Alright, I'm going to try to piece things together and start by backing up. The determination of whether matter, described by QM, has a spectrum gap has recently been shown to be undecidable per the third link in first post. This implies some aspect of physics is not computable, and therefore the Strong Church Turing thesis and digital physics are invalidated. It also implies that the reductionist hypothesis is invalid because there will be explanatory gaps from the microscopic to the macroscopic, and that emergence (sum is greater than parts) should be elevated to a first-class component of nature. The phi measure in IIT "will be high when there is a lot of information generated among the parts of a system as opposed to within them" and therefore can be by definition considered a measure of emergence. Tononi/Koch claim it's a measure of consciousness, though Koch is ironically a self-proclaimed "romantic reductionist." As reductionism is invalidated, the sum-greater-than-parts measure phi by Tononi/Koch corresponds to one hypercomputable aspect of nature; we say that to be hypercomputable or irreducable (i.e., to an algorithm) is to be emergent (sum-greater-than-parts). However, the interpretation of phi (a measure of emergence) as consciousness is based on intuition. It has not been verified. If this association of phi with consciousness could be verified, then we could safely assume HHI hypothesis to be true, i.e. that consciousness is a hypercomputable aspect of nature.
The argument by Maguire et al. starting with IIT (and also corroborating HHI hypothesis) seems to agree with the recent indirect proof that reductionism is invalid. However, it doesn't invalidate IIT as claimed because IIT implies hypercomputability; the phi measure is a measure of emergence. If consciousness is demonstrated to correlate with phi and thus proved to be hypercomputable, Goertzel says we can still produce humanlike AI with Turing machines by modeling imitation, intuition and chance. Furthermore, If HHI is true, then any reductionist attempts to describe consciousness like the OrchOR theory by Penrose/Hameroff are doomed to fail because a hypercomputable (emergent) process, by definition, cannot be described in any formal language (as Goertzel points out in his paper). Aaronson's zombie argument is just claiming that no scientific theory could explain the first-person experience and solve the Hard Problem of consciousness. He just observes it would be ridiculous if 'someone claims that integrated information “explains” why consciousness exists.' Notice that if consciousness is hypercomputable (correlates with phi), then that is exactly what Goertzel concludes in his paper. Aaronson even admits 'we can easily interpret IIT as trying to do something more “modest” than solve the Hard Problem, although still staggeringly audacious. Namely, we can say that IIT “merely” aims to tell us which physical systems are associated with consciousness and which aren’t, purely in terms of the systems’ physical organization. The test of such a theory is whether it can produce results agreeing with “commonsense intuition”: for example, whether it can affirm, from first principles, that (most) humans are conscious; that dogs and horses are also conscious but less so; that rocks, livers, bacteria colonies, and existing digital computers are not conscious (or are hardly conscious); and that a room full of people has no “mega-consciousness” over and above the consciousnesses of the individuals.' On Thursday, December 10, 2015 at 9:37:03 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: > > But see > > http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 > > Brent > > On 12/10/2015 5:54 PM, Dan wrote: > > I should mention this paper, which gives credence to HHI by beginning with > Tononi's Integrated Information Theory of consciousness and, by assuming > consciousness is a lossless integrative process, concluding that it would > not be computable. > > - http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.0126 > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected] <javascript:>. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > <javascript:>. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
