On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 12:34:18PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > On 30 Aug 2015, at 03:08, Russell Standish wrote: > > >Well as people probably know, I don't believe C. elegans can be > >conscious in any sense of the word. Hell - I have strong doubts about > >ants, and they're massively more complex creatures. > > I think personally that C. Elegans, and Planaria (!), even amoeba, > are conscious, although very plausibly not self-conscious. > > I tend to think since 2008 that even RA is already conscious, even > maximally so, and that PA is already as much self-conscious than a > human (when in some dissociative state). > > But I don't know if PA is more or less conscious than RA. That > depends of the role of the higher part of the brain consists in > filtering consciousness or enacting it. > > > > >But it probably won't be long before we simulate a mouse brain in toto > >- about 2 decades is my guess, maybe even less given enough dollars - > >then we're definitely in grey philosophical territory :). > > I am slightly less optimistic than you. It will take one of two > decades before we simulate the hippocampus of a rat, but probably > more time will be needed for the rest of their brain. And the result > can be a conscious creature, with a quite different consciousness > that a rat, as I find plausible that pain are related to the glial > cells and their metabolism, which are not taken into account by the > current "copies".
What is blocking us is not the computing power - already whole "rat brain" simulations have been done is something like 1/10000 of real time - so all we need is about a decade of performane improvement through Moores law. What development is needed is ways of determining the neural circuitry. There have been leaps and bounds in the process of slicing frozen brains, and imaging the slices with electron microscopes, but clearly it is still far too slow. As for the hypothesis that glial cells have something to do with it, well that can be tested via the sort of whole rat brain simulation I've been talking about. Run the simulation in a robotic rat, and compare the behaviour with a real rat. Basically what the open worm guys a doing, but scaled up to a rat. If the simulation is way different from the real rat, then we know something else is required. > > > > > >One intersting test I'd like to see is applying Tononi's integrated > >information measure to these simple creatures to see if they're > >producing any integrated information. I suspect Integrated Information > >is a necessary requirement for conscious, but not so sure about > >sufficiency. > > It is offred freely with the notion of self-reference, I would say. > The eight hypostases/persons-pov constitute each a different mode of > the self-integration. If Kauffman's idea that the DNA results from > something akin to Kleene's diagonalization (which I think too) the > amoeba and most protozoans are already quite self-integrated being. > Then elementary invertebrates might loose that integration (like > perhaps hydra), but quickly get it back, like with planaria. > You might be right that integrated information can be obtained from your hypostases, but it is not obvious. More work is required before you can plausibly make that claim. > I guess that you remember that I am not yet convinced by your > argument that ants are not conscious, as it relies on anthropic use > of the Absolute Self-Sampling Assumption (ASSA) which I prefer to > avoid because the domain of its statistic is not clear to me. (I am > not impressed by the doomsday argument for the same reason). > Yes, I've heard that a lot. "I'm not impressed" = "It sounds like a crock of shit, but I can't put my finger on why". Probably the best way forward is to put forward a toy model showing the anthropic argument failing, and then the mechanism is clear. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
