Re: Consciousness is information?
No. Consciousness is not information. It is an additional process that handles its own generated information. I you don´t recognize the driving mechanism towards order in the universe, you will be running on empty. This driving mechanism is natural selection. Things gets selected, replicated and selected again. In the case of humans, time ago the evolutionary psychologists and philosophers (Dennet etc) discovered the evolutionary nature of consciousness, that is double: For social animals, consciousness keeps an actualized image of how the others see ourselves. This ability is very important in order to plan future actions with/towards others members. A memory of past actions, favors and offenses are kept in memory for consciousness processing. This is a part of our moral sense, that is, our navigation device in the social environment. Additionally, by reflection on ourselves, the consciousness module can discover the motivations of others. The evolutionary steps for the emergence of consciousness are: 1) in order to optimize the outcome of collaboration, a social animal start to look the others as unique individuals, and memorize their own record of actions. 2) Because the others do 1, the animal develop a sense of itself and record how each one of the others see himself (this is adaptive because 1). 3) This primitive conscious module evolved in 2 starts to inspect first and lately, even take control of some action with a deep social load. 4) The conscious module attributes to an individual moral self every action triggered by the brain, even if it driven by low instincts, just because that´s is the way the others see himself as individual. That´s why we feel ourselves as unique individuals and with an indivisible Cartesian mind. The consciousness ability is fairly recent in evolutionary terms. This explain its inefficient and sequential nature. This and 3 explains why we feel anxiety in some social situations: the cognitive load is too much for the conscious module when he tries to take control of the situation when self image it at a stake. This also explain why when we travel we feel a kind of liberation: because the conscious module is made irrelevant outside our social circle, so our more efficient lower level modules take care of our actions --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Victor Korotkikh
On 15 May 2009, at 01:06, russell standish wrote: On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 05:30:57PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: Thanks Russell, I will take a look. At first sight he makes the same error with numbers that Wolfram makes with cellular automata. I think this sums up my feeling too. Although, I'm not sure we're talking about the same error :) I guess my interest in pointing it out to you was whether some interesting structure could be extracted from it when put into the framework of the AUDA. Since you point out that Robinson arithmetic is universal, might not Korotkikh's integer relationships also be a reflection of the same universality. As far as I understand it looks interesting indeed. I will have to dig deeper. I kind of dismissed this stuff as a curiosity when I first heard about it 13 years ago, but I've grown intellectually since then (having being exposed to your ideas amongst others :). BTW - I'm still enjoying Secret of the Amoeba, which I haven't finished yet. Its a shame it wasn't published - its some of your best stuff! Thanks Russell, Have a good day, Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Victor Korotkikh
Hi Ronald, On 15 May 2009, at 14:25, ronaldheld wrote: Bruno: I will wait for your most recent UDA to be posted here. All right. I have problems with infinite time and resources for your computations, if done in this physical Universe. Sure. Note that I use unbounded physical resources only in the step seven, to make the argument smoother, but the step 8 eliminates the need of that assumption. All you have to believe in is that a mathematical Turing machine either stop or not stop. Best, Bruno On May 14, 12:22 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Ronald, On 14 May 2009, at 13:19, Ronald (ronaldheld) wrote: Can you explain your Physics statement in more detail, which I can understand? UDA *is* the detailed explanation of that physics statement. So it would be simpler if you could tell me at which step you have a problem of understanding, or an objection, or something. You can search UDA in the archives for older or more recent versions, or read my SANE2004 paper: http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/ SANE2004MARCHALAbstract... In a nutshell, the idea is the following. If we are machine we are duplicable. If we distinguish the first person by their personal memories, sufficiently introspective machine can deduce that they cannot predict with certainty they personal future in either self- duplicating experience, or in many-identical-states preparation like a concrete universal dovetailer would do all the time. So, if you are concretely in front of a concrete universal dovetailer, with the guaranty it will never stop (in some steady universe à-la Hoyle for example), you are in a high state of first person indeterminacy, given that the universal dovetailer will execute all the computations going through your actual state. Sometimes I have to remind the step 5 for helping the understanding here. In that state, from a first person perspective you don't know in which computational history you belong, but you can believe (as far as you are willing to believe in comp) that there are infinitely many of them. If you agree to identify an history by its infinite steps, or if you accept the Y = II principle (that if a story bifurcate, Y , you multiply their similar comp-past, so Y gives II), then you can understand that the cardinal (number) of your histories going through you actual state is 2^aleph_zero. It is a continuum. Of course you can first person distinguish only a enumerable quotient of it, and even just a finite part of that enumeration. Stable consciousness need deep stories (very long yet redundant stories, it is deep in Bennett sense) and a notion of linear multiplication of independent stories. Now the laws of arithmetic provides exactly this, and so you can, with OCCAM just jump to AUDA, but you have to study one or two book of mathematical logic and computer science before. (the best are Epstein Carnielli, or Boolos, Burgess and Jeffrey). Or, much easier, but not so easy, meditate on the eighth step of UDA, which shows that form their first point of view universal machine cannot distinguish real from virtual, but they cannot distinguish real from arithmetical either, so that the arithmetical realm defines the intrinsic first person indeterminacy of any universal machine. Actually the eighth step shows that comp falsifies the usual mind/physical-machine identity thesis, but it does not falsify a weaker mind/many-mathematical machines thesis. If interested I suggest you study UDA in Sane2004, and ask any questions, or find a flaw etc. (or wait for a more recent version I have yet to put on my page) Thanks for the reference to Kent's paper (it illustrates very well the knotty problems you get into when you keep Everett, materialism and the identity thesis, but I have read it only diagonally just now). Hope this helped a bit. Bruno On May 13, 11:30 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Thanks Russell, I will take a look. At first sight he makes the same error with numbers that Wolfram makes with cellular automata. Those are still mathematical form of physicalism, incompatible with the mechanist thesis in the cognitive science. Of course we converge toward rather similar (recursively isomorphic or weakened) ontologies. But they seems to believe they can recover some physics from that, where, saying yes to the surgeon requires to abandon that very idea. Physics, like in Plato and Plotinus, is not a mathematical structure among others, it is a mathematical structure which relate all mathematical structures in a precise way. Physics is somehow much more fundamental than being a thing completely describable by a set of mechanical laws. Pu in another way, such theories are unaware of the mind-body problem and still use an identity relation between a mind and a implementation of a program which UDA forces to abandon, to be frank.
Re: Consciousness is information?
I think your discussing the functional aspects of consciousness. AKA, the easy problems of consciousness. The question of how human behavior is produced. My question was what is the source of phenomenal consciousness. What is the absolute minimum requirement which must be met in order for conscious experience to exist? So my question isn't HOW human behavior is produced, but instead I'm asking why the mechanistic processes that produce human behavior are accompanied by subjective first person conscious experience. The hard problem. Qualia. I wasn't asking how is it that we do the things we do, or, how did this come about, but instead given that we do these things, why is there a subjective experience associated with doing them. So none of the things you reference are relevant to the question of whether a computer simulation of a human mind would be conscious in the same way as a real human mind. If a simulation would be, then what are the properties that those to two very dissimilar physical systems have in common that would explain this mutual experience of consciousness? On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 3:22 AM, Alberto G.Corona agocor...@gmail.com wrote: No. Consciousness is not information. It is an additional process that handles its own generated information. I you don´t recognize the driving mechanism towards order in the universe, you will be running on empty. This driving mechanism is natural selection. Things gets selected, replicated and selected again. In the case of humans, time ago the evolutionary psychologists and philosophers (Dennet etc) discovered the evolutionary nature of consciousness, that is double: For social animals, consciousness keeps an actualized image of how the others see ourselves. This ability is very important in order to plan future actions with/towards others members. A memory of past actions, favors and offenses are kept in memory for consciousness processing. This is a part of our moral sense, that is, our navigation device in the social environment. Additionally, by reflection on ourselves, the consciousness module can discover the motivations of others. The evolutionary steps for the emergence of consciousness are: 1) in order to optimize the outcome of collaboration, a social animal start to look the others as unique individuals, and memorize their own record of actions. 2) Because the others do 1, the animal develop a sense of itself and record how each one of the others see himself (this is adaptive because 1). 3) This primitive conscious module evolved in 2 starts to inspect first and lately, even take control of some action with a deep social load. 4) The conscious module attributes to an individual moral self every action triggered by the brain, even if it driven by low instincts, just because that´s is the way the others see himself as individual. That´s why we feel ourselves as unique individuals and with an indivisible Cartesian mind. The consciousness ability is fairly recent in evolutionary terms. This explain its inefficient and sequential nature. This and 3 explains why we feel anxiety in some social situations: the cognitive load is too much for the conscious module when he tries to take control of the situation when self image it at a stake. This also explain why when we travel we feel a kind of liberation: because the conscious module is made irrelevant outside our social circle, so our more efficient lower level modules take care of our actions --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: No MWI
Right, I copied and pasted it and it must have lost the superscript. Thanks for catching that. Jason On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 10:48 PM, russell standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 05:40:09PM -0500, Jason Resch wrote: Deutsch. If the number is 64, people can shut their eyes but if it's 1064, they will no longer be able to pretend. Jason Hopefully you meant 10^64, not 1064, which is not all that startling. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: 3-PoV from 1 PoV?
Hi Stephen, Ok, Robinson Arithmatic is ... or Q, is a finitely axiomatized fragment of Peano arithmetic (PA). ...Q is essentially PA without the axiom schema of induction. Even though Q is much weaker than PA, it is still incomplete in the sense of Gödel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_arithmetic_Q It does not tell me where the assumption of implementation of the addition and multiplication obtain. I don't use the assumption of implementation of the addition and multiplication. I use only the fact that some relations among numbers are true or false. You could as well ask a physical realist in what he implements the physical laws ... Just because one can define X does not mean that one has produced X; unless we are assuming that the act of defining a representational system is co-creative of its objects. I think you are confusing numbers and their representations. Arithmetical truth is independent of the representation used for numbers. Are we to consider that an object, physical or platonic, is one and the same as its representations? Of course not. And that is why I don't need, at the ontological level, any representation. Of course I need some to talk with you, but that's different. Oh, I forgot, it has been proposed that a book containing a symbolic representation of Einstein's Brain is equal/equivalent to Einstein's Mind. OK! ... Moving on. Where? In the book Mind's I, Hofstadter just argues that if comp is true then you can converse with Einstein through the manipulation of a book describing (at the right level) the brain of Einstein at some moment. To proceed we have to be careful in all those little nuances. The devil is in the details. [BM] You can entirely define in arithmetic statements of the kind The machine x on input y has not yet stop after z steps. The notion of time used here through the notion of computational steps can be deined entirely from the notion of natural numbers successor (which can be taken as primitive or defined through addition and multiplication). [SPK] Ok, time (pun intended!) for a thought experiment. I go the Library of Babel and pull out the Einstein's Brain and bring it home with me. I sit down and ask it: what are your latest thoughts on the nature of Unified Fields?. How long am I going to wait before I realize that I will never get an answer? You might say:Stephen, you are going about it all wrong! You have to first create a well-formed question in the language of Eintein's Brain and then look up the appropriate responce inthe book. I answer, Ah, So Einstein's Brain can answer my question after all; it can only sit there on the table until I opening and use my own computational implementation to get my answer. Of course, if you want that Einstein answers relatively to you, you have to implement it relatively to you. Either with a Mac, or a PC, or an IBM, or with your hands, whatever. Come on Stephen ... So where is Einstein's Mind? Nowhere... The 3-OMs of Einstein are distributed in the whole of Arithmetic (assuming comp this is quasi trivial to show, yet tedious. The 1-OMs of Einstein appears from inside arithmetic (only Einstein knows them) and their relative statistics are defined by a relative measure (which has to exist or comp is false) pertaining on the 2^aleph_zero computations going through its states. Ask any precise question on this if you have any difficulties. What is it that distinguishes a random sequence of scratches on a plane of sand from the sequence of symbols of the equation representing the Grand Unified Theory of Everything? Well, one person might say: I can read the one that is an equation... Meaningfullness necessitates a subject to whom meaning obtains. Sure. Computational states, symbolic scratches or patterns of concurrent neuron firings or distributions of voltage potentials, mean something because their existance is such that situations would be different otherwise for some system other than that of the states, scratches, patterns, etc.. Sure. Remember the notion of Causation? There are plenty notion of causation derivable from inside arithmetic when you assume comp. Most would collapse to classical logic if the incompleteness did not exist. But machines are incomplete and reflect that incompleteness. This entails not only causation, but also responsibility and I would even argue it implies a form of strong, but partial, (free)-will. X is the Cause of Y if and only if X would not occur without the occurence of Y. David Deutsch defines it more pointedly: ...an event X causes an event Y in our universe if both X and Y occur in our universe, but in most variants of our universe in which X does not happen, Y does not happen either. The
