On 06 Mar 2014, at 00:17, John Mikes wrote:
Ghibsa and honored discussioneers:
you can say about that darn conscousness anything you like, as long
as you cannot identify it. Attribute of "a 1st person"? that would
leave out lots of smilar phenomena - not even assigned to 'a' 1st
person.
I am not sure I understand this.
Are you saying that consciousness might not be an 1p attribute?
Also, we cannot define consciousness, nor identify it with anything,
except our own right here and now. But we can still reason about it,
just by agreeing on some principle on it. We don't need to be able to
define the moon exactly, to walk on it.
When I tried to collect opinions about Ccness of several authors I
found that most speak about 'processes' rather than attributes.
But process is a typical 3p notion. To identify consciousness with
process is an error of category, more or less based on the
Aristotelian materialist brain/mind (or brain-activity/mental
activity) identity thesis, which is refuted by the UD Argument.
Around 'awareness'. That was in 1992 and I boiled down the essence
of THOSE opinions into some more and more general understanding just
to arrive at my DEFINITION-PROPOSAL (not like: 'something attributed
to') - streamlined since then into:------- Response to relations.
------------
Now: 1st persons may have that, but ANYTHING else as well.
That's the right 3p notion of observers, mocked by copenhagen, but
redeemed by Everett and computationalism.
But although very useful, such a definition ignore the 1p non
communicable features, like qualia, consciousness, etc.
(That also changed my "observer" into ANYTHING reacting to -well -
relations: maybe a person, maybe an ion 'observing an electric
charge, or a stone rolling down a slope.
If you attribute consciousness to such interaction, you will get
panpsychism. Why not. It is ambiguous, as we cannot derive from this
if you say "yes" or "no" to the doctor.
What I tried to do was (then, and mostly now as well) to get away of
the anthropic view of the world - explaining phenomena by HUMAN
reactivity and effect. We are not NATURE, nor do we direct Her
changes in every respect. We are consequence. Of more - much much
more than we know about (what I call our 'inventory'). Computation
(cum+putare) is definitely a human way
Not with the standard definitions. or you are saying this already for
notions like " being odd", but then everything is human, even alien in
other galaxies, and the word "human" becomes spurious.
and the quantitative side of it is "math" (IMO). No matter if the
facts underlying such inventory-items preceded the 'humans' or arose
with/after them.
So in my vocabulary (what I do not propose for everybody: I am no
missionary) there is an infinite complexity (The World, or Nature?)
or Arithmetic. keep in mind that the big discovery of the 20th
century, is that Arithmetical truth is far beyond machines (and
humans) cognitive ability.
of which we are a tiny part only. There are "relations" (everybody
may identify some) extended over the totality - way beyond our
knowledge.
Sure. already in arithmetic. We only scratch the surface of arithmetic
and computer science (a branch of arithmetic).
I am deeply agnostic on the question if there is anything more than
arithmetical truth, or even sigma_1 arithmetical truth, the rest being
an epistemological internal view brought by the fact that numbers need
relative representations to manifest themselves relatively.
Bruno
I do not propose a definition for consciousness either. Nor a site
for it (definitely not the brain, especially restricted to ours).
Just as I claim agnosticism for 'life' (definitely more than the
"bio" or wider Earthbound, not even carried on 'physical' material
substrate.
Your questions are well formulated and interesting. I have no
answer, but SOME you got in the discussion make lots of sense. What
I enjoyed was the 2D mentioned by Liz as the database.
Best regards
John Mikes
On Sun, Mar 2, 2014 at 7:36 AM, <[email protected]> wrote:
So, why do we get tired, and why is being tired like the way that it
is? If its exhaustion, maybe up a couple of days, why does it stop
being about motivation and becomes that we can't think straight? ass
Why do we need to sleep? Why do we need to REM sleep in what looks
to be precise amounts, which we're not capable of losing ground on
(strong evidence when people are prevented REM sleep in the lab over
days, they begin to pass out more and more easily, and don't return
to normal until all the REM is made up for)
i
Why is it, mental fatigue has certain properties that ties fatigue
to specific mental activities but not other, equally challenging
ones? Why is this strongly correlated with how much time a specifc
kind of activity has already been focused on since last sleep? Such
that 'a change is as good as a rest'.
ion
If computation is intrinsically conscious why aren't we conscious
in the vast majority of our brains, where the vast majority of the
heavy lifting goes on? Why aren't we conscious in our other organs
where sigtinificant computation takes place, and is connected with
our brains. When I write a piece of code and run it, why aren't I
experiencing the consciousness of the code? What decides what
object and experiences what consciousness, and why is that stable?
If I lie down beside my twin, why don't I sometimes wake up him?
If computation is intrinsically conscious, where is consciousness
experienced? How is facilitated? If a computer is intrinsically
conscious, which hardware parts are consciousness, and/or which
hardwaerre parts are required by the conscious experience of
software, such that the experience is able to think the next
thought? The processor? RAM?
Given all this hardware is tightly controlled by processes running,
and given these processes, and their footprint through the hardware
can be precisely known, why is the old Turing needed, or should it
be updated to include predictions for what an emergent consciousness
would look like, its footprint, CPU use? If computation is
intrinsically consciousness why can we account for the footprint of
our code, purely in terms of, and exactly
of that code?
,
Why haven't these footprint iss9ues been heavily researched over the
past 50 years...why isn't there a hard theory? With nothing at all
having been done in this area, for all we know when the computer
runs slow and starts to ceize that isn't sometimes a darling little
consciousness flashing into existence and struggling to survive,
only to be broken on the wheel of the Norton performance tuner? Why
is even a chance of that acceptable...why hasn't any work been done
on the footprint issue?
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