On 11 May 2014, at 18:29, John Mikes wrote:

Bruno, please do not identify what - I - "need" for an (my!) unidentified consciousness.

Excellent John!
That's the whole point. Löbian numbers already get the difference between the body-mind third person relations and *my* unnameable first person knowledge.

In artithmetic, it *is* the difference between []p and []p & p.





As for 'my' agnosticism: Mine is based on believed lots of things beyond our knowable mental inventory (that YET may have impact on our thinking/life/existence).
I wonder about the DISCOVERY(?) of the universal machine.

Yes, in the digital realm, the discovery of the universal machine in arithmetic. It is a remarkable discovery made simultaneously by many, and notably by Turing proof that there is a u such that phi_u(x,y) = phi_x(y). u is a code for a universal Turing machine.

It is a remarkable fact, and it is the incompleteness phenomenon which guaranties the consistency of the Church-Turing thesis, or Emil Post Natural law. I "discovered" it in books in molecular genetics, so "nature" seems to have discovered and exploited the "universal number" (an intensional notion, relative to some choice of universal base, like elementary arithmetic).

I am agnostic on the truth on this, but why not listen to the numbers?



Thinking about it is in my vocabilary much less then discover it. I would be careful to apply the verb "we know" after the term. Question: in what terms is 'it's' inventory UNDERSTANDABLE?

In the term of any of your favorite universal system. Fortran? Cobol? Lisp? Diophantine equations? Unitary Matrices? I don't mind, but to fix the things, and ease the interview of the machine, I use elementary arithmetic.




for us, agnostics (my term), or for the complexity unlimited?
Again: we can TALK about the latter in OUR present terms only.

You know that I think that we might be wrong on this since the closure of Plato academy.

At least taking comp *seriously enough* illustrate that we can remain rationalist and still have a conception of God closer to Plotinus and Plato, but also of Buddha and the Vedas, than the materialist conception of reality.



Agnostically yours

Agnostically yours too. Just less be sure what we are agnostic about :)

Bruno





John M


On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 4:41 AM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:

On 10 May 2014, at 22:56, John Mikes wrote:

Stathis and Esteemed Savants of this brilliant back-and-forth tackle:
Using words is easy. Did we agree in applied meanings at all?
Computation may refer (?) to tackling finite and known items.
Consciousness may refer (?) to inclusion of complexity (= infinite etc. included)
Conscious has not much to do with consciousness as we speak recently.
System is composed of known inventory - no infinites and complexities in it.
Organism may include complexity and requirements.
The YES DOC may reroduce the systemic part of your brain only.
Liz may think only of the non-complex part of physics, the one computable. I don't go with Bruno into 'machines like ourselves' reaching into infinite complexities.

For consciousness you need only the sigma_1 complete (Turing universality) complexity, which is rather simple, compared to the whole of arithmetic. The threshold of complexity needed for consciousness is very low, but not trivial. But from the first person perspective, the machine will be confronted to many thing more complex than herself, and sometimes not at all computable. Keep in mind that Arithmetical truth is *far* beyond the computable.




Using the term 'compute' means an understandable inventory to be used.

But after the discovery of the universal machine, we know that a very simple set of simple rules (the understandable inventory) can lead to non predictable behavior, and to *correct* discourse about non justifiable or non-provable truth, still inferable, or even "directly" knowable.

Are you saying that you are no more agnostic with respect to computationalism?

Bruno



Brent would have to answer how 'his' consciousness is embedded into the (what kind of) world? same as mine? a different one? Like a retro-causation? with what selection? We ALL gather personalized and dissimilar contents into our image of the world - so there is a problem in unifying the images. I agree intelligence is more involved than consciousness: the former 'understands' not verbatim explained connectivities only, the latter registers (respondes to?) relations. And then there lurks the unidirectional effect of t i m e . . . . .

John M



On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 11:56 AM, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected] > wrote:


On Saturday, May 10, 2014, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote:



On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 1:30 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected] > wrote:



On 10 May 2014 20:12, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote:



On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 8:30 AM, LizR <[email protected]> wrote:
On 10 May 2014 17:30, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]> wrote:


On Saturday, May 10, 2014, LizR <[email protected]> wrote:
I guess one could start from "is physics computable?" (As Max Tegmark discusses in his book, but I haven't yet read what his conclusions are, if any). If physics is computable and consciousness arises somehow in a "materialist-type way" from the operation of the brain, then consciousness will be computable by definition.

Is that trivially obvious to you? The anti-comp crowd claim that even if brain behaviour is computable that does not mean that a computer could be conscious, since it may require the actual brain matter, and not just a simulation, to generate the consciousness.

If physics is computable, and consciousness arises from physics with nothing extra (supernatural or whatever) then yes. Am I missing something obvious?

You're missing the step where you explain how doing the computations generates consciousness.

No, that was the initial assumption.

You said: "The anti-comp crowd claim that even if brain behaviour is computable that does not mean that a computer could be conscious, since it may require the actual brain matter"

So it is implied that some none-computable part of the brain generates consciousness, which immediately contradicts the assumption that brain behaviour is computable.

It could be that some system the behaviour of which is entirely computable gives rise to consciousness. But consciousness is not a behaviour.


That is what I understand "consciousness is computable" to mean.


Yeah, I always feel the same about this sort of argument. It seems so trivial to disprove:

"even if brain behaviour is computable that does not mean that a computer could be conscious, since it may require the actual brain matter, and not just a simulation, to generate the consciousness."

1. If brain behaviour is computable and (let's say comp)

Not "and let's say comp", since that is what you are setting out to prove

2. brain generates consciousness but
3. it requires actual brain matter to do so then
4. brain behaviour is not computable (~comp)

No, that doesn't follow. That brain behaviour is computable means that we are able to compute such things as the sequence in which neurons will fire and the effect neuronal activity will have on muscle.

so comp = ~comp

I also wonder if I'm missing something, since I hear this one a lot.

A computer model of a thunderstorm will predict the behaviour of a real thunderstorm but it won't be wet. In contrast, I believe that a computer model of a brain will not only predict the behaviour of a real brain but will also be conscious. However, I don't think this is trivially obvious.

A computer model and computability are different things. We have to be precise about what the initial assumptions mean.

Computability is an abstract concept. I understand the idea that a physical system is "computable" as meaning that there is an algorithm that allows us to predict its behaviour. I don't see how this could be applied to consciousness being computable in the same way, since consciousness is not a behaviour. The only sense I can make of consciousness being computable is that by doing the computations, consciousness is generated.


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Stathis Papaioannou

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