On 5/14/2019 1:20 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Tue, May 14, 2019, at 00:55, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
On 5/13/2019 4:18 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
3) Or maybe it's "what the brain does", as many physicalists like to
say. My body as mass, because the atoms that make up my body amount
to that mass. What amounts to my consciousness? What are the
building blocks? There is no accounting, there is no description in
yours or van Neumann's sense.
But there are models that work. That was my point in citing AI
projects like Watson
I mention this outside of our main discussion: Watson is mostly IBM
marketing hype for scientifically-illiterate business executives. I
say this as an AI researcher, not an AI-denialist. It does not deserve
a place alongside serious research endeavors in the field. The
Jeapordy player was cool, some nice papers came out of it (I have them
and have read them all), but that is about it. The rest is just a
bullshit business brand around cloud-stuff and old-fashioned business IT.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3321138/did-ibm-put-too-much-stock-in-watson-health-too-soon.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/07/02/is-ibm-watson-a-joke/
https://gizmodo.com/why-everyone-is-hating-on-watson-including-the-people-w-1797510888
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/stop-the-hype-the-real-value-of-ibm-watson-is-driving-small-incremental-business-value/
https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/08/you-can-call-it-hype-but-watson-is-getting-marketers-roi/
Etc.
and AlphaGO.
AlphaGO is pretty cool. My feeling is that you are doing with AI what
physicists tend to accuse outsiders to the field of doing with quantum
physics: mysticism. I'm not accusing you of being the Deepak Chopra of
AI-mysticism, I hold you in much higher regard than that, but I think
maybe you lack the depth of understanding to see that there isn't as
much there there as you might assume.
AlphaGO is essentially a minimax decision tree. Go is infamous for
leading to combinatorial explosion even more severely than chess, so
decision trees where considered a no-go for a long time. The genius
move here is to train a feed-forward neural network to prune the tree,
providing something akin to intuition and making the decision tree
both tractable and effective against expert human players.
Reinforcement learning was used to train the tree by having the agents
play against themselves (not in the first iteration of AlphaGO, but I
think we can simplify a bit for the purpose of this discussion).
This is all very neat and clever, but nothing was discovered in terms
of computer science that wasn't already well-known in the 1980s. It
just so happens that these approaches finally became feasible due to
sufficiently powerful hardware. Now, this is no small achievement, and
I have maximum respect for the AlphaGO team. But I failed to see what
was learned in terms of how intelligence works, let alone what this
has to do with consciousness, anymore than say, performing some linear
algebra with NumPy or whatever.
The building blocks are perception, information processing, values,
and action.
Well, if "perception" is a building block then there is already an
implicit perceiver, so you are begging the question. Reminds me of
this joke:
Easy way to make your own megaphone!
You just need:
1- Some duct tape
2- A megaphone
You say "there is no accounting" but that's because you're using
"accounting" as a synonym for "explain". The accounting in
scientific theory is in terms of a model that works. You're
demanding of a theory of consciousness that will do for consciousness
what general relativity/*does not do*/ for the metric or for the
stress-energy tensor, what Darwin/*did not do*/ for reproduction with
variation.
Darwin didn't have the full story, but now the main things are
accounted for. We know how nucleic acids can be sequenced in very long
molecules, thus digitally encoding the shape of proteins, that then
fold into 3D shapes according to the laws of physics and can interact
and compose themselves in ways that eventually generate complex
organisms, that can interact to mix their respective strands of
nucleic acids and create incubating environments for new, similar
organisms to be generated.
There are several scientific fields dedicated to the numerous details
that I am glossing over in the silly explanation above.
That's why people tend to think science explains more than it does. In
well developed fields the explanations can get very deep and go thru a
lot of diverse fields. Our explanation of consciousness is still
shallow. it's pretty much limited to what will shut off consciousness
or give halluciantions, and some mapping of functions in the brain. But
when the explanation gets deep and detailed, will you still notice that
it leads to a "dead end"? Do you notice that general relativity "dead
ends" with no explanation of why mass-energy curves spacetime?
Under physicalism, for consciounsness, we have nada. Unless we start
with the megaphone.
Maybe someday Bruno's theory will yield some interesting prediction
(of the future), but until then it's a theory doesn't do any work. So
far it doesn't even account for the effect of holding your breathe
too long or ingesting LSD.
You know I appreciate Bruno and his work very much, but this is
besides the point here. I am not arguing that Bruno has the answers
(or not), just that physicalism accomplishes nothing that idealism
does not, and in fact seems to lead to a dead end when it comes to
consciousness. I am not even arguing that idealism provides the
answers. I am just insisting on our ignorance, and I find it bizarre
that scientifically-minded people such as you will be so reluctant to
admit it.
My point is that ignorance is relative. We've got a lot of good models
in physics and engineering, but to a metaphysician they all have dead ends.
The physical model that says consciousness is the brain processing
information by neuron's firing at synapses...a very successful model.
Successful at doing what?
Predicting what will affect consciousness. I know you, and others on
this list, will think, "Oh that's just the 'easy problem'.", but notice
that it's not a problem Cosmin or Bruno even come within sight of.
But the mysterians of consciousness
This is something I really have a hard time understanding. We might
disagree on some things, but I always assumed that we had more in
common than what sets us apart: that we developed a passion for
science because we are curious and reject bullshit authorities, such
as that adult man who dresses like a white wizard in the Vatican or
anyone who thinks that bronze-age people suffering from sun stroke in
the desert somehow have something so profound to say that no other
book is needed. That we believe that reality is intelligible, and that
we can reason and talk about it, and that this can lead to some
progress in our understanding.
But here you are, name-calling those who are curious and refuse to
stop asking the big questions, because the big questions that show
cracks in your favorite word-view make you uncomfortable... Beware of
spending too much time fighting monsters and so on...
want to pooh-pooh that because it doesn't talk about how their
consciousness "feels".
Yes. I don't understand the scare quotes. If you don't talk about how
consciousness "feels" you are not talking about consciousness. You are
just hiding from the big question.
Also, you are accusing of "woo" those who insist on the reality of the
only experience that can be directly verifiable, and remain sceptical
of anything else. If that is "woo", then "woo" is better than what you
call "science".
Well, how does "life" feel? Remember when 'elan vital was the big
mystery? My point is that we didn't solve that problem. We
circumvented it. We learned so much about the detail of molecular
biology we don't even know where the line is between life and not-life.
I think the problem of consciousness won't be solved either because it
is has been defined as giving an objective, sharable account of qaulia
which are/*defined*/ as subjective and personal. But I think the
problem of consciousness will be dissolved into many technical
subfields, just as the problem of life has been.
Brent
But neither does Bruno's . He talks about "arithmetic, seen from
the inside" as though that was more than a Platonic metaphor.
Well, that's another discussion, and I'm sure Bruno is available to
answer your questions, but even if you are right, it does not refute
my point.
Telmo.
Brent
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