On 17 May 2015, at 18:34, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sun, May 17, 2015 at 10:44 AM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 16 May 2015, at 15:47, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 2:48 PM, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]
> wrote:
Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 11:50 AM, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 10:22 AM, Bruce Kellett
Are you seriously going to argue that homo sapiens did *not*
arise by a process of natural selection, aka evolution?
No, Darwinian evolution is my favourite scientific theory.
What I am arguing is that we don't know if consciousness is an
evolved trait. It is perfectly possible to imagine darwinian
evolution working without consciousness, even to the human
intelligence level (producing philosophical zombies).
For example, if consciousness is more fundamental than matter,
then evolution is something that happens within consciousness,
not a generator of it.
That is probably the strongest argument against computationalism to
date.
How so?
So you think that Darwinian evolution produced intelligent zombies,
and then computationalism infused consciousness?
No. What I am saying is that consciousness is not a plausible
target for gradual evolution for the following reasons:
1) There is no evolutionary advantage to it, intelligent zombies
could do equally well. Every single behaviour that each one of us
has, as seen for the outside, could be performed by intelligent
zombies;
2) There is no known mechanism of conscious generation that can be
climbed. For example, we understand how neurons are computational
units, how connecting neurons creates a computer, how more neurons
and more connections create a more powerful computer and so on.
Evolution can climb this stuff. There is no equivalent known
mechanism for consciousness.
I don't know if intelligent zombies are possible. Maybe
consciousness necessarily supervenes on the stuff necessary for
that level of intelligence. But who knows where consciousness stops
supervening? Maybe stuff that is not biologically evolved is
already conscious. Maybe stars are conscious. Who knows? How could
we know?
I think we can say that universal numbers are conscious, but they
are self-conscious only when they become Löbian.
So, in a sense, I agree with you, consciousness is already there, in
arithmetic, seen in some global way.
Then it can differentiate on the different computation which will
relatively incarnate/implement those universal numbers.
I think you are going to have to do better than that if you want
comp to be believed by anyone with any scientific knowledge.
Anyone with any scientific knowledge will be agnostic on comp.
There is no basis to believe it or disbelieve it. Maybe it is
unknowable. What we can do is investigate the consequences of
assuming comp.
If the classical-comp-physics is different from the empirical
physics, we wll have clues that the classical comp is false.
Ok. Do you have any intuition on the level of effort necessary to
extract classical physics from comp?
I guess that you mean the approximate classical physics.
In fact classical comp entails the falsity of classical physics. Comp
entails quickly the non booleanity of all points of view, and the main
features of the quantum.
So we just derive the quantum from comp, and then will derive the
classical limit from the quantum, and it will be more difficult, and
perhaps impossible, which would make the apparent classicalness of
physics geographical. i doubt this, as I think that space and time
arise from the necessary part of the necessary quantum feature, but I
am less sure for the Hamiltonian.
You really are calling on dualism to explain consciousness -- the
homunculus in the machine.....
I am not trying to explain consciousness. I don't know what
consciousness is
I think you know what consciousness is (you just cannot define it).
True.
or how it originates. What I am claiming is that current science
has nothing to say about it either.
Hmm...
Would you be willing to accept, if only for the sake of a
discussion, the following "consciousness of P axioms" (P for a
person):
1) P know that P is conscious,
2) P is conscious entails that P cannot doubt that P is conscious,
3) P, like any of its consistent extensions, cannot justify that P
(resp the consistent extensions) is (are) conscious
4) P cannot define consciousness in any 3p way. (But might with some
good definition of 1p.)
4) comp: there is a level of description of P's body such that P's
consciousness is invariant for a digital substitution made at that
level.
I have no problem with any of these axioms. They feel like a natural
expansion on "cogito ergo sum" + the definition of comp.
OK. So you agree science can talk about it, and some, like Descartes
already suggested the main axiom.
But then it just a matter of digging a bit in computer science, as
machines in arithmetic have also already found an approximation of
Descartes, when they discover that the fixed point of the doubt (<>
~x) is entails by the the x we doubt about.
Gödel's theorem explains why the numbers cannot *not* develop
consciousness, once you accept the axiom above. In fact, the notion of
consistency is the closest 3p notion to the (necessary 1p)
consciousness.
If yes, then current computer science can already explains why
universal machine, or Löbian machine, are already conscious (even
just in arithmetic).
Roughly speaking, consciousness originates from the fact that p ->
[]p (the sigma_1 truth get represented in the body/brain of the
machine), and the fact that []p -> p is true, but non justifiable by
the machine. That makes the machine which are developing knowledge,
more and more aware of their possible relative ignorance, and above
some threshold, even wise, as they understand that the augmentation
of knowledge leads to the augmentation of ignorance. The more the
lantern is powerful in the cavern, the more we see that the cavern
is big.
Nice way to put it.
Also, that (axiomatic) notion of consciousness has many role, from
speeding up the relative ability of the machine, and augmenting the
degrees of freedom, to distinguishing efficaciously the bad (like
being eaten) from the good (like eaten). It makes also possible to
understand each other, even if quite imperfectly.
Consciousness is what makes possible to internalize some semantic:
it is the sense maker, or the (instinctive) bet of self-consistency,
or, equivalently, of the presence of some reality or some truth.
In the definition of knowledge ([]p & p), consciousness appears to
be more on the side of truth (p), than of []p. It looks like the
brain-body ([]p) is mainly a filter of truth (p) and of
consciousness than the producer.
I still feel that you are talking about intelligence, and that you
are perhaps showing that intelligence entails consciousness, but
consciousness itself is maintained as a brute fact. I still feel
there's a magic step.
There is a gap, but comp explains why there is necessarily a gap.
Consciousness is like God: if someone comes with a complete theory, it
means it is a fraud.
Actually, I think we can intuit this. Try to think about what could be
like a satisfactory direct theory of consciousness, it will seems to
you directly like a fraud.
The only thing we can do, with comp, is to explain the axiomatic of
consciousness from machine's predicate definable or not definable by
the machine) which obeys formally to the same logic. Asking more is
provably impossible (assuming comp).
Also, with comp, zombies are not possible, because you need some
body to make a zombie. And there are none, after the reversal.
Couldn't the zombies be part of the dreams of computations, like
other features of the universe?
Yes, and they are, but then they are not real-ontologically. With comp
zombie have no bodies, they are only appearance to person, given that
consciousness is not related to any primary body. You can only dream
about a zombie. The concept makes no sense once we just abandon the
physical supervenience. Consciousness is related to infinities of
number relation, and physics is part of it, with the measure problem
and all what needs to be done to test comp.
Of course, I talk of zombie as a tool in the derivation of the
absurdity. In MGA, for example, we use both the sup-phys and the sup-
comp, to get a contradiction.
Bruno
Telmo.
Bruno
Telmo.
Bruce
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