On 16 May 2015, at 05:41, meekerdb wrote:
On 5/15/2015 7:37 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
meekerdb wrote:
On 5/15/2015 6:18 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
meekerdb wrote:
On 5/15/2015 4:40 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
meekerdb wrote:
On 5/14/2015 7:24 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
LizR wrote:
On 15 May 2015 at 06:34, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]
>> wrote:
I'm trying to understand what "counterfactual
correctness" means in
the physical thought experiments.
You and me both.
Yes. When you think about it, 'counterfactual' means that the
antecedent is false. So Bruno's referring to the branching
'if A then B else C' construction of a program is not really
a counterfactual at all, since to be a counterfactual A
*must* be false. So the counterfactual construction is 'A
then C', where A happens to be false.
The role of this in consciousness escapes me too.
It comes in at the very beginning of his argument, but it's
never made explicit. In the beginning when one is asked to
accept a digital prosthesis for a brain part, Bruno says
almost everyone agrees that consciousness is realized by a
certain class of computations. The alternative, as suggested
by Searle for example, that consciousness depends not only of
the activity of the brain but also what the physical material
is, seems like invoking magic. So we agree that consciousness
depends on the program that's running, not the hardware it's
running on. And implicit in this is that this program
implements intelligence, the ability to respond differently to
different externals signals/environment. Bruno says that's
what is meant by "computation", but whether that's entailed by
the word or not seems like a semantic quibble. Whatever you
call it, it's implicit in the idea of digital brain prosthesis
and in the idea of strong AI that the program instantiating
consciousness must be able to respond differently to different
inputs.
But it doesn't have respond differently to every different
input or to all logically possible inputs. It only needs to
be able to respond to inputs within some range as might occur
in its environment - whether that environment is a whole world
or just the other parts of the brain. So the digital
prosthesis needs to do this with that same functionality over
the same domain as the brain parts it replaced. In which case
it is "counterfactually correct". Right? It's a concept
relative to a limited domain.
That is probably right. But that just means that the prosthesis
is functionally equivalent over the required domain. To call
this 'counterfactual correctness' seems to me to be just
confused.
What makes the consciousness, in Bruno's view, is that it's the
right kind of program being run - which seems fairly
uncontroversial. And part of being the right kind is that it is
"counterfactually correct" = "functionally equivalent at the
software level". Of course this also means it correctly
interfaces physically with the rest of the world of which it is
conscious. But Bruno minimizes this by two moves. First, he
considers the brain as dreaming so it is not interacting via
perceptions. I objected to this as missing the essential fact
that the processes in the brain refer to perceptions and other
concepts learned in its waking state and this is what gives them
meaning. Second, Bruno notes that one can just expand the
digital prosthesis to include a digital artificial world,
including even a simulation of a whole universe. To which my
attitude is that this makes the concept of "prosthesis" and
"artificial" moot.
I don't think you would consider just *any* piece of software
running to be conscious and I do think you would consider some,
sufficiently intelligent behaving software, plus perhaps certain
I/O, to be conscious. So what would be the crucial difference
between these two software packages? I'd say having the ability
to produce intelligent looking responses to a large range of
inputs would be a minimum.
Quite probably. But the argument was made that the detailed
recording of the sequence of brain states of a conscious person
could not be conscious because it was not counterfactually
correct. This charge has always seemed to me to be misguided,
since the recording does not pretend to be functionally
equivalent to the original in all circumstances -- just in the
particular circumstance in which the recording was made. It has
never been proposed that the film could be used as a prosthesis
for all situations. So this argument against the replayed
recording recreating the original conscious moments must fail --
on the basis of total irrelevance.
But you could turn this around and pick some arbitrary sequence/
recording and say, "Well it would be the right program to be
conscious in SOME circumstance, therefore it's conscious."
I think it goes without saying that it is a recording of brain
activity of a conscious person -- not a film of your dog chasing a
ball. We have to assume a modicum of common sense.
Fine. But then what is it about the recording of the brain activity
of a conscious person that makes it conscious? Why is it a property
of just that sequence, when in general we would attribute
consciousness only to an entity that responded intelligently/
differently to different circumstances. We wouldn't attribute
consciousness based on just a short sequence of behavior such as
might be evinced by one of Disney's animitronics.
I think Bruno is right that it makes more sense to attribute
consciousness, like intelligence, to a program that can respond
differently and effectively to a wide range of inputs. And, maybe
unlike Bruno, I think intelligence and consciousness is only
possible relative to an environment, one with extent in time as well
as space.
The physical environment can put some weight on the measure, so that
consciousness is stabilized in normal histories, but consciousness
itself is associated to any computation or emulation of the
(generalized) brain (assuming comp).
So I do agree with you, for any consciousness lasting in subjective
time: the environment is brought by all computation going through my
states in the UD. For the first person plural perspective, statistics
is mandatory, and the points of view suggests already a non boolean,
quantum-like, statistics.
Bruno
Brent
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