On 7/23/2019 11:52 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
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.
I'm not sure that's true. ISTM that some of the experiments by
cognitive neuroscientists include conscious thoughts and judgements as
elements of their theory.
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?
Certainly. Two obvious ones are that Alexa is responsive to the
environment (speech) and is knowledgeable.
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 :)
I agree. And notice that these details would at least implicitly
include modeling inner thoughts of the kind we call conscious.
My problem with what you say, as I think you know, is that we cannot detect
consciousness,
I pointed out in another post that we do it all the time in cases of
great import. I think you are demanding some kind of magical direct
detection which we never have in other sciences.
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.
Exactly. The same way we guess at all scientific theories...except we
like to say "hypothesize". And we judge our guesses according to how
they match and predict observations.
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.
Then I'm curious as to what you think a solution would look like. What
form could it possibly take?
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?
They are described by Dirac matrices...so far. But my point is that
science does not need to detect the thing-in-itself. Science makes
models which it strives make accurate, prediction, comprehensive, and
consilient.
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.
What metaphysical belief do you refer to?
Brent
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