Thanks, Quentin,
I take it as a reply to my questioning PA and RA.
(the "A" in PA meaning axioms, in RA arithmetic?).
None of them satisfies my own take on 'intelligent'.
I start from the llinguistic origin (Latin: inter-lego), I *READ
between* -
the lines and words, that is). To catch a 'meaning' (sense) more
widely and accurately than a flat translation from a dictionary.
Arithmetic is restricted IMO, I see no straight penetration into the
emotional, feelable, artsy, thought-provoking, even freely anticipatory
etc. by it's application (maybe, because I am no mathematician).
Axioms I consider artificial rules made up to make (scientific?)
conclusions valid.
Maybe I am all wrong on this list.
John Mikes
On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 3:24 PM, Quentin Anciaux <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
PA = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms
RA = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_arithmetic
2015-11-03 21:17 GMT+01:00 John Mikes <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>:
I read it all, did not find what PA and RA are standing for.
Can you explain in brief?
Thanks
John M
On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 4:06 AM, Bruno Marchal
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
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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