On 02 Nov 2015, at 08:09, 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). 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. 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.
The soul is the first person, the knower. It is the one who knows
which of the W-guy or the M-guy he/she is, somehow. Then we can agree
on some axioms on knowledge or knowledgeability. Most analytical
philosophers agree on the axiom K, and T, for a form of rational
knowledge. The axiom T means that only truth can be known: []p -> p. K
describe the belief in the modus ponens: if you know that p, and if
you know that p implies q, then q is knowable for you: ([]p & [](p ->
q))-> []q (and this is tautologically equivalent with [](p -> q) ->
([]p -> []q), which is the usual form of K). In such logic we assume
modus ponens, and the necessitation rule p/[]p, but usually not the
axiom p -> []p.
Does a subject, a person, a soul, requires a body? It certainly does
if the goal is to manifest itself relatively to other entities,
including the possible universal one which run its "body/bodies". With
other goal in mind, maybe the body/bodies is (are) not that much
necessary, as we belong to infinities of "lines" in the first person
projective perspective, well, that makes only realize that the "end of
life" problem is quite complex with computationalism, for all
universal machines (same problem with Everett, note).
I think it could be misleading to talk of conscious *process*, as it
can be ambiguous about the level where the person inhabits. That leads
to Searle error of confusing the guy imitating the chinese with the
chinese guy. It is not the process of running of the Einstein's
brain's book which is conscious, but it is Einstein, and thus, not the
universal machine running the brain (that one might be conscious, but
is not Einstein, indeed, it is "me" in Searle's thought experiment).
Once digital, information process can executed complex and variate
dialog between different universal numbers.
Now I think that the base universal machine is conscious, and if there
is only one first person, then "becoming another machine than that
one" is already a form of delusion, which suggests that, paradoxically
enough, that RA is already more conscious than PA. I am not sure at
all! It is like the induction axioms would be lies!
[P(0) & For all x (P(x) -> P(s(x)))] ->. For all x P(x)
I have still the old alternate theory where PA has not yet sinned, but
the salvia experience has put some doubt about its main intuition, à
la Brouwer-Bergson-Heraclite, which relates consciousness and
(subjective) time.
Accepting the consciousness of all universal numbers (even if
identical) helps me also to relate Moderatus of Gades, Plotinus, with
the five affirmative hypotheses of Parmenides. (It enlarges also the
misunderstanding of Aristotle in his critics of Plato's Worlds of
Ideas). The creation/annihilation, or differentiation/fusion are
amnesia/anamnesia in arithmetic (or Turing equivalent). It clarifies
at the least Plato. It is not used to extract physics or argue that we
have to extract physics, note.
Have you Smullyan's book "Forever Undecided"? It helps to see what
exactly I am talking about, well, you will need Boolos 1979, to
pursue, but at that point you can trust the theorems I am using, no
need to verify all proofs, most results are standard.
Bruno
Brent
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