On Friday, March 21, 2014 1:04:46 PM UTC-4, Gabriel Bodeen wrote: > > > > On Thursday, March 20, 2014 8:48:30 PM UTC-5, Craig Weinberg wrote: >> >> >> On Thursday, March 20, 2014 1:01:43 PM UTC-4, Gabriel Bodeen wrote: >>> >>> >>> On Thursday, March 20, 2014 11:16:19 AM UTC-5, Craig Weinberg wrote: >>>> >>>> >>>> On Thursday, March 20, 2014 11:09:39 AM UTC-4, Gabriel Bodeen wrote: >>>> >>>> >>>>> It formed increasingly high-level associations between bundles of >>>>> sensory data, eventually also combining sounds and vocal behavior into >>>>> those associations. There's nothing obviously intractable about >>>>> describing >>>>> such data input and analysis in computational terms. >>>>> >>>> >>>> If that were true, the oldest words would describe things like danger >>>> or food, but they don't. They are concepts like I, who, two, three and >>>> five >>>> ( >>>> http://media.tumblr.com/8b5d411063f5291737c4a36681474205/tumblr_inline_mmrdbhECQY1qz4rgp.png >>>> ) >>>> >>> >>> BTW, that chart is about the most-conserved words in the Indo-European >>> family of languages. It says nothing either way about what the earliest >>> words were. >>> >> >> Most conserved = earliest words that are still in use. >> > > Indeed, but that doesn't rescue the original point. The earliest words > still in use today don't tell us what the earliest words were. >
Right, but it can still tell us something about how communication progresses. > > >> Computationalism need not have anything to do with the brain. It's about >> consciousness arising from computation, i.e., it supports strong AI, which >> would not be about brains. >> > > Ah, that's an important comment. You are indeed talking about a specific > kind of CTM that wasn't clear to me. Thanks for clarifying. The usual > sense of CTM is that consciousness is literally computation, not that it > arises from computation. > Either way, we would not expect computations to emerge as modality-dependent. > > >> The brain doesn't figure into this at all. My point was that if >> consciousness is computation, and qualia are just complex computational >> labels, then we should expect languages to develop from simple, >> modal-independent forms to modal-dependent forms in which computations >> become so diversified that the lose any common vocabulary. Would you agree >> that this is precisely the opposite of what is seen in nature? >> > > Yes, I still agree about how we observe language to form. It's just that > your characterization of CTM as making the predictions you mention is > wrong. It only makes those predictions when supplemented with additional > assumptions that are not generally part of CTM. > I'm not so much interested in defining CTM, as in exploding the assumptions from which CTM and other mechanistic, information-theoretical models of consciousness arise. > > >> They don't reduce to a binary code like we would expect them to in CTM. >> > > That is not a prediction of CTM. Here's a relevant quote from the > Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Turing himself seems to have been of > the opinion that a machine operating in this way would literally be doing > the same things that the human performing computations is doing—that it > would be 'duplicating' what the human computer does. But other writers have > suggested that what the computer does is merely a 'simulation' of what the > human computer does: a reproduction of human-level performance, perhaps > through a set of steps that is [at] some level isomorphic to those the > human undertakes, but not in such a fashion as to constitute doing the same > thing in all relevant respects." > Again, either way the development of modality-dependence in non-humans and modality-independence in humans does not support the idea that consciousness is driven by logic and computation. That is clearly a more recent development. In the same way, any instance of computation we can find can be reduced to a deeper level of sensory-motive interaction. Craig > -Gabe > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
