On 3/4/2019 3:32 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 3 Mar 2019, at 20:15, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 3/3/2019 3:34 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 1 Mar 2019, at 21:36, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 3/1/2019 7:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 28 Feb 2019, at 22:47, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 2/28/2019 1:17 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
The best current philosopher of (and writer about) consciousness
is *Galen Strawson*.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galen_Strawson
https://sites.google.com/site/galenstrawson/
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/philosophy/faculty/profile.php?id=gs24429
There is a lot of his material (PDFs, articles, videos, etc.)
freely available online.
The main word that is synonymous with /consciousness /is
/experience/.
Which is something bacteria and plants and my thermostat
have...and ability to detect and react to the environment based
on internal states.
What the thermostat lacks, that the bacteria and plants do not
lack, is Turing universality. That gives the mind, and even the
free-will.
A bacterium doesn't have Turing universiality, only bacteria in the
abstract of a potentially infinite set of evolving bacteria
interacting with their environment. But if a consider a
potentially infinite set of thermostats interacting with their
environment of furnaces and rooms, it will be Turing universal too.
Turing universality is cheap.
Yes, it is cheap, like consistency, and plausibly consciousness.
But it is more cheap you might think, because even one bacteria is
fully Turing universal. The genome of Escherichia Coli can be
“programmed” to run a Turing universal set of quadruplet. Of course,
the bacteria’s “tape” is quite limited, and they can exploit their
universality only by cooperation in the long run, and so no
individual bacteria can be self-conscious or Löbian.
I think that's what I said. Except I also noted that all this
requires an environment within which the bacteria can metabolize.
That is contingent with respect of the bacteria “mental life”. All
programs needs a code, and an environment which run it, but it can be
arithmetic. Then a physical reality emerges as a means on all
accessible computations-continuations.
Mentioning the environment can be misleading. If a material
environment is needed, matter would play some role, and there is no
more reason to say accept a digital, even if physical, brain.
I didn't say anything about the environment being "material". But
your objection seems to reduce to, "But that's contrary to my theory."
It's no good saying your theory is testable when you only test it within
the assumptions you used to derive it.
In a dream, we create more clearly the environment by ourself, and
that is enough for being conscious, or even self-conscious, like in a
lucid dream, or a sophisticated virtual environment.
The dream is realized by the brain and it is about elements of our real
environment.
So to say bacteria have Turing universality is like saying water is
lemonade...if you add lemons and sugar.
It means that with the 4 letters, you can program any partial
recursive function. Of course you need the decoding apparatus, but
that is entirely in the bacteria. It means that you can simulate any
other computer, with a basic set of DNA-enzyme molecular interaction.
A universal machine is just a number u such that for all x and y
phi_u(x, y) = phi_x(y) *in principle. You can implement all control
structure. The operon illustrates a “if-then-else”, and the regulation
apparatus is enough to get universality. René Thomas, in Brussels, has
succeeded to make a loop, with a plasmid (little circular gene)
entering in the bacterium, and then going out, repetitively. It is
even a “fuzzy computer”. Some product are regulated in a continuum,
depending on the concentration of the metabolites. When I was young, I
have made e project for a massively parallel computers which was a
solution of bacteria (E. coli) and bacteriophage. One drop of it could
process billions of instructions in a second. But the read and write
was demanding highly sophisticated molecular biology. I think that
such ideas have more success today. After all, molecular biology
studies “natural nanotechnology”.
You're wrong. The environment is essential. The fact that DNA can
encode functions means nothing without the ability to read and execute
the code. RNA, proteins, krebs cycle, and proton pumps are all
necessary for that.
Brent
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