OOPS! I hit "send" when I intended to "close" my email. So here's another try
at replying.
On 9/16/2014 9:21 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Hi Russell, Hi Others,
Sorry for the delay. Some comments on your (Russell) MGA paper appear below.
On 25 Aug 2014, at 00:30, Russell Standish wrote:
On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 01:22:51PM -0700, meekerdb wrote:
On 8/24/2014 12:55 AM, Russell Standish wrote:
I don't think that can be the case. I don't see how it can be anything
to be like a tree, yet trees are clearly DNA-based beings. So you
would get skewed results if you were to reason as though you could be
a tree.
Exactly. It's a reductio on the pattern of argument you used to
prove ants can't be conscious. I used it to prove ants can't be DNA
based.
I don't understand. How is having DNA relevant to having
consciousness? It is quite plausible that non-DNA-based forms are
conscious (eg a computer running a suitable AI program), and that
some DNA-based forms are not conscious (trees, for example).
DNA isn't relevant to consciousness. It was just an example of something we share with
ants, to point out that an argument that ants aren't conscious because if they were we'd
be ants is invalid.
I agree.
Incidentally, when you see the complexity of the interaction between the roots of trees
and the soils, chemicals and through bacteria, and when you believe, as some experiences
suggest, that trees and plant communicate, I am not so sure if trees and forest, perhaps
on different time scale, have not some awareness, and a self-awareness of some sort. (I
take awareness as synonymous with consciousness, although I change my mind below!).
The reference class cannot be larger than the class of conscious
beings. Obviously it can be quite a bit smaller, but there must be a
maximal reference class for which anthropic reasoning is valid,
although it is quite controversial what it is - some suggest it may
even be as small as those people capable of understanding the
anthropic argument, a sizable fraction of which inhabits this list!
That's what bothers me. If you exclude ants because they're not
conscious (and I assume you've read "Godel, Escher, and Bach") and
hence can't understand the argument, why not exclude people who
can't understand the argument?
"Ant Fugue" is about the possibility that ant _colonies_ might be
conscious. My argument has nothing to say about ant colonies, even
though I consider "Ant Fugue" to be just an interesting speculation,
rather than a serious claim about ant colonies.
I am a bit agnostic on this. But I have few doubt that individual ants have some
consciousness, though.
But why is "consciousness" or "understanding the argument" the relevant attribute of
"us"? Why not "breathes oxygnen" or "metabolized carbohydrates"?
Oh - perhaps you mean "can't understand the argument" as in organisms
that can't understand the anthropic argument must be excluded from the
reference class. This seems a rather implausible claim - just because
anthropic argument has not occurred to you yet, shouldn't really
exclude you. The idea that self-awareness is a necessary requirement
of the reference class is a perhaps more believable claim - in order to even
think anthropically requires a concept of self - but then I'm still
not sure what it even means to be conscious, but not self-aware. What
does it even mean to "be an amoeba", as Bruno seems to think is possible.
Yes, that's another way of asking the same question - why is "be an amoeba" the important
category?
OK. I will make a try. Awareness in its most basic forms comes from the ability to
distinguish a good feeling from a bad feeling. The amoeba, like us, knows (in a weak
sense) that eating some paramecium is good, but that hot or to cold place are bad, and
this makes it reacts accordingly with some high degrees of relative self-referential
correctness. The genome of the amoeba, which is really a collection of cooperating many
genomes (lot of "nucleus") is Turing universal or "complete", and the amoeba incarnates
it relatively to her (our) probable lower substitution level (which defines by the FPI
the physical reality). So she get a life, a first person life, of some sorts. Little
consciousness, if you want, because from the first person view of the amoeba it is the
whole big thing. The life of protozoans are similar to ours. They keep moving for
eating, try to avoid the possible predators, get sleepy (very deeply so) when it get
cold (the cell transforms into a sort of egg), and they really dislike when being eaten,
and try to avoid it instinctively, but with a possible "bad" experience.
here an amoeba eats two paramecia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvOz4V699gk
I agree. You're defining amoeba's to be conscious because of the intelligence of their
behavior, and as you note (though you've denied elsehwere) they may be said to have a
"little consciousness" because their intelligence has a relatively narrow scope of action.
However, you shift around inconsistently and refer to amoeba as a genome (or the
species?). The genome may be "intelligent" in a different way in the sense that it can
evolve into say and Einstein and so solve some difficult problems - but this is not what
we generally mean by intelligence or consciousness. It's not awareness of the environment
except in one response: reproduce or not. All the rest of the "intelligence" comes from
random variation.
Now, amoeba are universal, but not Löbian, and so they lack the Kp -> KKp law, and are
not self-aware. Nor do have them memories, or only few one, so they live in the instant
present, happy when eating, unhappy when being eaten. At least they will not
philosophize and be unhappy when eating because they know they *might* be eaten, nor
happy when being eaten because they got the point that it is part of the game of life
and be serene about this, or because they believe in christ or someone. You need to be
Löbian to develop those form of craziness. I think this came with lower invertebrate,
like jumping spiders and cuttlefishes. But they are lucky, their brain are not enough
big to develop much of the craziness. They probably live a little bit less in the
present, but still don't get the point of the existential question.
To be aware is to feel the cold, the hot, the yummy, the acidity level, and capable of
interpreting it "self-referentially", and reacting.
Right. It's to have values and to be able to act to attempt to realize them.
To be self-aware add the memories and one more reflexive loop (which you get in RA when
adding the induction axioms, leading to PA). As long as you are correct, you obey the
modal logic G and G* in that case. But the 1p views obeys the intensional variants.
But that smacks of parochialism, much like the notion of
geocentrism. I just haven't found a convincing argument that the
maximal reference class is not just the class of conscious organisms,
of beings for whom there is a something it is like to be.
But my question (which you haven't answered) is what you think this
maximal reference class is from your four part classification of consciousness.
If I had to pick, I'd say it was those entities who were aware of
their own thoughts and had sufficient language to formulate Bayesian
inference.
The Bayesian theory is a bit stringent don't you think. There are
plenty of formulations of the doomsday argument that don't use
Bayesian reasoning. Take Gott's version for example.
Self-awareness, as I mentioned, is more defensible property. The
question is whether non-self-aware consciousness (your koi) is a
coherent concept.
I agree that to have awareness, you need a self, a third person self. But that is well
played by the relative body (actually bodies, incarnate through the UD).
Maybe we should define consciousness by self-awareness, and then self-consciousness
would be the higher form of self-self-awareness? That makes one "self" per reflexive loop.
I think there are different levels of self-awareness and maybe that's what you have in
mind. The first level is just being aware of one's self and nothing else. Amoeba have
this. The second level is being aware of one's self and of one's relation to other things
in the world. I'd say spiders and koi have this level. Then there's being aware of one's
self and of one's relation to other things and to other self-aware beings. I'd say dogs
and cats have this level. And then there's being aware of one's self and of what other's
think of you and of how you think of yourself.
Brent
Attacks on anthropic reasoning will work better by choosing a
reference class which is indisputably a subset of the reference class,
such as all human beings, and then demonstrating a contradiction. I
thought I had come up with such an example with my "Chinese paradox",
but it turned out anthropic reasoning was rescued from that by the
peculiar distribution of country population sizes that happens to hold
in reality. AR has proved remakably resilient to empirical tests.
I am still a bit agnostic for its use in the fundamentals, as the probability, with
computationalism, are always relative. It is the same in quantum mechanics, where the
probabilities are not on states, but on relative states: they have always the form <a I
b>^2, the probability for finding b when being in the state a.
But we can extract useful information from the Anthropic principle, and even from the
most general Turing-thropic. Just saying that the laws of physics should be a calculus
of relative probabilities.
PS I have printed your MGA paper, and so read it and comment it despite being in a busy
period.
Let me say here, as we are in the good thread, two main points, where we might have
vocabulary issue, or perhaps disagree on something? So you might think about this and be
prepared :)
The first point concerns the relation between counterfactualness and modal realism, that
you link in a way which makes me a bit uneasy. I do believe in some links between them,
though, but it might not correspond to yours. Examples will follow later.
The second point is the one we have already discussed, and concerns the definition of
supervenience. We do both agree on the Stanford definition, but I am still thinking you
are misusing it when apply to the Alice and Bob in the classroom situation.
You agree that
C supervenes on B if to change C it is necessary to change B.
For example, consciousness C supervenes on a brain activity B, because to change that
consciousness you need to change that brain activity.
Now take the (physical) union of B and A: B-and-A.
If you change B, you automatically change B-and-A.
So if consciousness C supervenes on B, you need to make a change to B-and-A (indeed to
the B part), and so automatically C will supervenes on the union of B and A.
So when Alice and Bob are in the classroom, we have that
- Alice's consciousness supervenes on Alice's brain activity
- Alice's consciousness supervenes on Alice + the entire room (including Bob's brain
activity)
- Bob consciousness supervenes on Bob's brain activity.
- Bob consciousness supervenes on Bob + the entire room (including Alice's
brain activity).
It is not a problem that both Bob's and Alice's consciousness supervenes on the same
classroom, as to make a change in either Alice or Bob's consciousness, you need to make
a change of the A+B system.
It is the same for UD*. My and your consciousness supervenes on UD*. To make a change
to my or your's consciousness here and now, we would need to make the (impossible)
change in the UD*.
Are you OK with:
(C supervenes on B) entails (C supervenes on B+D), with B+D being some physical union of
B and some C.
I have to go, sorry for the delays, and possible other delays. September-october are
particularly heavy this year, but we have all the time, OK?
Best,
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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