On 5/8/2019 11:28 PM, smitra wrote:
On 08-05-2019 21:55, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
On 5/5/2019 7:06 PM, smitra wrote:
Or perhaps it's a mistake to attribute consciousness to particular
physical systems. Instead of saying that this computer or that brain
is or isn't conscious, we could postulate that there exists (in some
sense) consciousness, and that consciousness can find itself in some
location, and where it finds itself in, is implicitly defined by the
content of the consciousness itself.
If we then consider the set of all conscious states, then each
element of that set contains a subjective description of some
conscious thought which also contains in it where and when this
thought is supposed to have happened and who it belongs to. But that
description of itself won't contain enough information to fully
specify what precise algorithm generated it. My conscious thoughts
won't contain all the information necessary to reconstruct my brain
in the exact state it is now. This means that there are a large
number of different physical systems that are each consistent with
being me in the subjective state I'm in right now.
But I can still pin myself down to being in an environment that from
a macroscopic point of view must look the same as what I'm seeing
right now. There is then a large number of different physical local
environments within which brains are located that can be said to
represent me. I'm all of them, not one particular item. There is a
one-to-one relationship between me getting more localized inside
this set and me changing due to adding more information to my
conscious state.
Systems that are a lot less complex than our brain obviously run
much simpler algorithms than our brains are running. These
algorithms with at best less awareness, would then not be able to
localize themselves as precisely as we can. But since the state
space of the computer is much smaller
State space of the computation or of the computer, the "mind" or the
"brain".
, a question like: "is this AI conscious?" implies a far more
precise localization of the AI's consciousness than in case of us.
Hmm. I was with you up till that. Your earlier said that the AI
being simpler would imply it was LESS localized in physical space,
which I agreed with. Now you seem to say the opposite?
Yes, it's indeed going to be less localized but that would mean that
it won't fit into the device we've set up. So, when we point to our
device and imagine the conscious AI to be in there, it's not actually
in that particular device we're looking at.
This coarse grained view goes a long way to address the problems
implied by thought experiments where one replaces the transistors of
the computer or the neurons of the brain by a devices that perform the
exact same action as is actually happening in the instant the AI is
supposed to feel something but would fail to perform the correct
action in a counterfactual situation. You could then replace the brain
by a recording of brain processes and that recording would then be
conscious.
The problem is then with attempting to localize conscious in such a
fine grained picture that's too small to accommodate the algorithm
that is actually running. In a more course grained picture there do
exist counterfactuals on nearby branches that the consciousness itself
cannot resolve. So, in the MWI we should picture ourselves as being
located on bundles of branches, not on single branches.
Right. That's Julian Barbour's metaphor of streams in a channel. That
means that "we" exist at the coarse grained level, like other
quasi-classical stuff. That was pretty much Bohr's point. The
classical world is necessarily where we exist and do science
Brent
Saibal
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