On 5/20/2014 6:22 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 2:21 AM, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 5/19/2014 4:56 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 9:33 PM, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On 5/19/2014 11:31 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 8:09 PM, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On 5/19/2014 10:24 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 7:06 PM, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On 5/19/2014 2:38 AM, LizR wrote:His main interest is the mind-body problem; and my interest in that problem is more from an engineering viewpoint. What does it take to make a conscious machine and what are the advantages or disadvantages of doing so. Bruno says a machine that can learn and do induction is conscious, which might be testable - but I think it would fail. I think that might be necessary for consciousness, but for a machine to appear conscious it must be intelligent and it must be able to act so as to convince us that it's intelligent. That is fair enough, but it (of course) assumes primary materialism -No it doesn't. Why do you think that? I think "assuming primary materialism" is a largely imaginary fault Bruno accuses his critics of. Sure physicists study physics and it's a reasonable working hypothesis; but nobody tries to even define "primary matter" they just look to see if another layer will be a better layer of physics or not. But I think Bruno's criticism is that physics->psychology is assumed,Assumed by whom though? Physicists working on physics? Probably. Philosophers working on consciousness? Some do, some don't. By scientists in general, I would say. Physicists are the easiest to forgive, their work seems valid either way. Neuroscientists, psychologists and social scientists are not so easy to forgive. I personally have no problem with assuming primary materialism, provided that you are aware that it is an assumption.For thousands of years humans looked for consciousness and agency in everything. Then one day someone said let's just forget about ulimate truth and God and what's primary and let's just see what we can say about the shadows...and that's when modern science took off. The discovery of the scientific method had nothing to do with the abandonment of deep questions. It had to do with a rejection of appeals to authority. Don't believe the guy in the funny robe, do the experiment -- and sometimes the thought experiment.But the authorities being abandoned, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas were all of the opinion that thinking about deep questions was the way to learn about theworld. What was the perfect form? What was the natural state of a substance? Plato denigrated observation as "looking at shadows" and the world as an imperfectreflection of ideal forms. Sure there was rejection of the authority of the Church and the ancients - but in favor of what? The protestants just changed to the Bible as the sole authority (and invented fundamentalism). Science arose from rejecting authority in favor of observation of "the shadows". You can't observe the ur-stuff of the world, I think you can, but what you find is not communicable. you can only make up models, show they work, and see what ontology they imply.From the 3p view sure. There's nothing wrong with doing those things, in fact it's what my paycheck says that I do for a living. I don't feel that thinking about philosophy interferes with my ability to apply the scientific method. I don't see why it would have to be an either-or proposition. Self-appointed authorities come in many forms, of course, and it's important to not fall for that trap. I'm not sure we even disagree when making things concrete.Which leads us to philosophers, which are largely irrelevant at the moment -- because of their own sort-comings and because there is a strong bias against deep questions in current culture. I think. For me, the relevance of this sort of issue is personal (another preoccupation that goes a bit against the zeitgeist, which is increasingly self-centred but in a superficial fashion). For example, ISTM that it has strong implications in terms of deriving a rational code of ethics and in making life choices.Really? I don't see the implications. Bruno proposes to derive physics, specifically QM from his theory; not change it. So there are no new implications there. Deepak Chopra will no doubt take advantage of it to get rich on some more "thinking will make it so" woo-woo...when he hears about it. What implications do you refer to? Brent, with all due respect. I value your contributions to the mailing list and learned from them. Even when I disagree with you, you have interesting things to say. But you are too quick with the labelling. It's not really fair play. I think it's quite obvious that I am not defending guys in funny robes or Deepak Chopra.Sorry I didn't mean to imply you did and I certainly know that you don't. I just mentioned him as someone who will try to draw (his usual) ethical implications from whatever new sounding science there is. I apologise for reading too much into it! But you didn't answer my question. What are the new implications you see? Ok, a few examples.- Otherness. Under fundamental matter, there is otherness. We are a chunk of matter, that somehow generates our consciousness. Other people are other chunks of matter, and we can measure the degree of otherness by genetic distance, for example. Unfortunately, there are several instances in History where this idea was taken to extremes. If we don't assume mater to be fundamental, the entire idea of otherness becomes dubious and perhaps selflessness comes more easily.
There's always been a tension between family and others. Scientific and philosophical ideas are manipulated to pull one way or the other. I don't see anything new here, and in support of that I'd cite the application of blood transfusion. Yes people are phenotypically different and that was "scientific" support for racism. But then science found there was no difference blood and blood transfusions could ignore race. This caused some consternation at first, but gradually the idea of "racial blood" has faded away.
So if people have the same blood, are made of the same physical stuff and work by the same biological principles, what will be cited as evidence for me being different from him?...our thoughts, consciousness obviously. You already see this in "religious" wars - Jews and Arabs are both Semitic peoples, they're not even racially different - so they are divided by their thoughts.
It also provides different answers to important human questions that science can't really address. For example: why not kill oneself in a blaze of hedonism? The fact that materialist atheists (I'm an agnostic atheist) still have a moral code that, ironically, appears very puritanical (give to charity, work for the common good, exercise, eat healthy, etc.) makes me suspect that they are, in fact, agnostics in the closet.
Science says kill yourself if you want - but you probably don't really want to because you're an evolved biological social animal and evolution has built you to want to survive and to care about your children and your group. So what's the different answer of comp? Kill yourself and you'll just be conscious in a different thread of computation?
- Suppose we build an AI that behaves like an human being, you suspect that it could be conscious. The "fundamental mater" model of reality invites us to look for evidence that it is conscious, to what degree and so on.
But only by looking at its behavior. There's nothing in a materialist model that says we must look for evidence in its atoms.
The reversal invites us to assign it personhood immediately, and further more assume no otherness. It is like us. This has ethical implications that I suspect we will soon have to consider. The same applies to aliens (although I'm not so sure we will ever have to worry about that).
It implies that we should regard a printout of the AI code as conscious too. That's essentially the MGA. But then if you accept the argument, the AI consciousness already existed in Platonia and will continue to exist no matter what we do to the machine or the code.
- Under the "fundamental matter" model, psychedelics are essentially substances that cause a brain malfunction. The explanation for their use is recreation. But if matter is a dream of mind, this forces us to revise the ontological status of such experiences.
Yes, that would be an ethical difference, although Huxley and millions of shamans have thought it without any reference to AI or comp, so it's not really new.
Ethically, it changes the prohibition from the banning of a form of recreation to a banning of entire universes. Perhaps more importantly, it constrains reality by ignoring entire sets of observations, which starts to feel like something that goes deeply against the scientific stance.
Maybe we'll start issuing visas for people to visit other universes. Brent -- 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.
