On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 10:47 PM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On 12/7/2017 1:01 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: >> >> On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:50 PM, Brent Meeker <[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? > > > ?? Why surely. It seems you're rejecting the idea that a physical system > can be conscious just out of prejudice.
Not at all. I remain agnostic on materialism vs. idealism. Maybe I am even a strong agnostic: I suspect that the answer to this question cannot be known. Assuming materialism, consciousness must indeed be a property or something that emerges from the interaction of fundamental particles, the same way that, say, life does. Ok. All that I am saying is that nobody has proposed any explanation of consciousness under this assumption that I would call a theory. The above is not a theory, in the same way that the Christian God is not a theory: it proposes to explain a simple thing by appealing to a pre-existing more complex thing -- in this case claiming that the act of forecasting at a very high level somehow leads to consciousness, but without proposing any first principles. It's a magical step. My view is that this sort of emergentism always smuggles a subtle but important switcheroo at some point: moving from epistemology to ontology. For me, emergence is an epistemic tool. It is not possible for a human to understand hyper-complex systems by considering all the variables at the same time. We wouldn't be able to understand the human body purely at the molecular level. So we create simplifying abstractions. These abstractions have names such as "cells", "tissues", "organs", "disease", etc etc. A Jupiter Brain might not need these tools. If it's mind is orders of magnitude more complex than the human body, then it could apprehend the entire thing at the molecular level, and one could even say that this would lead to a higher level of understanding than what we could hope for with our little monkey brains. In the case of biological systems, although we couldn't do what the Jupiter Brain does, we could understand what are the first principles that said brain would make use of. Emergentists switch to the ontological. As if "emergence" generates something new. As if it's something akin to a fundamental law of nature. It's a language trick. When we say that something emerges from something else, we are building an epistemic tool, we are not being literal. Could emergentism be true? Sure. But for it to be an actual theory, it would have to provide some first principle. What I referred to as the "atom" of consciousness, in the same way that a local trasaction between two actors is the atom of economic models. Were is it? >> 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. > > > In Hawkins model the predictions fail from the "bottom up", i.e. from the > subconscious, automatic responses up to the top/lanuage/conscious level. I like Hawkins model and his work in general, but I think it is purely about intelligence. >> 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. > > > There is no "atom of consciousness". In Hawkins model consciousness is the > spreading to the 'failed prediction' signal across the top level of the > neocortex. As I said earlier, this is not Hawkins main interest, it's more > an aside. He's more interested in intelligence. Indeed. I read "On Intelligence" years ago (one decade?) so I might be fuzzy on the details. I got the impression that he is completely uninterested in consciousness, or that he doesn't even consider it a serious question. > But as has been discussed > here many times, philosophical zombies are probably not possible. That > would imply that a sufficiently intelligent system, however constructed, > will be conscious. Yes, I tend to agree with this view. Telmo. > Brent > > >> >> Telmo. >> >>> Brent >>> >>> >>> -- >>> 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 https://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 https://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. 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