On 5/6/2021 6:36 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 30 Apr 2021, at 20:47, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 4/30/2021 4:19 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
If a program can be said to "know" something then can we also say
it is conscious of that thing?
That's not even common parlance. Conscious thoughts are fleeting.
Knowledge is in memory. I know how to ride a bicycle /because/ I do
it unconsciously. I don't think consciousness can be understood
except as a surface or boundary of the subconscious and the
unconscious (physics).
If you use physics, you have to explain what it is, and how that
select the computations in arithmetic,
That is a field of active research: how brains implement computations
and why they do some and not others.
or you need to abandon mechanism.
Only your idea of "mechanism".
With mechanism, to claim that a machine consciousness is not
attributable to some universal machinery, despite they do execute a
computation, in the only mathematical sense discovered by Church and
Turing (and some others) seem a bit magical.
My motorcycles animation is not attributable to some universal motorcycle.
Note that you don’t quote me, above. You should have quoted my answer.
The beauty of Mechanism is that the oldest definition of (rational)
knowledge (Theaetetus true (justified) opinion) already explain why
no machine can define its own knowledge, why consciousness seems
necessarily mysterious, and why we get that persistent feeling that we
belong to a physical reality, when in fact we are just infinitely many
numbers involved in complex relations.
I didn't quote it because it only obscures the transitory nature of
conscious thought. "True belief" is ambiguous; do you have a true
belief the 2+2=4 when you are not thinking about numbers or do you have
this true belief at all times...but unconsciously?
Brent
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