On 3/6/2014 3:35 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
On Thu, Mar 06, 2014 at 04:48:37PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 06 Mar 2014, at 09:51, ghib...@gmail.com wrote:
What about others - like Russell (who might just read this and be
willing to answer ). Does Russell
(a) agree with you completely
Only Russell can answer this. I would use "understand" instead of
"agree", because I don't think it i a question of agreeing. It is
I didn't respond earlier, because I wasn't actually all that clear
what was being asked.
question of acknowledging the validity of a reasoning, or of showing
something missing or some flaws, or some unclarity.
from our conversation, I would say that Russell "agrees" with the
FPI, and probably UDA1-7, but as some reservation on the step 8.
That is a fair summary. UDA 1-7 looks straightforward to me, and in
any case, the conclusion to me accords with my world view (that
physics emerges from some underlying theory, such as arithmetic), so
that I have no problems accepting COMP as a potential working theory
of consciousness.
I do have reservations about step 8, which partly come from not being
clear what the step actually addresses (ie what the problem is). In
part, that is because I don't actually see a problem, so in some
senses step 8 is redundant, but I have attempted to figure out what
the step is trying to address, and have achieved some understanding of
it. I intend to try to write that up as a paper that could help
others, or at least act as a discussion point, as often the subtleties
get lost in the mail archives.
(b) think computation is intrinsically conscious
But this wording is worst, as it looks like it insists that a
computation (or some computation) are conscious. But only a first
person is conscious, and a first person is nothing capable of being
defined in any 3p way.
For example, a brain cannot think. Brain activity cannot think, a
computer cannot think, a computation cannot think, I would say.
This issue causes people a lot of problems. It does not matter for the
purposes of UDA 1-7, but for step 8 is important. The issue is
probably best handled using the concept of (COMP) supervenience -
consciousness supervenes on the running of a program on a given
reference machine. That machine and the running of the program can be
quite abstract, of course, which is something people find hard to get,
but is perfectly fine for the concept of supervenience.
How is that different than saying a given machine performing a certain computation is
thinking? Bruno seems to be saying that no matter whether it's abstract or concrete it's
a 3p notion and so cannot be thinking. When I've asked Bruno what it takes, on his
theory, for a machine to be conscious, he has answered that it be Lobian, which is an
attribute of the functions it can compute and which seems 3p to me.
Brent
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