On 22 Aug 2014, at 21:39, meekerdb wrote:
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.
Right. With the comp supervenience, consciousness is not related to a
state, but to a state + the past states, + the future states. The type
of consciousness (= the points of view, the hypostases) structures
such cloud of neighbor states differently.
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.
Very good question. I am not sure.
With Löbianity, we might even loss some qualitative difference.
Those are very hard problem corresponding to the fact that an empty
"and" is always true, or that the unary intersection of the empty set
is the collection of all set. The unary intersection of a set, is
given by the intersection of all its elements (in opure set theory
where all elements are sets). The empty set is empty so for all y in
{ }, you do have the consequence, I mean (x in { }) -> # is
always"trivially" true, so 1-inter({ }) = U (the universe of sets).
Like wize, the empty state of the virgin universal machine can be a
qualitatively maximal consciousness state, and the brain activity
would be a kind of filtrations of the potentialities.
You need one Marcel Proust to give a glimpse on one minute of the
conscious experience "the madeleine effect", where a one second
tasting of some biscuits/molecules reminds a whole of sort of forgot
past memories".
With comp, we might already need an infinity of "Marcel Proust" to
give a glimpse of the first person one day life of a butterfly.
But the butterflies don't correlate its action, with its mind state.
He might feel "need some flowers", and fly accordingly, but it does
not theorize about its relation with what he feels, unlike, I think,
jumping spiders, and cuttle fishes. "hunting" animals have more reason
to become Löbian, especially those who evolve the terrestrial
exploration, like the spiders who use their web as simple couches, or
for the eggs, but hunt in the wild, with naked legs, if I can say.
Keep in mind that the butterfly person is subject to the FPI too, and
nature recurs probably on many similar 1p states, even more (somehow,
not significantly, recurrently as they have less Kbits in their
description states).
If comp is true, butterfly are immortal too, and you might have been
one (in some neuro-embryological-logico-arithmetical sense).
So without it a being would be less conscious, as the Borg might be
more conscious than we are.
OK, in that sense. Careful because consciousness has many ladders, and
many are orthogonal, so the terms can be misleading. I think we agree
on this.
Bruno
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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