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]> 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]>:
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]>
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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