetation at the hospital).
You might confuse a theory with the intended semantic of the theory.
That is like confusing a brain and a mind.
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.
I am listening to machines all day long. I have to reboot them
because they are incapable of learning even how to install their own
updates. Even if a machine seemed to realize something, there would
be no way of knowing that such an impression was not my own
pareidolia.
By listening to the machine, you need (today) to study the work of
Gödel, Löb, Solovay. Only there is the "listening" well defined and
recognizable as a genuine interview. The result is given through the 8
hypostases.
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.
Silicon and carbon are not the relevant distinction. If sense
experience is primary, then the forms are only a disposable front
end for a history of feeling, not of arithmetic. The material is no
more important than an IP address is to a web site. To expect the
website to follow the IP address is the Cargo Cult mistake. It's not
that silicon is materially less hospitable than carbon, it is that
the expression of biological life uses a carbon alphabet on the
microphysical level, and no other.
So, if we translate the relevant carbon associations in silicon terms,
we might get the right subst level? Then comp is correct.
It may very well be too late to introduce any kind of competing
biology,
Why? And then comp is not that silicon can replaced carbon. Only that
it is in principle possible. the consequence are derived from that
possibility, not from any technical feasibility.
because of the tyrannical nature of sense. Absolute uniqueness is
conserved.
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.
How can we tell the difference between observing what can be proved
on machines and what our own expectations project into them? It is
like asking the I Ching whether it can ever be wrong.
We cannot. But we cannot do that for other humans too. So this does
not distinguish machines from humans.
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.
But arithmetic truth and effective theory are both blind to the
distinction between experience and abstraction.
Not at all. See the hypostases. Machines like PA do already understand
that difference.
It cannot be disproved theoretically,
Perhaps. But it can be disproved experimentally.
No, because experiments rely on measurement, which means awareness
is amputated. The unique-proprietary becomes generic-public.
But that is not the relevant level. I just said that the comp theory
of consciousness can be disproved by its consequence in physics. The
theory does not amputated awareness, as it is based on awareness to
start with. Only primitive awareness is amputated.
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.
Sure, but the fact that they work doesn't complete them.
Sure. Nobody pretended or used anything contrary to this.
A puppet can be made to imitate a person, and that 'works' as far as
an audience is concerned, but the reality of a person is more than
the characterization of a ventriloquist.
Sure.Puppet, cartoon's heroes, etc. do not think. Glad we agree on
that. Nor does brain, bodies, and computation's description. But comp
allows people to be enacted by a computation or a brain relative
activity, not by puppets or pictures or any descriptions.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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