On 28 Jan 2014, at 19:25, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Tuesday, January 28, 2014 12:31:07 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 28 Jan 2014, at 13:36, Craig Weinberg wrote:
But the counterfactuals are theoretical rather than realistic.
I will no more comment any statements using word like "real",
"realistic", "concrete", etc.
How would you like to refer to the difference between an Escher
portrait, in which lizards can come from paper and staircases can
turn inside out, and the ordinary world which is presented in which
such things are understood to be obviously and permanently impossible?
As different type of objects on which we can propose different theories.
The computation is like an Escher drawing, it can do things that
would be impossible for a real brain and cannot do or be real in
ways that a brain must necessarily be. A picture is just the next
step in abstraction toward the sub-theoretical, but it is actually
one step more concrete in aesthetic realism. A real picture of a
triangle is closer to consciousness than a computation for the
Mandelbot Set, which is only a theory until it is presented
graphically to a visual participant.
Now, we do describe computation by some description, and so this
confusion is frequent. But it is the same type of confusion between
ciphers and numbers. Ciphers and sequence of ciphers are not
numbers. It is the cionfusion between "345" and 345.
Both "345" and 345 are still pictures.
?
I ask myself if you get the notion of number.
Yes, but the notion of number is not the necessarily true. It may
not refer to something which exists, but rather common sense of the
gaps between what exists.
I did not mention any particular "notion of number".
They can only be made meaningful when they are associated by a
sensory experience in which some aesthetic content or expectation
can be labelled with a string or value.
What can I say? That follows from your theory. But your theory does
not even try to explain the sensory experience.
Of course. Explanation means only the translation from one aesthetic
context to another. Sense experience is the primordial identity, so
explaining it would be to appeal to the senseless.
Yes.
You assume the difficulty which I think computer science explains
partially, and in a testable way.
The existence of your theory is not by itself a refutation of a
different theory.
That's because the theory prevents the truth about it from being
accessed.
= "don't ask". You oppose science.
The theory of comp is blind to its blindness, and demands to be
refuted only by those wearing blindfolds. To test fairly, you would
have to take off the blindfold, but then the fact of your seeing
would make the test redundant.
Of course, you take the problem as the solution of the problem. That's
bad "don't ask philosophy".
In either case, consciousness makes no more sense as part of a
brain or a machine than a picture.
Right. We agree on that. But a brain can locally manifest a person.
I don't think it can.
So, if someone lost his body in some accident, but the rescuer saves
the brain, and succeeded in connecting it to an artificial heart,
and eventually an artificial body (but still with his natural brain).
The guy behaves normally. He kept his job. But you tell me that he
has become a zombie?
The brain never stopped being an expression of the victim's life
though. It is still his body in some sense, even if there is only
one cell. The copy of the brain never starts becoming an expression
of anyone's life because it is made of nothing but lower level pre-
biotic experiences.
Making your "I don't think it can" even more incomprehensible.
A tip cannot locally manifest an iceberg. A cookie cutter cannot
manifest a cookie.
A picture cannot. You can't implement it in a computer, in the
sense of implementing a program, which then can manifest a person.
Right, because nothing can manifest a person except the complete
history of experiences of Homo sapiens.
You confirm that you are lowering the level, and in fact up to
infinity.
It's not a difference in degree, but a difference in kind. It isn't
a question of lowering or raising, it is a matter of understanding
that just because all pizzas can be sliced in the same way does not
mean that a pizza can be made by slicing-ness. Arithmetic is slicing-
ness.
If 345 is a picture, you can say that. But you can say anything.
It looks like saying "I am an infinite being".
I would say "I am an infinitely unique experience, made of
infinitely unique experiences, which approximates experience as
finite and generic".
I have no local Gödel number that you can put on some hard disk.
It is your right, but, well, I am not interested in that type of
theory.
It excludes too much possibilities, and is based on some illusion of
superiority.
I don't see it as having anything to do with superiority, it is only
a recognition that slicing a hard drive like a pizza doesn't make it
edible. The hard drive does different things than the pizza
entirely, regardless of how much we think it looks like a pizza.
The 1p of the machine also believes, even know, its relation with
*infinity*, but the correct machine does not brag on this, and still
less, derived any superiority feeling from this.
Humility and pride are both equally anthropocentric in my mind.
Bending over backward to imagine that we are the same as inanimate
object is just an inverse egotism.
But nobody said that. Even zombie are animated.
It is pure vanity to say "I have transcended the vanity of my
species." It is a very special privilege to believe to know how very
un-special life is. It is the same comfort that we seek when we look
up at the grandeur of our own insignificance as when we look down on
the grandeur of ourselves. They are both settings on the continuum
of sense-making, of what I call eigenmorphism or eigengraphy.
But you still believe to be more than my sun in law. You attribute
sensory experience to yo, and not to him.
(especially that comp explains in which sense the machine is right
when saying that about herself (her 1-self).
I don't believe that a machine can be right or wrong. It can only
reflect the intention of its design and the nature of its materials.
I don't believe that a slave can be right or wrong. It can only
reflect the intension of his master.
(You beg the question).
Machines are like 4D pictures. One picture or form leads to
another and another, and if there were some interpreter they could
infer a logic to those transitions, but there is nothing in the
machine which would itself lead from unconsciousness to awareness.
No, but the machine can still enact it.
What the machine enacts is an impersonal performance of personhood,
not a person.
Well, at least that's a nice way to define what do a zombie: an
impersonal performance of personhood.
A (3-1) person without a (1-1) person.
Hmm...
They already exist everywhere. Photographs, cartoons, movies, dolls.
There is no (3-1) here.
We have many signs and simulacra which lull our senses into
accepting some degree of empathy. A computer can amplify that
considerably in theory, although in fact, I have yet to see any
indication that even that is forthcoming. The sterility of
impersonality always seems to be there if you have the patience to
notice. Imitations and forgeries can never be complete, although
they come much closer when imitating an object instead of a subject.
You are not providing an argument. You are just repeating your
personal feeling that machine cannot manifest consciousness. I don't
know that, and without argument, it looks like a form of solipsism and
prejudice based on external appearance.
Bruno
Craig
Bruno
Craig
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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