On Thu, Jul 25, 2019, at 11:06, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> > On 24 Jul 2019, at 20:31, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> 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…
>
> Most neuroscientists believes in Matter, and, sometimes even
> explicitly, like the ASSC, do not address the mind-body problem.
>
> When they have some understanding of the problem, they eliminate
> consciousness and person, which is the logical thing to do for people
> believing in both matter and mechanism: consciousness does not exists.
I have met a few neuroscientists, and this is also my impression. I have also
met researchers who were trying to become neuroscientists, but eventually were
discouraged by the lack of philosophical rigor in the field. The former become
well-known, the latter disappear into other endeavors. I will not get into more
details to protect identities. This sort of dynamic creates a false impression
of consensus in some scientific fields, especially with the lay people who are
interested in science, and helps make scientists with non-aligned positions
seem crazy.
Telmo.
> Of course, most people here would disagree with such a blatant deny of
> the most important data on consciousness: the experience we live
> everyday.
>
> Bruno
>
>
>
> >
> >>>
> >>>> 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?
> >
> >>>
> >>>>> 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?
> >
> >>>
> >>> 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.
> >
> >>> 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.
> >
> >>> 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).
> >
> > Telmo.
> >
> >> Brent
> >>
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> >>
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