On 8/20/2014 2:20 PM, John Mikes wrote:
Brent: why should "spiders" (etc.) be 'not conscious'?
I think they are, in a way. But if I were pitching the idea of uploading someone's mother
into a virtual reality and warranting that said virtual mother would be conscious, I don't
think I'd mention that the concept of "conscious" was elastic enough to include spiders.
BTW what is your take on "conscious"? I have no idea myself, because I consider
"everything" an 'observer' that tackles info about anything - and
the brainfunction(?) invoked by many for conscious processes lacks the connection in our
present scintific catasters (measurements?) to topical contents (distinctions).
When I have to speak about 'consciousness' I have a different meaning in mind from
'being conscious' (an elusive term).
Ccness means in my vocabulary the 'response to relations'. A process.
I tried to distinguish that, which I called "awarness" from "self-awarness". Maybe I
should lay out my idea of these levels of consciousness, not claiming they have some
metaphysical significance, just terminology:
awareness: JM's response to relations. This is very low level, like my thermostat is
aware of the temperature because it has a specific response to it in service of a goal.
self-awareness: Having an interior mental model in which self is represented alongside
other 3p elements of the model, i.e. my koi know where they are in the pond.
consciousness: Creating a narrative account of events for memory and calling up those
memories in developing "responses to relations".
self-consciousness: Reflective awareness of consciousness, i.e. attributing thought and
intention to the 3p model of one's self.
Dunno if those are useful, but they seem to me to be a kind of hierarchy of consciousness
that is more descriptive and finer than Bruno's "any universal Turing machine".
Brent
John M
On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 3:39 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 8/20/2014 11:20 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 19 Aug 2014, at 21:49, John Mikes wrote:
Stathis:
you wrote Aug.19:
/"What we know is that the brain can generate consciousness. The brain is
not a
digital computer running a program, but if it can be simulated by one, and
if the
simulation is conscious, and if the program can be "run" in Platonia rather
than
on a physical computer, then every possible brain's consciousness will
necessarily
be instantiated. I'm not sure whether self-referential computations on
their own
are conscious - that would seem a further assumption on top of the three
mentioned
in the previous sentence - even though it does seem more elegant than
simulating
klunky brains./
/
/
Let's skip the question of defining Ccness (maybe broader than BEING ccous)
and
let me ask HOW do you know that the brain can generate 'it'? Do you have a
brain
that never had 'it' and followed a process BY it(!) generating Ccness?
Those experiments in which computer etc. (NOT some 'brain'-input)
're-started'
the process were all carried out on (live?) "brains" previously capable of
doing
it (whatever).
I agree that "/The brain is not a digital computer running a program,...". /
Are ALL details of the so called "brain"(function?) mapped and correlated?
Are all
facets of 'brain' even knowable? we think we know some. Then newer items are
detected (or thought so) and included smoothly into the previous setup.
IMO we are far from being able to 'simulating' a human brain in its
entirety.
And we will never know if we can do that, but indeed here we can't know
much. yet
some people will accept, in the future, such artificial brains, and the
rest is a
question of rights. The question will never be does it work, some people
will have
the religion that it works, and that it is handy to explore the Solar
System at the
speed of light.
The only real question is "do you accept that your daughter or son marries a
partner who get an artificial kidney, heart and brain".
We cannot know, but we can make bet. Also, we don't know any laws in nature
which
is not computable, so your attitude is more a speculation on some unknown
things to
prevent testing a possible, and plausible from the 3p evidences, facts.
We cannot know our level of substitution.
Something like this is possible. The first immortal person, in the
technological
relative sense (pursuing the Samsara), will be copied only at a rough
incomplete
description of her cortex. Then it will take her 5224 years to recover some
stable
sense-full life, recover smell and genuine vision, and it will take her
another
millenium to overcome the amnesia.
We will never know, John.
If true, we can't know it.
But people will bet on level, and that's what we always do. Then we can
make the
bet precise and deduce consequences, and ask for consistency of the set of
beliefs.
Plausibly the mobile will get in the ear and in the yes and then in the
peripheral
nervous systems, the cerebral stem up to the cortex, if we made a lapse on
the next
millennia.
Many humans will refuse, and it is their right, but others will make the
jump. At
their risk and peril.
I think long before that people will be "uploaded" to computers where they
will live
on (as much as they can afford) in virtual realities. This will be paid
for by
their children and relatives who wish to keep them "alive" so they can
converse and
reminisce with them. I think it could be done now, although crudely. One
could
assure clients that the well known logician, Bruno Marchal, has shown that
the
"uploaded" person is conscious. No need to mention that by his measure
spiders are
also conscious. :-)
Greg Egan envisioned such a future in "Permutation City". I once wrote a
one-act
play on that theme, which sadly I have not gotten performed.
Brent
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