On Thursday, May 28, 2015 at 6:06:22 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: > > On 5/26/2015 10:31 PM, Pierz wrote: > > Where I see lookup tables fail is that they seem to operate above the >> probable necessary substation level. (Despite having the same >> inputs/outputs at the higher levels). >> >> But your memoization example still makes a good point - namely that > some computations can be bypassed in favour of recordings, yet presumably > this doesn't lead to fading qualia. We don't need anything as silly as a > gigantic lookup table of all possible responses. We only need to > acknowledge that we can store the results of recordings of computations > we've already completed, and that this should not result in any strange > degradation of consciousness. > > > Isn't that what allows me to drive home from work without being conscious > of it? >
People keep making this point, which is one that I myself made in the past - and I believe you argued with me at the time, saying that it's not clear that the mechanism for automating brain functions is anything like the same as caching the results of a computation. I think that objection is actually fair enough. With automated actions it's not clear that the computations aren't being carried out any more, just that they no longer require conscious attention because the neuronal pathways for those computations have become sufficiently reinforced that they no longer require concentration. I think this model (automated computation rather than cached computation) fits our experience of this phenomenon. Sometimes I suspect we're really talking out of our proverbial arses with these speculations as we still have so little idea about how the brain works. It may be a computer in the sense that it is Turing emulable, but then we talk as if it were squishy laptop or something, and that analogy can be misleading in many ways. For example, our memories are nothing like RAM. They are distributed like a hologram, constructive and fuzzy, whereas computer memory is localised, passive and accurate to the bit. I'm probably guilty of the same over-zealous computationalism with my lookup table analogy above, but I was thinking more of an AI and the in-principle point that cached computation results may be employed at a fine grained level. I would continue to insist that it is meaningless to say that a "brain" that employs cached results of computations is a zombie to the extent that it does so, because it is meaningless to speak of the "when" of qualia. (You never replied to my argument about poking a recorded Einstein with a stick, which I think makes a compelling case for this.) We have to rigorously divide the subjective and the objective. > > Brent > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
