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.
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