On Tue, Jul 23, 2019, at 17:33, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
>
>
> On 7/23/2019 4:50 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
> > Hi Brent,
> >
> > On Fri, Jul 19, 2019, at 22:04, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
> >>
> >> On 7/19/2019 4:49 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
> >>> I share their perplexity. The idea of immaterialism is natural (and
> >>> arises thousands of years ago), because the only thing that we cannot
> >>> doubt (as Descartes pointed out) -- our consciousness -- is
> >>> immaterial. There is not scientific instrument that can detect
> >>> consciousness.
> >> That's not really true. Of course doctors assess patients as conscious,
> >> unconscious, in coma, or brain dead every day. The myth that
> >> consciousness is a mystery is part hubris (we are too special to be
> >> understood) and part an exaggerated demand for understanding. There's no
> >> scientific instrument that can detect the wave function of an electron
> >> either. But with the electron we're happy to have an effective theory
> >> that tells us when the detector will click or not. Mystery mongering
> >> about consciousness makes us demand something more that mere measurement
> >> and prediction, something that doesn't exist for any theory.
> > I understand your point that we can always make additional demands for
> > explanation, and that any scientific theory cannot be expected to do more
> > than what successful scientific theories do, which is to correctly predict
> > phenomena.
> >
> > My main point is this, and I think it goes to the core of our disagreement:
> > No scientific theory predicts consciousness!
>
> What would it mean to predict consciousness. When we predict electrons
> what we mean it we predict the observable effects of electrons.
Right, so what are the observable effects of consciousness? All I can see in
neuroscience are predictions about the observable effects of (wet)
computations. Neuroscience is not capable of pointing to a behavior and saying:
ah! consciousness! see, this couldn't happen without consciousness.
If you rob physicists of electrons, suddenly many of their models will have
holes in them, they will no longer be valid. If you rob neuroscientists of
consciousness, everything works the same.
> In that
> sense I think we will, eventually, predict consciousness. We will
> engineer intelligent entities and some of them will have the observable
> aspects of consciousness...and we will be able to say why the do and
> others don't and how we can design entities that have more or less or
> different kinds of consciousness: perception, self-identity, reflection,
> etc.
I attended a presentation the other day of a psychologist who is investigating
the sort of relationships that people develop with voice assistants such as
Alexa. She told the story of a woman who admits to being emotionally attached
to her Alexa. She says that she is not crazy or deluded. This woman is an
engineer and she has a pretty good grasp of what Alexa is, and how it works in
general. And yet, the emotional attachment still kicks in. So I guess,
according to your idea, we should start searching Alexa for an initial model of
consciousness?
> > Putting it another way, every single successful scientific theory that we
> > know about as these two properties:
> >
> > - Consciousness is not required for anything "to work";
> > - Consciousness is not predicted to exist in any way.
> But when we have a successful theory of intelligence I think we will
> find that consciousness is required for it to work for certain kinds of
> entities, one's we would think of as "social".
On a side note: I believe that an important component that is still missing in
AI is the ability to model and forecast the internal states of human beings.
The AI could then attempt to predict the effects of its actions in the user's
internal state, and learn from mistakes. I think this can lead to the "social"
AI you talk about, now it's just a matter of filling in the implementation
details :)
My problem with what you say, as I think you know, is that we cannot detect
consciousness, so no matter how good the AI we build, we are still confronting
with the same problem we have with cats, plants, stars. We have to guess.
Sometime we don't even have a basis to guess. I think the engineering approach
to understanding is a dead end when it comes to consciousness -- even though I
work in the field of AI and like it very much.
> > Now, I know you will argue that yes, neuroscience can predict and observe
> > conscious states, but the only thing it can do is find correlates between
> > observable behavior and brain activity. Which is great, but has nothing to
> > do with the hard problem.
>
> I reject the "hard problem". It's a problem that is intractably hard
> because it asks what no scientific theory ever provides.
I agree that it asks what no scientific theory so far provides, but I don't
agree that is a valid basis for rejecting it. At most, you can claim to find it
personally uninteresting.
> > Firstly because consciousness itself cannot be measured or observed. What
> > you can do is observe behaviors that you *assume to be correlated with
> > consciousness*. I challenge you to find any other theory or filed of
> > science where such a speculative leap is accepted and the results after
> > such a leap taken seriously.
> >
> > - Are my cells individually conscious? I don't know.
> > - Are stars conscious? Is Google? Who knows. Emergentists might suspect
> > they are, because they are systems with highly complex behavior.
> > - Are cats conscious? I assume they are, but am I not just noticing their
> > similarities to me? What about plants? Why or why not?
> > - Etc.
> Are electrons waves or particles? Why or why not?
"Particle" is the name of a type of model, "wave" is the name of another type
of model. Electrons turn out to not be explainable by any of those models, so
they are a third thing. No?
Telmo.
> Brent
>
>
> >
> > In the end, I find John Clark's position on this more palatable: he agrees
> > that consciousness cannot be measured, so he doesn't care about the
> > problem. He thinks it's a waste of time to think about it. Intelligence is
> > the interesting thing. Fair enough. But your position is a bit different:
> > you present your own metaphysical belief as scientifically justified, and I
> > don't think that is a tenable position.
> >
> > Telmo.
> >
> >
> >> Brent
> >>
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