On 7/24/2019 11:31 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Wed, Jul 24, 2019, at 17:41, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
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.
They try, but they can't measure.
- Alexa, are you conscious?
- Of course!
Err...
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.
But you don't need Alexa for that. You start by assuming that consciousness is
related to things such as being responsive to the environment, and then you
point at something that is responsible to the environment and you find signs of
consciousness. Don't you really see the problem here?
I see a problem that it is very weak evidence, two points of similarity
in a vast field. Exactly, the same problem I see with Bruno finding a
similarity between Goedelian self-reference and self 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 :)
I agree. And notice that these details would at least implicitly
include modeling inner thoughts of the kind we call conscious.
Maybe we are not talking about the same thing at all. I do not mean conscious as in "having a
model of yourself or others". I mean conscious in the sense that "the lights are
on". You're not a zombie. Why?
Again, I would like you to say what kind of answer you seek?
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.
I am not demanding it, I think it is impossible to detect consciousness. I
think it is a type of phenomena that is outside the scope of empirical science,
perhaps because all the scientists live inside of it.
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.
But in this case nothing can be observed.
Can your consciousness be observed by you?
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?
Not all questions have answers.
Exactly my point. The "hard problem" is formulated to NOT have an
answer. It asks for an explanation of something that is immediately
known but is unobservable.
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.
I agree. And my point is that Darwinism necessitates not consciousness, not
does it expect it to arise.
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?
The metaphysical belief that consciousness is a property of matter (and not the
other way around, for example).
By the same reasoning that leads to thinking other people are conscious,
I infer that their consciousness is affected by acting on the matter in
their brain. What do you infer?
Brent
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