On 01 Nov 2015, at 18:12, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 11/1/2015 12:59 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Sunday, 1 November 2015, Pierz <pier...@gmail.com> 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? 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".
Thoughts?
This is panpsychism for computation: if one thing can be conscious,
why can't everything be conscious to a greater or lesser extent?
I've suggested that there are different levels of consciousness, or
awareness, but Bruno rejects that and says conscious is an all-or-
nothing logical property.
It is the idea that an entity is either conscious, or is not
conscious. Once conscious there are a lot of degrees, and types of
content. But I give two important thresholds: Universality and the
level of awareness of one's own universality (Löbianity). The
awareness here can be described in terms of representable beliefs/
memories, and then in term of the fixed point of true self-reference
(after applying the Theaetetus' idea).
Then what an entity can do with such awareness will depend a lot of
its memory bank, situations/world/semantics, amount of alcohol in the
blood, etc.
I think these are two very different concepts of consciousness. One
problem is that as soon as we start speculating about consciousness
that is different from what we experience we don't know what we're
talking about.
Absolutely.
We don't know what we are talking about.
We don't know who we are talking about.
And we don't know who are doing the talking.
But we can have some idea, sometimes, and those idea can be relatively
true, or false, sometimes.
We better should bet in consciousness, in case of doubt, but as your
link on Anna's story illustrated, even that can be misused.
Bruno
Brent
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