On 02 Nov 2015, at 18:30, Brent Meeker wrote:
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.
OK.
Computation is a pure 3p notion.
Consciousness is a pure 1p notion.
Nothing can be more different.
A computation just can makes it possible for a person to manifest its
consciousness relatively to a universal number/environment.
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.
I agree, except that "all or nothing" is for the presence or absence
of consciousness, a bit like a point of the complex plane is, or is
not, in the Mandelbrot set, even if we can never be sure for a point
which is very near the boundary (we zoom, and still don't know after 1
billions years, and have no idea how long it could take for the zoom
to decide this).
Of course one can argue that the internet is conscious or the
weather is conscious or arithmetic is conscious -
Only if we can name the entity, but "weather" or even "arithmetic" is
fuzzy notion. To say that arithmetic is conscious is different than to
say that RA is conscious, or PA is conscious, etc.
but these depend adding the qualification "but not like my
consciousness".
RA is conscious like my consciousness after salvia (say)
PA is conscious like you and me. Indeed, we are both PA, but
reconstituted in different bodies with different memories.
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.
Well, in machine's theology, the proof of the immortality of the soul
by Socrates is valid, but is not constructive, and its practical
aspect is dependent of you degree of appreciation of not knowing who
you (first person are).
Then, a priori computationalist immortality seems to be something more
to fear than to hope, but both computer science and salvia can be
reassuring by allowing possibilities of jumps between type of
consciousness state (but *that* is still wishful thinking, as such
jump are hard to relate with some type of death.
Once a machine is above the Gödel-Löbian treshold, it has at each
instant an infinite of futures, and near death or near catastrophes,
it continues in the closer world consistent with its memory. If the
subject identifies too much with its memory, the experience can be
unpleasant. Some training in "let it go" can help, perhaps.
Bruno
Brent
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