First remark: I do not equate 'compute' with 'calculate math.-ly', but from
the Latin origin: "put together thoughts (whatever putare refers to)".
Second remark: amoeba is  SSOOO different from a 'human' that in human
terms it sounds "strange" to imagine how/what it feels/thinks.

Supporting idea:
1. according to my (agnostic) belief the WORLD (call it Nature, or call it
whatever you like) is an infinite complexity of the Entirety and we have
but a tiny proportional access to some segments of it.
AND - to try to explain our entire existence (let me call it instead of
our "objective human reality" our human subjective composite)  ---
math-related terms would simplify the task into one plane (numbers) instead
of applying the unlimited 'planes' (connections) of the infinite complexity
of Everything we cannot even fathom.

2. the complexity-levels of an amoeba and a human (mind? I don't know about
'soul' mentioned here) are so vastly different that no straight comparison
seems realistic.

John Mikes


On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 8:11 AM, Pierz <pier...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I disagree with most of the theorising about this scenario, which seems to
> me to be coming from a much too theoretical place. Humans may or may not be
> computational at base, but we are not PCs. We are not blank slates, waiting
> for an operating system to be installed. Our brains and bodies imply an
> environment and a developmental trajectory in which social interaction and
> emotional nurture play a critical role. (Consider the famous "wire mother"
> experiments performed on rhesus monkeys:
> http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/studies/HarlowMLE.htm) A person raised
> like a brain in a vat, "sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything", is not an
> amoeba, but a torture victim. Certainly they would fail to develop into
> something we would recognize as a person, but they would not and could not
> "fail to become a person", because personhood is not a function of the
> development of specific physical or cognitive capabilities. People with
> locked-in syndrome are also often not recognised as persons because they
> cannot communicate their personhood. My own suspicion with regards to this
> scenario is that the victim would die, as people sometimes do who are
> deprived of all hope. Physical health is not merely a product of the input
> of certain nutrients, the removal of wastes and so on. Like development
> itself, it is a function of a relationship between a body and an
> environment to which that body, mind and soul are adapted. That is the
> meaning of being an organism, and it's why the computational metaphor sits
> badly with me sometimes (I don't agree with much of what Craig Weinberg
> used to say, but I suspect we're aligned on that point).  If we're
> computers, it is only in the most abstract sense, but the metaphor tends to
> extend itself, as metaphors do. The infant "expects" a mother, without
> being able to name that expectation. It expects a lot more too - to put it
> simply, it expects a *world. *In some sense, it *is* that world, having
> evolved over billions of years as a response to it. This makes the
> "experiment" extremely artificial - as a philosopher of mind we might be
> tempted to think of the subject as a kind of computational tabula rasa, as
> Bruno appears to do. But in truth he or she is much more like the most
> extreme form of amputee.
>
>
>
>
> On Monday, September 21, 2015 at 10:55:55 PM UTC+10, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>> Hi Brian, Telmo and others,
>>
>> On 21 Sep 2015, at 02:49, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>
>> Hi Brian,
>>
>> That's an interesting question. My take is this: I think trying to
>> understand that experience is like trying to understand what it feels like
>> to be an amoeba. It's just too alien.
>>
>>
>> I am not sure. I can imagine an amoeba having "proto-feeling" comparable
>> to ours. An amoeba or a paramecium might feel something like some urge to
>> find food when hungry, some urge to find a mate, some urge to build a kist
>> due to pollution, ... A monocellular eukaryotic organism is a cell playing
>> the roles of liver cells, digestive cells, skin cells, neuronal cells,
>> muscular cells, etc. In the case of paramecium, this is more or less
>> confirmed by the molecular structure of the cells, in which key molecules
>> playing the corresponding role of each organ can be found. In particular we
>> can anesthetize a paramecium, we can block its locomotion with inhibiters
>> similar to what can inhibit our muscles, etc.
>> (Note that muscular and neuronal key molecules of that type have been
>> found at the base of the roots of plants too, and we can indeed anesthetize
>> plants).
>> The only difficulty for us to imagine what is like to be an amoeba might
>> comes when it divides itself, but then in this list this should no more be
>> a problem (except for Clark and Peck I guess).
>>
>> But this does not solve Brian's difficult question. A human totally
>> deprived of an environment would be more like an encysted amoeba, never
>> going out of its "egg" (cyst), I think its consciousness might be similar
>> to the consciousness of the virgin machine (the non programmed computer),
>> which I think is similar to the consciousness we can have during some phase
>> of sleep or with some drug (notably salvia). That is a consciousness state
>> that we can hardly conceive, because it is not time-related, nor
>> space-related. To imagine it, some thought experience can be given, but
>> they will have to contain "total amnesia", and even this will just be a
>> sort of approximation. In fact such a state of consciousness, even when
>> lived, are not strictly speaking memorable. If some theories are correct,
>> the feeling can be like an "home feeling". It looks like some people
>> getting at that state describe it as the usual, normal consciousness when
>> in absence of any hallucination: it is being like "you" before you begin
>> any differentiation. Even among those who describe it as "home", some are
>> quite positive about it (like bliss) and some are negative about it.. Note
>> that people doing deprivation of input experience in talk deprivation, are
>> actually trying to get closer to such state (and some claims to have found
>> it in that way).
>>
>> Now, it is only recently (well since 2008) that I think that all
>> universal machine are maximally conscious, and why that sort of "blank
>> state", when given information/input, is somehow distracted, and will
>> confuse that "out-of-time" consciousness with its growing content. If such
>> state was too much easily accessible, we would get in there when we have
>> problem, instead of solving the problem, and probably accept equally to eat
>> and to be eaten, which is a good state at the end of life, but handicapping
>> when young where we are supposed to take life, and its information flux,
>> very seriously. We forget quickly our nocturnal dreams for probable similar
>> reason.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> We have some clues. For example, it is known that if children don't learn
>> a language until a certain age, they become incapable of learning a
>> language forever. There are some instances of this, with children being
>> raised by animals in the wild.
>>
>> I believe we depend on a lot of information that is encoded in the
>> environment to become human. What you describe would be a life form, but
>> not human as we understand it. A developing brain is capable of growing
>> into what we understand to be a human brain, but not by itself.
>>
>>
>> "Humanness" is encoded in the environment, it transcends single bodies or
>> what DNA can encode by itself.
>>
>>
>> I agree with this and what the others said. If you are never feed any
>> input, you are in the state that "you" had before birth, and with some
>> luck, after clinical death (when you don't backtrack on different
>> continuations, if that is possible, as plant and experience reports suggest
>> to be possible). It is not a human state of mind.
>>
>> To be honest, I have done a simplification here, as a fetus *might* have
>> preprogrammed human experiences and skills. Babies seem to be able to swim
>> and walk immediately after birth (like horse), but quickly forget those
>> skills (and perhaps associated experience) to learn them again through the
>> try and error typical way for baby to learn (unlike horse who will just
>> walk instinctively). So, a real human born in a deprivation tank might have
>> some experience, due to the fact that it has some brain, will get food,
>> etc. he will have the sleep phases, and might dream that he is hungry for
>> example. I doubt that he will be able to imagine colors and shapes, though.
>> (To be sure I read that some people born blind did saw color when taking
>> some drugs, which is not so hard to conceive, as color might be partially
>> preprogrammed in the brain too). But the reports might be fake, and that
>> might be circumstantial, and my answer is on the principle, not in
>> practice, where such an experience would be ... inhuman to do.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Bruno
>>
>> *We are not human beings having from time to time divine experiences. We
>> are divine beings having from time to time human experiences (de Chardin).*
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Telmo.
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 1:21 AM, Brian Tenneson <ten...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I wonder what would happen to someone's mind if they were born in a
>>> white (or any color) isolation tank. What would happen as years wore on?
>>> Would the person ever hallucinate anything? It has only seen the tank for
>>> his whole life. So what would inspire him to hallucinate something? Can he
>>> hallucinate, say, a friend staring at him from across the void without ever
>>> seeing a friend or anything for that matter except the white isolation
>>> tank. Would he dream and what would he dream of? Would dreaming become
>>> one with waking? Would he even know what a dream is? He has never heard the
>>> word "dream" spoken out loud. But he knows which worlds decay faster or are
>>> more "curvy" in the world-line sense: dreams decay faster or are more
>>> "curvy" than waking events. So, locally, we usually know when it's a dream.
>>> When the event world-line is straight, that means we pretty much never know
>>> what is a dream and what is "real"?
>>>
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>>
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>> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
>>
>>
>>
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