On 11/1/2015 11:09 PM, Pierz wrote:
On Sunday, November 1, 2015 at 6:25:57 PM UTC+11, Brent wrote:
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?
Computationalism is precisely that assumption (that computation
equates to consciousness).
No, it's the assumption that some particular computation instantiates
consciousness.
However, usually the assumption is also that a certain level of
computational complexity must be reached before consciousness "kicks
in". If as Bruno suggests, it's "all or nothing", then it's hard to
see why the light should suddenly be switched on when a computation
reaches some magical complexity threshold.
It's my view that consciousness is realized by certain kinds of
computation in interaction with an environment (which we call "the
physical world"). It's not just a matter of complexity (the internet's
plenty complex) or even "integrated information" (c.f. Scott Aaronson's
blog on Tononi). I don't think we know exactly what it is, but I
suspect it has to do with language and other representations of the
world. I think that there are qualitatively different kinds of
consciousness, not a continuum and not all-or-nothing. Of course one
can argue that the internet is conscious or the weather is conscious or
arithmetic is conscious - but these depend adding the qualification "but
not like my consciousness". I think this is a cheap argument. We only
know what consciousness is from introspective experience; so at least
until we know how to produce and manipulate that we have no basis for
extrapolating to other forms with which we have no experience. The kinds
of consciousness I refer to are ones that we do experience at different
times, e.g. awareness of without self-awareness.
If it's more of a continuum then that does suggest panpsychism, though
what the consciousness of simple processes is like is pretty hard to
imagine. Panpsychism does still sound to me like a pretty big jump
from the materialism we know and (some of us) love. A world of
conscious information processes is not quite a world with soul, but
perhaps also not so far from it.
Now you not only project consciousness onto the world, but hope for
immortality.
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.