On 8/22/2014 11:24 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 22 Aug 2014, at 18:49, meekerdb wrote:
On 8/22/2014 2:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 21 Aug 2014, at 19:40, meekerdb wrote:
On 8/21/2014 1:03 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 21 Aug 2014, at 01:45, meekerdb wrote:
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".
Are you kidding me or what?
We have the raw consciousness for *all* universal machine, yes, then we nhave
self-consciousness for the Löbian machines, which are much more than universal
machine, then we have the 8 internal views, and all the refinement between belief,
knowledge, observation, feeling, all being themselves nuanced by the G and G*
separation, and all this in a testable (and tested ) way, thanks to the observation
part.
But, as I understand it, those computational based categories make no distinction
between the jumping spider (what do you have against web spiders?) the dog and me in
terms of consciousness.
Yes.
(there are no evidences that web spiders induce a world independent of them. There are
such evidence for the jumping spider, which arise probably for their complex hunting
technic. They have a bigger brain, also, and display more competence and changes of
competence according to different situations.
We all have feelings, knoweldge, make observations. But I think there are other
qualitative differences as I said above.
That difference is taking into account in the machine rational "believability",
symbolized by the modal "box", and which is representable in the brain in a 3p way,
unlike the []p & p, which cannot be represented, but will also admit qualitative
difference, according to the "memories" contained in the "[]" part. I agree,
consciousness admits infinities of qualitative differences.
So a conscious being may lack some qualities that another has.
Sure. I know a guy who survived a car crash, but lost completely the sense of taste and
smell.
Blind people, at birth, are not unconscious.
Which is what I meant by consciousness is not all-or-nothing.
That is what I said, that I did not mean it in that way, and I can even conceive
"conscious state" which looks, when we come back from them, like if the "conscious
intensity" was low. But consciousness itself is all of nothing.
But per you definitions ("being Turing universal", "being Lobian",...) it seems to be a
potentiality of a machine - not a state.
The image is like a real number can be great or little (that's relative), but it is
positive or null (in the classical analysis). It cannot be half positive half null, or
in a metaphorical sense only.
Now, that "intensity" is still a brain/number construct, part of a full invariant
conscious background. Some drugs, like alcohol up to the nausea, can trigger quite
unpleasing abnormal consciousness intensity level, perhaps related to liver problem.
Now, is the normal consciousness of a butterfly less intense than human's one. Less
rich? That is not clear for me. Self-consciousness adds a lot, but I am not sure it adds
"intensity".
But doesn't it add a qualitative difference. So without it a being would be less
conscious, as the Borg might be more conscious than we are.
Brent
I use quotes, as it is a very vague notion, which can be different in the experience and
in a recollection of the experience.
Bruno
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