On 10/31/2015 11:47 PM, Pierz wrote:
On Sunday, November 1, 2015 at 4:18:05 PM UTC+11, Brent wrote:
On 10/31/2015 8:55 PM, Pierz wrote:
OK, a subject title designed to provoke, but here's a thought
that has intrigued me. Computationalism (and let's not worry for
the time being about whether one buys Bruno's UDA) states that
consciousness supervenes on computation. This necesssarily
implies (by Church thesis) that the hardware doesn't matter.
This commits us to some unintuitive scenarios in which thought is
instantiated by means of carrier pigeons delivering letters with
symbols written on them, or dominoes falling or whatever. It's
assumed that such a computation must reach a certain level of
complexity in order to become conscious, though what level of
complexity is not specified. According to some views (Brent has
expressed this position), it is necessary that the computations
reference a "world", though I'll admit I don"t understand the
rationale for that exactly. Important though is that it is
neither necessary that the computations are carried out in some
localised "device"/brain nor that they are carried out by "wetware".
So my thinking is this: isn't /evolution/ precisely such a
computation?
I take it you mean life is doing a computation which consists of
finding ways to live and reproduce. Life on Earth is executing
THE paradigmatic genetic algorithm.
Exactly.
It is undoubtedly an extremely complex calculation (more so than
any human thought has ever been), and it undoubtedly "references
a world". Bruno mentions "Loebianity" in this context as well, or
the capacity for self-reference. I'm not so sure about this in
relation to an evolutionary computation. Certainly it is a highly
recursive procedure with a continual self-environment feedback
loop. I don't understand Loebianity sufficiently to say whether
genes , or the gene-environment system, might possess it. However
I'm also not sure if it's required for consciousness, or merely
/self/- consciousness. I don't see that the possession of qualia
demands the possession of self-awareness, though I can also see
that it is at least conceivable that an evolutionary feedback
system might possess a kind of self-reference.
Anyway it seems that if we're committed to computationalism plus
Church thesis, then we have to consider the possibility that
evolution may be a conscious process - indeed the onus should be
on us to say why it /wouldn't/ be conscious. Which does not mean
I am suggesting some mystical additional ingredient. Evolution
would still be described objectively in terms of random mutation
plus environmental selection, but this process may have an
interior component, its own "1P".
Yes, I think that's right in a sense. Life in a sense forms a
representation of the world. If a alien scientist were told just
about the living organisms on Earth he could infer a great deal
about the inorganic aspects of the planet. I don't know if you
could say it's self-aware, except by inclusion of ourselves. The
problem is that it may be conscious in such a different way from
humans or animals that it doesn't really add anything to our
understanding of it to say it is conscious. I've sometimes had a
similar idea about the atmosphere and weather. Isn't weather a
kind of computation performed by the atmosphere and isn't it aware
of things in its environment like solar heating, ocean currents
and temperatures, human activities like jet liners and burning
fossil fuel,...
Yes. But then isn't an orbiting planet carrying out a computation?
Isn't a river? Isn't an atom doing quantum computing? It almost
becomes a matter of perspective whether any given physical process is
a computation or not, e.g., if someone wanted to compute the route
that water would take down a given slope, they could "compute" it
analogically with actual water on an actual slope. Which, combined
with computationalism, seems like the (ahem) slippery slope to
panpsychism, which /I/ am happy enough with, but which I suspect to be
too mystical for /your/ metabolism...
I don't see anything mystical about saying all those physical processes
are computations, i.e. they are also information processes. Have you
slipped over from computation to assuming they are conscious?
Brent
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