On 12/7/2017 9:36 AM, David Nyman wrote:
On 7 Dec 2017 15:08, "Bruno Marchal" <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 07 Dec 2017, at 10:01, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:50 PM, Brent Meeker
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 12/6/2017 1:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
I suspect that this is perhaps why Brent want to refer
to the environment
for relating consciousness to the machine, and in
Artificial Intelligence,
some people defend the idea that (mundane)
consciousness occur only when the
environment contradicts a little bit the quasi
automatic persistent
inference we do all the time.
That's Jeff Hawkins model of consciousness: one becomes
conscious of
something when all lower, more specialized levels of the
brain have found it
not to match their predictions.
In that sort of model, how does matter "know" that it is being
used to
run a forecasting algorithm? Surely it doesn't right?
Imagine a society which builds some objects. When everything go
well, the boss can sleep in his office. But then there is some
accident or something unusual. That is the time to wake up the
boss. In this analogy, consciousness is played by the
(incorrigible) boss.
The only way this could work is if the forecasting algorithm
and the
cascading effects of failing predictions have the side effect of
creating the "right" sort of interactions at a lower level that
trigger consciousness.
After a moment of panic, the sub-entities dare to awake the
ultimate judge: the one capable of "going out of the box" to take
a (perhaps risky) decision in absence of complete information, and
to take on its shoulder the responsibility.
Then I want to know what these interactions
are, and what if the "atom" of consciousness, what is the first
principle. Without this, I would say that such hypothesis are
not even
wrong.
The sub-unities have specialized task, and does not need evolved
forecasting ability. You can think them as ants, when they do
their usual jobs triggered by the local pheromones left by their
close neighbors. But if the nest is attacked, or if some important
food is missing, some species will needs some order of the queen
(ike to fight or to move away. Some societies can delegate most of
the power to the sub-unities, but in complex unknown situation, if
they have to make important decision, they will need a
centralization of the power, which can act much more quickly to
convince the whole society of some unusual option, like running
away, closing the doors, fighting the enemy, etc. That will happen
when *many* ants complain on something.
In this case, the role of consciousness is focusing the attention
on what is important (with respect to survival), and to speed-up
planning, decision, etc.
I am not sure this answer the question (we are in the "easy" part
of the problem here).
I follow you here, but I'd like to make a comment on the "hard" side
of the problem. What comp implies in its ineffably strange way, given
that matter itself becomes an appearance, is that strictly speaking we
should say that the "easy" part of the story is only what "appears" to
be happening. So neurocognition itself is a sort of (very precise and
constrained) story, narrated in terms of physical action, itself
emulated in computation.
From the perspective of reality or truth we get an interpretation or
meaning in terms of which such stories can make sense, but each
'level' has its own proper logic; and the logic of material appearance
is that of the 'laws' of physics. Nothing else is necessary, at least
at that level, to account for the disposition and evolution of
material states. So strictly speaking, when talking of prediction and
other mentalistic concepts, we should nevertheless be aware that this
isn't of itself the logic of the physical mechanisms with which these
concepts are entangled. Of course it must be consistent with that
logic for the mental to be capable of manifesting in the generalised
environment of physical appearances, but we shouldn't expect the logic
of the physical level to recapitulate the mentalistic logic in virtue
of instantiating it.
Hence when we speak of such things as predictions at the level of the
brain, we mustn't forget that this is a 'manner of speaking' to be
cashed out interpretatively or meaningfully only at the level of
perceptual truth.
That's "cashed out" if you're interpreting the process in a mental
realm. But there are other equally valid realms. In the physical realm
it is cashed out by action in the world. In biology it is cashed out by
success or failure in reproduction and evolution.
It's easy to miss this distinction because inevitably we can't help
talking about everything from an implicitly pre-interpreted
perspective. This is how Dennett for example is able to conceal from
his readers (and possibly from himself) that he is both denying and
asserting the same thing at one and the same time.
I think this is an unfair criticism because it assumes that the mental
viewpoint is the only really real one. Can you illustrate your point
with quotes from Dennett?
Brent
David
But you will help me by telling me what is missing. I am not sure
we need to dig on the difficult part of the consciousness problem
here, which is handed at a different level, and concerned with the
fact that the boss/queen is confined in his office/chamber and can
never be sure if the ants panic is genuine, or an illusion, and
still decide ...
Bruno
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