Re: Jack's partial brain paper
On 17 March 2010 05:29, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: I think this is a dubious argument based on our lack of understanding of qualia. Presumably one has many thoughts that do not result in any overt action. So if I lost a few neurons (which I do continuously) it might mean that there are some thoughts I don't have or some associations I don't make, so eventually I may fade to the level of consciousness of my dog. Is my dog a partial zombie? It's certainly possible that qualia can fade without the subject noticing, either because the change is slow and gradual or because the change fortuitously causes a cognitive deficit as well. But this not what the fading qualia argument is about. The argument requires consideration of a brain change which would cause an unequivocal change in consciousness, such as a removal of the subject's occipital lobes. If this happened, the subject would go completely blind: he would be unable to describe anything placed in front of his eyes, and he would report that he could not see anything at all. That's what it means to go blind. But now consider the case where the occipital lobes are replaced with a black box that reproduces the I/O behaviour of the occipital lobes, but which is postulated to lack visual qualia. The rest of the subject's brain is intact and is forced to behave exactly as it would if the change had not been made, since it is receiving normal inputs from the black box. So the subject will correctly describe anything placed in front of him, and he will report that everything looks perfectly normal. More than that, he will have an appropriate emotional response to what he sees, be able to paint it or write poetry about it, make a working model of it from an image he retains in his mind: whatever he would normally do if he saw something. And yet, he would be a partial zombie: he would behave exactly as if he had normal visual qualia while completely lacking visual qualia. Now it is part of the definition of a full zombie that it doesn't understand that it is blind, since a requirement for zombiehood is that it doesn't understand anything at all, it just behaves as if it does. But if the idea of qualia is meaningful at all, you would think that a sudden drastic change like going blind should produce some realisation in a cognitively intact subject; otherwise how do we know that we aren't blind now, and what reason would we have to prefer normal vision to zombie vision? The conclusion is that it isn't possible to make a device that replicates brain function but lacks qualia: either it is not possible to make such a device at all because the brain is not computable, or if such a device could be made (even a magical one) then it would necessarily reproduce the qualia as well. I think the question of whether there could be a philosophical zombie is ill posed because we don't know what is responsible for qualia. I speculate that they are tags of importance or value that get attached to perceptions so that they are stored in short term memory. Then, because evolution cannot redesign things, the same tags are used for internal thoughts that seem important enough to put in memory. If this is the case then it might be possible to design a robot which used a different method of evaluating experience for storage and it would not have qualia like humans - but would it have some other kind of qualia? Since we don't know what qualia are in a third person sense there seems to be no way to answer that. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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: Jack's partial brain paper
On 17 March 2010 06:09, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote: Stathis, I feel we are riding the human restrictive imaging in a complex nature. While I DO feel completely comfortable to say that there is a neuron through which connectivity is established to a next segment in our mental complexity, and if that neuron dies, the connectivity to that particular quale broke - on 2nd thought the diversity and multiplicity we do experience in nature (knownw domains and presumed for the still unknown ones) provides hope for more than one connecting link to ALL reducing the exclusivity of that particular neuron. Nature's complexity, however, shows redundancy and 'multiple emergency breaks' to the features, according to their 'importance' , that may be beyond our present grasp. In human logic (engineering/physical thinking as well) we think in THE way how things occur. O N E is enough. (This is the basis of our one-track causality-thinking as well: we find in our (known) model ONE most valued initiating factor and satisfy ourselves with that one, as THE Cause while from 'beyond our model' there may be multiple factors contributing to the effect assigned to that ONE in-model factor. This is the reason why our knowledge is almost, sometimes even paradoxical and ambiguous). Stathis asked: Are you prepared to say that it is possible there is a single subatomic particle in your brain which makes the difference between consciousness and zombiehood? I am propared to say that we may do that, i.e. to assign such differences to a figmentous 'particle' - in what we may be no more right than in other 'presumed' mental explanations based on tissue/energy/bio science of the brain. Am I far out to compare a 'zombie' to a binary computer in 'basic' while the more advanced (still!) 'partial zombie' variants come in the advanced AI versions? It still does not commute with the wholeness of mentality, but follows certain leads beyond the strictly mechanistically prefabricated machine connectivities. We still program within our known domains. We still cannot exceed our limited (model-view) knowledge base. The question (which has got a bit lost in the discussion) is whether it is possible to make an artificial brain component which exactly reproduces the behaviour of the biological component, so that it if replaces the biological component the surrounding tissue cannot tell that it is an impostor, but which lacks consciousness. If it is possible, then it would either be possible to create a partial zombie who is blind, deaf, aphasic etc. but behaves normally, or perhaps a abrupt full zombie when one vital component (which would have to be an indivisible part of a neuron) was changed. This does not assume any scientific theory about brain function: we can imagine that the artificial component is created and installed by God. Is it possible to make such a component, or is it a logical impossibility, such that even God could not do it? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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: Jack's partial brain paper
I'm quite confused about the state of zombieness. If the requirement for zombiehood is that it doesn't understand anything at all but it behaves as if it does what makes us not zombies? How do we not we are not? But more importantly, are there known cases of zombies? Perhaps a silly question because it might be just a thought experiment but if so, I wonder on what evidence one is so freely speaking about, specially when connected to cognition for which we now (should) know more. The questions seem related because either we don't know whether we are zombies or one can solve the problem of zombie identification. I guess I'm new in the zombieness business. But leaving the zombie definition and identification apart, I think current science would/should see no difference between consciousness and cognition, the former is an emergent property of the latter, and just as there are levels of cognition there are levels of consciousness. Between the human being and other animals there is a wide gradation of levels, it is not that any other animal lacks of 'qualia'. Perhaps there is an upper level defined by computational limits and as such once reached that limit one just remains there, but consciousness seems to depend on the complexity of the brain (size, convolutions or whatever provides the full power) but not disconnected to cognition. In this view only damaging the cognitive capacities of a person would damage its 'qualia', while its 'qualia' could not get damaged but by damaging the brain which will likewise damage the cognitive capabilities. In other words, there seems to be no cognition/consciousness duality as long as there is no brain/mind one. The use of the term 'qualia' here looks like a remake of the mind/body problem. On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 17 March 2010 05:29, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: I think this is a dubious argument based on our lack of understanding of qualia. Presumably one has many thoughts that do not result in any overt action. So if I lost a few neurons (which I do continuously) it might mean that there are some thoughts I don't have or some associations I don't make, so eventually I may fade to the level of consciousness of my dog. Is my dog a partial zombie? It's certainly possible that qualia can fade without the subject noticing, either because the change is slow and gradual or because the change fortuitously causes a cognitive deficit as well. But this not what the fading qualia argument is about. The argument requires consideration of a brain change which would cause an unequivocal change in consciousness, such as a removal of the subject's occipital lobes. If this happened, the subject would go completely blind: he would be unable to describe anything placed in front of his eyes, and he would report that he could not see anything at all. That's what it means to go blind. But now consider the case where the occipital lobes are replaced with a black box that reproduces the I/O behaviour of the occipital lobes, but which is postulated to lack visual qualia. The rest of the subject's brain is intact and is forced to behave exactly as it would if the change had not been made, since it is receiving normal inputs from the black box. So the subject will correctly describe anything placed in front of him, and he will report that everything looks perfectly normal. More than that, he will have an appropriate emotional response to what he sees, be able to paint it or write poetry about it, make a working model of it from an image he retains in his mind: whatever he would normally do if he saw something. And yet, he would be a partial zombie: he would behave exactly as if he had normal visual qualia while completely lacking visual qualia. Now it is part of the definition of a full zombie that it doesn't understand that it is blind, since a requirement for zombiehood is that it doesn't understand anything at all, it just behaves as if it does. But if the idea of qualia is meaningful at all, you would think that a sudden drastic change like going blind should produce some realisation in a cognitively intact subject; otherwise how do we know that we aren't blind now, and what reason would we have to prefer normal vision to zombie vision? The conclusion is that it isn't possible to make a device that replicates brain function but lacks qualia: either it is not possible to make such a device at all because the brain is not computable, or if such a device could be made (even a magical one) then it would necessarily reproduce the qualia as well. I think the question of whether there could be a philosophical zombie is ill posed because we don't know what is responsible for qualia. I speculate that they are tags of importance or value that get attached to perceptions so that they are stored in short term memory. Then, because evolution cannot redesign things, the same
Re: Free will: Wrong entry.
- Original Message - From: Bruno Marchal To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tuesday, March 16, 2010 2:29 PM Subject: Re: Free will: Wrong entry. Or, are you saying here that choices made by the (3rd person) UD tend to be influenced by one's life-history to the extent of (often) providing the very alternatives that the (1st) person would have chosen? Exactly. Except I would not say that the UD, or arithmetic, makes choices. But the first person did, and can realize her consistent choice. Our consciousness is related to the normal histories which makes us (the lobian numbers) having a relative partial self control with respect to our most probable universal history. That can be reflected in notion like responsibility, remorse, conscience, well founded feeling of guiltiness, badly founded feeling of guiltiness, etc.). In other term free will is more related to determinist chaos, or Gödelian self-reference, than to the abrupt indeterminacy provided by the 'matter' of comp or the 'matter' of quantum mechanics. But is there a deliberate feedback (of any kind) between first person and UD? How does the UD identify and favor our normal histories? How do the lobian numbers affect the UD. (I think you've answered these questions before but not in ways that are clear to me. Please give it one last try.) m.a. 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-l...@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. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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: Jack's partial brain paper
On 17 March 2010 23:47, HZ hzen...@gmail.com wrote: I'm quite confused about the state of zombieness. If the requirement for zombiehood is that it doesn't understand anything at all but it behaves as if it does what makes us not zombies? How do we not we are not? But more importantly, are there known cases of zombies? Perhaps a silly question because it might be just a thought experiment but if so, I wonder on what evidence one is so freely speaking about, specially when connected to cognition for which we now (should) know more. The questions seem related because either we don't know whether we are zombies or one can solve the problem of zombie identification. I guess I'm new in the zombieness business. *I* know with absolute certainty that I am not a zombie, but I don't know if anyone else is. It is just a philosophical idea: there are no known cases of zombies, and we could never know if there are. Some philosophers of mind, such as Daniel Dennett (who has said that they are an embarrassment to philosophy) don't believe that zombies are even conceptually possible. This attitude goes along with an epiphenomenal view of consciousness as a necessary side-effect of intelligent behaviour. The fading qualia argument we have been discussing is due to David Chalmers: http://cogprints.org/318/0/qualia.html It purports to show that functionally equivalent zombie brain components are impossible. Chalmers, unlike Dennett, still believes that zombies are conceptually possible, although he thinks they are probably physically impossible. But leaving the zombie definition and identification apart, I think current science would/should see no difference between consciousness and cognition, the former is an emergent property of the latter, and just as there are levels of cognition there are levels of consciousness. Between the human being and other animals there is a wide gradation of levels, it is not that any other animal lacks of 'qualia'. Perhaps there is an upper level defined by computational limits and as such once reached that limit one just remains there, but consciousness seems to depend on the complexity of the brain (size, convolutions or whatever provides the full power) but not disconnected to cognition. In this view only damaging the cognitive capacities of a person would damage its 'qualia', while its 'qualia' could not get damaged but by damaging the brain which will likewise damage the cognitive capabilities. In other words, there seems to be no cognition/consciousness duality as long as there is no brain/mind one. The use of the term 'qualia' here looks like a remake of the mind/body problem. Yes, that's what it is: the mind-brain problem. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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: Jack's partial brain paper
On 17 Mar 2010, at 13:47, HZ wrote: I'm quite confused about the state of zombieness. If the requirement for zombiehood is that it doesn't understand anything at all but it behaves as if it does what makes us not zombies? How do we not we are not? But more importantly, are there known cases of zombies? Perhaps a silly question because it might be just a thought experiment but if so, I wonder on what evidence one is so freely speaking about, specially when connected to cognition for which we now (should) know more. The questions seem related because either we don't know whether we are zombies or one can solve the problem of zombie identification. I guess I'm new in the zombieness business. I know I am conscious, and I can doubt all content of my consciousness, except this one, that I am conscious. I cannot prove that I am conscious, neither to some others. Dolls and sculptures are, with respect to what they represent, if human in appearance sort of zombie. Tomorrow, we may be able to put in a museum an artificial machine imitating a humans which is sleeping, in a way that we may be confused and believe it is a dreaming human being ... The notion of zombie makes sense (logical sense). Its existence may depend on the choice of theory. With the axiom of comp, a counterfactually correct relation between numbers define the channel through which consciousness flows (select the consistent extensions). So with comp we could argue that as far as we are bodies, we are zombies, but from our first person perspective we never are. But leaving the zombie definition and identification apart, I think current science would/should see no difference between consciousness and cognition, the former is an emergent property of the latter, I would have said the contrary: consciousness - sensibility - emotion - cognition - language - recognition - self-consciousness - ... (and: number - universal number - consciousness - ...) Something like that, follows, I argue, from the assumption that we are Turing emulable at some (necessarily unknown) level of description. and just as there are levels of cognition there are levels of consciousness. Between the human being and other animals there is a wide gradation of levels, it is not that any other animal lacks of 'qualia'. Perhaps there is an upper level defined by computational limits and as such once reached that limit one just remains there, but consciousness seems to depend on the complexity of the brain (size, convolutions or whatever provides the full power) but not disconnected to cognition. In this view only damaging the cognitive capacities of a person would damage its 'qualia', while its 'qualia' could not get damaged but by damaging the brain which will likewise damage the cognitive capabilities. In other words, there seems to be no cognition/consciousness duality as long as there is no brain/mind one. The use of the term 'qualia' here looks like a remake of the mind/body problem. Qualia is the part of the mind consisting in the directly apprehensible subjective experience. Typical examples are pain, seeing red, smell, feeling something, ... It is roughly the non transitive part of cognition. The question here is not the question of the existence of degrees of consciousness, but the existence of a link between a possible variation of consciousness in presence of non causal perturbation during a particular run of a brain or a machine. If big blue wins a chess tournament without having used the register 344, no doubt big blue would have win in case the register 344 would have been broken. Some people seems to believe that if big blue was conscious in the first case, it could loose consciousness in the second case. I don't think this is tenable when we assume that we are Turing emulable. The reason is that consciousness is not ascribable to any particular implementation, but only to an abstract but precise infinity of computations, already 'realized' in elementary arithmetic. Bruno On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 17 March 2010 05:29, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: I think this is a dubious argument based on our lack of understanding of qualia. Presumably one has many thoughts that do not result in any overt action. So if I lost a few neurons (which I do continuously) it might mean that there are some thoughts I don't have or some associations I don't make, so eventually I may fade to the level of consciousness of my dog. Is my dog a partial zombie? It's certainly possible that qualia can fade without the subject noticing, either because the change is slow and gradual or because the change fortuitously causes a cognitive deficit as well. But this not what the fading qualia argument is about. The argument requires consideration of a brain change which would cause an unequivocal change in consciousness, such as a
Re: Free will: Wrong entry.
On 17 Mar 2010, at 14:06, m.a. wrote: But is there a deliberate feedback (of any kind) between first person and UD? No. The UD can be seen as a set of elementary arithmetical truth, realizing through their many proofs, the many computations. It is the least block-universe fro the mindscape. (Assuming comp). How does the UD identify and favor our normal histories? Excellent question. This is the reason why we are hunting white rabbits and white noise. This why we have to extracts the structure of matter and time from a sum on infinity of computations (those below or even aside our level and sphere of definition). If we show that such sum does not normalize, then we refute comp. How do the lobian numbers affect the UD. (I think you've answered these questions before but not in ways that are clear to me. Please give it one last try.)m.a. Löbian machine survives only in their consistent extension. It is the couple lobian-machine/its realities which emerge from inside the UD* (the execution of the UD, or that part of arithmetic). The free-will of a lobian number is defined with respect to its most probable realities. They can affect such realities, and be affected by them. But no lobian number/machine/entity/soul (if you think at its first person view) can affect the UD, for the same reason we cannot affect elementary arithmetic. (or the physical laws, for a physicalist). Look at UD* (the infinite run of the UD), or arithmetic, as the block universe of the mindscape. Matter is a projective view of arithmetic, when viewed by universal numbers from inside it. Normality is ensured by relative self-multiplication, making us both very rare in the absolute, and very numerous in the relative. Like with Everett, except we start from the numbers, and shows how to derive the wave, not just the collapse. I just explain that if we take comp seriously, the mind body problem leads to a mathematical body problem. Bruno -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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 . 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-l...@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: Jack's partial brain paper
On 3/17/2010 3:34 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 17 March 2010 05:29, Brent Meekermeeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: I think this is a dubious argument based on our lack of understanding of qualia. Presumably one has many thoughts that do not result in any overt action. So if I lost a few neurons (which I do continuously) it might mean that there are some thoughts I don't have or some associations I don't make, so eventually I may fade to the level of consciousness of my dog. Is my dog a partial zombie? It's certainly possible that qualia can fade without the subject noticing, either because the change is slow and gradual or because the change fortuitously causes a cognitive deficit as well. But this not what the fading qualia argument is about. The argument requires consideration of a brain change which would cause an unequivocal change in consciousness, such as a removal of the subject's occipital lobes. If this happened, the subject would go completely blind: he would be unable to describe anything placed in front of his eyes, and he would report that he could not see anything at all. That's what it means to go blind. But now consider the case where the occipital lobes are replaced with a black box that reproduces the I/O behaviour of the occipital lobes, but which is postulated to lack visual qualia. The rest of the subject's brain is intact and is forced to behave exactly as it would if the change had not been made, since it is receiving normal inputs from the black box. So the subject will correctly describe anything placed in front of him, and he will report that everything looks perfectly normal. More than that, he will have an appropriate emotional response to what he sees, be able to paint it or write poetry about it, make a working model of it from an image he retains in his mind: whatever he would normally do if he saw something. And yet, he would be a partial zombie: he would behave exactly as if he had normal visual qualia while completely lacking visual qualia. Now it is part of the definition of a full zombie that it doesn't understand that it is blind, since a requirement for zombiehood is that it doesn't understand anything at all, it just behaves as if it does. But if the idea of qualia is meaningful at all, you would think that a sudden drastic change like going blind should produce some realisation in a cognitively intact subject; otherwise how do we know that we aren't blind now, and what reason would we have to prefer normal vision to zombie vision? The conclusion is that it isn't possible to make a device that replicates brain function but lacks qualia: either it is not possible to make such a device at all because the brain is not computable, or if such a device could be made (even a magical one) then it would necessarily reproduce the qualia as well. I generally agree with the above. Maybe I misunderstood the question; but I was considering the possibility of having a continuum of lesser qualia AND corresponding lesser behavior. However I think there is something in the above that creates the just a recording problem. It's the hypothesis that the black box reproduces the I/O behavior. This implies the black box realizes a function, not a recording. But then the argument slips over to replacing the black box with a recording which just happens to produce the same I/O and we're led to an absurdum that a recording is conscious. But what step of the argument should we reject? The plausible possibility is that it is the different response to counterfactuals that the functional box and the recording realize. That would seem like magic - a different response depending on all the things that don't happen - except in the MWI of QM all those counterfactuals are available to make a difference.. Brent I think the question of whether there could be a philosophical zombie is ill posed because we don't know what is responsible for qualia. I speculate that they are tags of importance or value that get attached to perceptions so that they are stored in short term memory. Then, because evolution cannot redesign things, the same tags are used for internal thoughts that seem important enough to put in memory. If this is the case then it might be possible to design a robot which used a different method of evaluating experience for storage and it would not have qualia like humans - but would it have some other kind of qualia? Since we don't know what qualia are in a third person sense there seems to be no way to answer that. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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: Jack's partial brain paper
On 3/17/2010 5:47 AM, HZ wrote: I'm quite confused about the state of zombieness. If the requirement for zombiehood is that it doesn't understand anything at all but it behaves as if it does what makes us not zombies? How do we not we are not? But more importantly, are there known cases of zombies? Perhaps a silly question because it might be just a thought experiment but if so, I wonder on what evidence one is so freely speaking about, specially when connected to cognition for which we now (should) know more. The questions seem related because either we don't know whether we are zombies or one can solve the problem of zombie identification. I guess I'm new in the zombieness business. For me the question of zombieness seems meaningful if I put it in the form of creating an artifiicially intelligent being, as opposed to replacing the components of a brain by functionally identical elements. Julian Jaynes has a theory of the evolutionary development of consciousness as an internalization of hearing speech. He supposes that early humans did not hear an inner narrative as we do but only heard external sounds and the speech of others and due to some biogenetic changes this became internalized so that we heard the instructions of parents in our heads even when they weren't present. Then we came to hear ourselves in our head too, i.e. became conscious. I don't know if this is true - it sounded like nonsense when I first heard of it - but after reading Jaynes I was impressed by the arguments he could muster for it. But if it's true it would mean that I could create an artificially intelligent being who, for example, did not process verbal thoughts thru the same module used for hearing and then this being would not have the same qualia corresponding to hearing yourself in your head. It might very well have some different qualia. But since we don't know what qualia are in a third person sense, it's impossible to make sense of having qualia, but different from those we know. As I understand Bruno's theory, he identifies qualia with certain kinds of computation; a third person characterization. But I'm not sure what kind or whether I could say that my artificially intelligent being had them. Brent But leaving the zombie definition and identification apart, I think current science would/should see no difference between consciousness and cognition, the former is an emergent property of the latter, and just as there are levels of cognition there are levels of consciousness. Between the human being and other animals there is a wide gradation of levels, it is not that any other animal lacks of 'qualia'. Perhaps there is an upper level defined by computational limits and as such once reached that limit one just remains there, but consciousness seems to depend on the complexity of the brain (size, convolutions or whatever provides the full power) but not disconnected to cognition. In this view only damaging the cognitive capacities of a person would damage its 'qualia', while its 'qualia' could not get damaged but by damaging the brain which will likewise damage the cognitive capabilities. In other words, there seems to be no cognition/consciousness duality as long as there is no brain/mind one. The use of the term 'qualia' here looks like a remake of the mind/body problem. On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 17 March 2010 05:29, Brent Meekermeeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: I think this is a dubious argument based on our lack of understanding of qualia. Presumably one has many thoughts that do not result in any overt action. So if I lost a few neurons (which I do continuously) it might mean that there are some thoughts I don't have or some associations I don't make, so eventually I may fade to the level of consciousness of my dog. Is my dog a partial zombie? It's certainly possible that qualia can fade without the subject noticing, either because the change is slow and gradual or because the change fortuitously causes a cognitive deficit as well. But this not what the fading qualia argument is about. The argument requires consideration of a brain change which would cause an unequivocal change in consciousness, such as a removal of the subject's occipital lobes. If this happened, the subject would go completely blind: he would be unable to describe anything placed in front of his eyes, and he would report that he could not see anything at all. That's what it means to go blind. But now consider the case where the occipital lobes are replaced with a black box that reproduces the I/O behaviour of the occipital lobes, but which is postulated to lack visual qualia. The rest of the subject's brain is intact and is forced to behave exactly as it would if the change had not been made, since it is receiving normal inputs from the black box. So the subject will correctly describe anything placed in front of him, and he
Re: Jack's partial brain paper
On 3/17/2010 10:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 17 Mar 2010, at 13:47, HZ wrote: I'm quite confused about the state of zombieness. If the requirement for zombiehood is that it doesn't understand anything at all but it behaves as if it does what makes us not zombies? How do we not we are not? But more importantly, are there known cases of zombies? Perhaps a silly question because it might be just a thought experiment but if so, I wonder on what evidence one is so freely speaking about, specially when connected to cognition for which we now (should) know more. The questions seem related because either we don't know whether we are zombies or one can solve the problem of zombie identification. I guess I'm new in the zombieness business. I know I am conscious, and I can doubt all content of my consciousness, except this one, that I am conscious. I cannot prove that I am conscious, neither to some others. Dolls and sculptures are, with respect to what they represent, if human in appearance sort of zombie. Tomorrow, we may be able to put in a museum an artificial machine imitating a humans which is sleeping, in a way that we may be confused and believe it is a dreaming human being ... The notion of zombie makes sense (logical sense). Its existence may depend on the choice of theory. With the axiom of comp, a counterfactually correct relation between numbers define the channel through which consciousness flows (select the consistent extensions). So with comp we could argue that as far as we are bodies, we are zombies, but from our first person perspective we never are. But leaving the zombie definition and identification apart, I think current science would/should see no difference between consciousness and cognition, the former is an emergent property of the latter, I would have said the contrary: consciousness - sensibility - emotion - cognition - language - recognition - self-consciousness - ... (and: number - universal number - consciousness - ...) Something like that, follows, I argue, from the assumption that we are Turing emulable at some (necessarily unknown) level of description. and just as there are levels of cognition there are levels of consciousness. Between the human being and other animals there is a wide gradation of levels, it is not that any other animal lacks of 'qualia'. Perhaps there is an upper level defined by computational limits and as such once reached that limit one just remains there, but consciousness seems to depend on the complexity of the brain (size, convolutions or whatever provides the full power) but not disconnected to cognition. In this view only damaging the cognitive capacities of a person would damage its 'qualia', while its 'qualia' could not get damaged but by damaging the brain which will likewise damage the cognitive capabilities. In other words, there seems to be no cognition/consciousness duality as long as there is no brain/mind one. The use of the term 'qualia' here looks like a remake of the mind/body problem. Qualia is the part of the mind consisting in the directly apprehensible subjective experience. Typical examples are pain, seeing red, smell, feeling something, ... It is roughly the non transitive part of cognition. The question here is not the question of the existence of degrees of consciousness, but the existence of a link between a possible variation of consciousness in presence of non causal perturbation during a particular run of a brain or a machine. If big blue wins a chess tournament without having used the register 344, no doubt big blue would have win in case the register 344 would have been broken. Not with probability 1.0, because given QM the game might have (and in other worlds did) gone differently and required register 344. Some people seems to believe that if big blue was conscious in the first case, it could loose consciousness in the second case. I don't think this is tenable when we assume that we are Turing emulable. But the world is only Turing emulable if it is deterministic and it's only deterministic if everything happens as in MWI QM. Brent The reason is that consciousness is not ascribable to any particular implementation, but only to an abstract but precise infinity of computations, already 'realized' in elementary arithmetic. Bruno On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 17 March 2010 05:29, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: I think this is a dubious argument based on our lack of understanding of qualia. Presumably one has many thoughts that do not result in any overt action. So if I lost a few neurons (which I do continuously) it might mean that there are some thoughts I don't have or some associations I don't make, so eventually I may fade to the level of consciousness of my dog. Is my dog a partial zombie? It's certainly possible that qualia can fade without the subject noticing, either
Re: Jack's partial brain paper
Brent: why do you believe IN *QUALIA?* they are just as human assumptions (in our belief system) as* VALUE* (or, for that matter: to take seriously your short (long?) term memories). A* ZOMBIE* is the subject of a thought experiment in our humanly aggrandizing anthropocentric boasting. A dog? With the incredible complexity we must assume for (mental) brain(function) it is almost ridiculous to speak about partial brains - especially in the same breath where we assume what the loss of 1 (one) or even of an infinitesimally small part of ONE neuron may do. How about the non-neuronal ingredients, like prions, a little structural change of which may cause (I would rather say: 'indicate') mad cow disease. John On 3/16/10, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: On 3/16/2010 6:03 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 16 March 2010 20:29, russell standish li...@hpcoders.com.au li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: I've been following the thread on Jack's partial brains paper, although I've been too busy to comment. I did get a moment to read the paper this evening, and I was abruptly stopped by a comment on page 2: On the second hypothesis [Sudden Disappearing Qualia], the replacement of a single neuron could be responsible for the vanishing of an entire field of conscious experience. This seems antecedently implausible, if not entirely bizarre. Why? Why isn't it like the straw that broke the camel's back? When pulling apart a network, link by link, there will be a link removed that causes the network to go from being almost fully connected to being disconnected. It need not be the same link each time, it will depend on the order in which the links are removed. I made a similar criticism against David Parfitt's Napoleon thought experiment a couple of years ago on this list - I understand that fading qualia is a popular intuition, but it just seems wrong to me. Can anyone give me a convincing reason why the suddenly disappearing qualia notion is absurd? Fading qualia would result in a partial zombie, and that concept is self-contradictory. It means I could be a partial zombie now, completely blind since waking up this morning, but behaving normally and unaware that anything unusual had happened. The implications of this is that zombie vision is just as good as normal vision in every objective and subjective way, so we may as well say that it is the same as normal vision. In other words, the qualia can't fade and leave the behaviour of the brain unchanged. I think this is a dubious argument based on our lack of understanding of qualia. Presumably one has many thoughts that do not result in any overt action. So if I lost a few neurons (which I do continuously) it might mean that there are some thoughts I don't have or some associations I don't make, so eventually I may fade to the level of consciousness of my dog. Is my dog a partial zombie? I think the question of whether there could be a philosophical zombie is ill posed because we don't know what is responsible for qualia. I speculate that they are tags of importance or value that get attached to perceptions so that they are stored in short term memory. Then, because evolution cannot redesign things, the same tags are used for internal thoughts that seem important enough to put in memory. If this is the case then it might be possible to design a robot which used a different method of evaluating experience for storage and it would not have qualia like humans - but would it have some other kind of qualia? Since we don't know what qualia are in a third person sense there seems to be no way to answer that. Brent Chalmers thinks partial zombies are absurd but does not believe that full zombies are prima facie absurd. Accepting this, it would seem to be possible that one could suddenly transition from fully conscious to fully zombified without going through an intermediate stage. For example, this could happen with the swapping of one neuron. However, it wouldn't be the neuron that causes the change, it would be an infinitesimally small part of the neuron. This is because the neuron itself, like the brain, could be replaced with functionally identical components. For the same reason that qualia can't fade for the whole brain, qualia can't fade for the neuron. So the qualia would have to suddenly disappear with the swapping of one single indivisible component of the neuron. Are you prepared to say that it is possible there is a single subatomic particle in your brain which makes the difference between consciousness and zombiehood? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.comeverything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at
Re: Jack's partial brain paper
On 3/17/2010 11:39 AM, John Mikes wrote: Brent: why do you believe IN *QUALIA?* they are just as human assumptions (in our belief system) as* VALUE* (or, for that matter: to take seriously your short (long?) term memories). I don't believe *IN* anything. They are just something that /occurred/ to me. A* ZOMBIE* is the subject of a thought experiment in our humanly aggrandizing anthropocentric boasting. How is it *boasting* to consider a thought experiment? A dog? /Is that a question?/ Yes I have *dog* (three of them in fact). With the incredible complexity we must assume for (mental) brain(function) it is almost ridiculous to speak about partial brains - especially in the same breath where we assume what the loss of 1 (one) or even of an infinitesimally small part of ONE neuron may do. I didn't assume what it would do. I noted that I'm/* losing*/ them all the time (/faster when have a whiskey/). Brent How about the non-neuronal ingredients, like prions, a little structural change of which may cause (I would rather say: 'indicate') mad cow disease. John On 3/16/10, *Brent Meeker* meeke...@dslextreme.com mailto:meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: On 3/16/2010 6:03 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 16 March 2010 20:29, russell standishli...@hpcoders.com.au mailto:li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: I've been following the thread on Jack's partial brains paper, although I've been too busy to comment. I did get a moment to read the paper this evening, and I was abruptly stopped by a comment on page 2: On the second hypothesis [Sudden Disappearing Qualia], the replacement of a single neuron could be responsible for the vanishing of an entire field of conscious experience. This seems antecedently implausible, if not entirely bizarre. Why? Why isn't it like the straw that broke the camel's back? When pulling apart a network, link by link, there will be a link removed that causes the network to go from being almost fully connected to being disconnected. It need not be the same link each time, it will depend on the order in which the links are removed. I made a similar criticism against David Parfitt's Napoleon thought experiment a couple of years ago on this list - I understand that fading qualia is a popular intuition, but it just seems wrong to me. Can anyone give me a convincing reason why the suddenly disappearing qualia notion is absurd? Fading qualia would result in a partial zombie, and that concept is self-contradictory. It means I could be a partial zombie now, completely blind since waking up this morning, but behaving normally and unaware that anything unusual had happened. The implications of this is that zombie vision is just as good as normal vision in every objective and subjective way, so we may as well say that it is the same as normal vision. In other words, the qualia can't fade and leave the behaviour of the brain unchanged. I think this is a dubious argument based on our lack of understanding of qualia. Presumably one has many thoughts that do not result in any overt action. So if I lost a few neurons (which I do continuously) it might mean that there are some thoughts I don't have or some associations I don't make, so eventually I may fade to the level of consciousness of my dog. Is my dog a partial zombie? I think the question of whether there could be a philosophical zombie is ill posed because we don't know what is responsible for qualia. I speculate that they are tags of importance or value that get attached to perceptions so that they are stored in short term memory. Then, because evolution cannot redesign things, the same tags are used for internal thoughts that seem important enough to put in memory. If this is the case then it might be possible to design a robot which used a different method of evaluating experience for storage and it would not have qualia like humans - but would it have some other kind of qualia? Since we don't know what qualia are in a third person sense there seems to be no way to answer that. Brent Chalmers thinks partial zombies are absurd but does not believe that full zombies are prima facie absurd. Accepting this, it would seem to be possible that one could suddenly transition from fully conscious to fully zombified without going through an intermediate stage. For example, this could happen with the swapping of one neuron. However, it wouldn't be the neuron that causes the change, it would be an infinitesimally small part of the neuron. This is because the neuron itself, like the brain, could be replaced with functionally identical components. For the same reason that qualia can't fade for the whole brain, qualia can't fade for the neuron. So the qualia would have
Re: Jack's partial brain paper
Hi Gentlemen, I start out with the bias that the brain as a neural network with ~ 10^11 neurons, given the exogenous and endogenous inputs presented to it, continuously computes our perception of the world around us. Some neuroscientists suggest that each neuron in the brain is separated by only a few synapses from every other neuron. No nerve impulse ever encounters a dead end in the brain. The same bits (and pieces) of information may be processed simultaneously in multiple brain sites. This is massively parallel architecture, and even without a thorough understanding of quailia, it is difficult (for me) to understand how the loss of a few neurons here and there would affect quailia. Without redundancy, we could not recover from minor brain insults, such as the common ischemia, that we accumulate. Operationally, the brains neurons make the most significant connections with only certain specific neurons, but there are parallel circuits. With the recent introduction of very high resolution MRI, a lot of damage is observed in all brains, as we age. This has posed a problem for clinicians and neuroscientists: What is a normal brain? One of the midwestern medical centers has undertaken a project with a few thousand apparently healthy individuals, with no history of mental health issues, in an effort to learn how much damage can exist in the brain and we would still consider it normal. Astronauts in orbit, have commented on observing bright flashes, which are thought to be cosmic rays / high energy protons ripping through the brain, optic nerve and retina. Does this change astronauts quailia? Not as far as we know. However, on very long exposure, such as the proposed trip to Mars, there is a concern that the astronauts would arrive brain dead - apparently something different than being a zombie.Just as an aside, it has been commented that with billions of circuits operating in (feedback?) loops, it is impossible to have entirely rational thoughts, or purely emotional reactions - another subject for another time. William On Mar 17, 2010, at 11:12 AM, Brent Meeker wrote: On 3/17/2010 10:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 17 Mar 2010, at 13:47, HZ wrote: I'm quite confused about the state of zombieness. If the requirement for zombiehood is that it doesn't understand anything at all but it behaves as if it does what makes us not zombies? How do we not we are not? But more importantly, are there known cases of zombies? Perhaps a silly question because it might be just a thought experiment but if so, I wonder on what evidence one is so freely speaking about, specially when connected to cognition for which we now (should) know more. The questions seem related because either we don't know whether we are zombies or one can solve the problem of zombie identification. I guess I'm new in the zombieness business. I know I am conscious, and I can doubt all content of my consciousness, except this one, that I am conscious. I cannot prove that I am conscious, neither to some others. Dolls and sculptures are, with respect to what they represent, if human in appearance sort of zombie. Tomorrow, we may be able to put in a museum an artificial machine imitating a humans which is sleeping, in a way that we may be confused and believe it is a dreaming human being ... The notion of zombie makes sense (logical sense). Its existence may depend on the choice of theory. With the axiom of comp, a counterfactually correct relation between numbers define the channel through which consciousness flows (select the consistent extensions). So with comp we could argue that as far as we are bodies, we are zombies, but from our first person perspective we never are. But leaving the zombie definition and identification apart, I think current science would/should see no difference between consciousness and cognition, the former is an emergent property of the latter, I would have said the contrary: consciousness - sensibility - emotion - cognition - language - recognition - self-consciousness - ... (and: number - universal number - consciousness - ...) Something like that, follows, I argue, from the assumption that we are Turing emulable at some (necessarily unknown) level of description. and just as there are levels of cognition there are levels of consciousness. Between the human being and other animals there is a wide gradation of levels, it is not that any other animal lacks of 'qualia'. Perhaps there is an upper level defined by computational limits and as such once reached that limit one just remains there, but consciousness seems to depend on the complexity of the brain (size, convolutions or whatever provides the full power) but not disconnected to cognition. In this view only damaging the cognitive capacities of a person would damage its 'qualia', while its 'qualia' could not get damaged
RE: Zombies (was: Jack's partial brain paper)
Hi Bruno and Fellow Listers, As I have been following this conversation a question occurred to me, how is a Zombie (as defined by Chalmers et al.) any different functionally from the notion of other persons (dogs, etc.) that a Solipsist might have? They seem equivalent, both behaving exactly as a “real person would” yet having no consciousness or 1-p reality of their own. What am I missing here? Onward! Stephen P. King From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-l...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 2010 1:45 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Jack's partial brain paper On 16 Mar 2010, at 19:29, Brent Meeker wrote: On 3/16/2010 6:03 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 16 March 2010 20:29, russell standish mailto:li...@hpcoders.com.au li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: I've been following the thread on Jack's partial brains paper, although I've been too busy to comment. I did get a moment to read the paper this evening, and I was abruptly stopped by a comment on page 2: On the second hypothesis [Sudden Disappearing Qualia], the replacement of a single neuron could be responsible for the vanishing of an entire field of conscious experience. This seems antecedently implausible, if not entirely bizarre. Why? Why isn't it like the straw that broke the camel's back? When pulling apart a network, link by link, there will be a link removed that causes the network to go from being almost fully connected to being disconnected. It need not be the same link each time, it will depend on the order in which the links are removed. I made a similar criticism against David Parfitt's Napoleon thought experiment a couple of years ago on this list - I understand that fading qualia is a popular intuition, but it just seems wrong to me. Can anyone give me a convincing reason why the suddenly disappearing qualia notion is absurd? Fading qualia would result in a partial zombie, and that concept is self-contradictory. It means I could be a partial zombie now, completely blind since waking up this morning, but behaving normally and unaware that anything unusual had happened. The implications of this is that zombie vision is just as good as normal vision in every objective and subjective way, so we may as well say that it is the same as normal vision. In other words, the qualia can't fade and leave the behaviour of the brain unchanged. I think this is a dubious argument based on our lack of understanding of qualia. Presumably one has many thoughts that do not result in any overt action. So if I lost a few neurons (which I do continuously) it might mean that there are some thoughts I don't have or some associations I don't make, so eventually I may fade to the level of consciousness of my dog. Is my dog a partial zombie? A priori the dog is not a zombie at all. It may be like us after taking some strong psych-active substance, disabling it intellectually. If enough neurons are disabled, it may lose Löbianity, but not yet necessarliy consciousness. If even more neurons are disabled, it will lose the ability to manifest his consciousness relatively to you, and it will be senseless to attribute him consciousness, but from its own perspective it will be another dog or another universal machine in Platonia. I think the question of whether there could be a philosophical zombie is ill posed because we don't know what is responsible for qualia. I speculate that they are tags of importance or value that get attached to perceptions so that they are stored in short term memory. Then, because evolution cannot redesign things, the same tags are used for internal thoughts that seem important enough to put in memory. If this is the case then it might be possible to design a robot which used a different method of evaluating experience for storage and it would not have qualia like humans - but would it have some other kind of qualia? Since we don't know what qualia are in a third person sense there seems to be no way to answer that. If the robot can reason logically and believes in the induction axioms, it will be Löbian, and the 8 arithmetical hypostases will necessarily apply. In that case, if you find Theaetetus' theory of knowledge plausible, then it is plausible that it has a personhood, and its qualia are described by S4Grz1, X1* and Z1*, whatever the means of storage are used. 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-l...@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. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List
Re: Zombies (was: Jack's partial brain paper)
On 18 March 2010 06:32, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: As I have been following this conversation a question occurred to me, how is a Zombie (as defined by Chalmers et al.) any different functionally from the notion of other persons (dogs, etc.) that a Solipsist might have? They seem equivalent, both behaving exactly as a “real person would” yet having no consciousness or 1-p reality of their own. What am I missing here? The problem of zombies is a version of the problem of other minds. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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: Jack's partial brain paper
On 18 March 2010 04:34, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: However I think there is something in the above that creates the just a recording problem. It's the hypothesis that the black box reproduces the I/O behavior. This implies the black box realizes a function, not a recording. But then the argument slips over to replacing the black box with a recording which just happens to produce the same I/O and we're led to an absurdum that a recording is conscious. But what step of the argument should we reject? The plausible possibility is that it is the different response to counterfactuals that the functional box and the recording realize. That would seem like magic - a different response depending on all the things that don't happen - except in the MWI of QM all those counterfactuals are available to make a difference.. I think that was Jack's problem with the fading qualia argument: it would imply that a recording or random process could be conscious, which is a no-no. He therefore contrives to explain how fading qualia (with identical behaviour) could in fact happen. But I don't buy it: I still think the idea of the partial zombie is incoherent. If a chunk were removed out of my computer's CPU and replaced with a black box which accidentally reproduces the I/O behaviour of the missing part the computer would function perfectly normally. We would not say that it isn't really running Windows and Firefox. Why do we say this about consciousness? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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: Jack's partial brain paper
On 3/17/2010 9:28 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 18 March 2010 04:34, Brent Meekermeeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: However I think there is something in the above that creates the just a recording problem. It's the hypothesis that the black box reproduces the I/O behavior. This implies the black box realizes a function, not a recording. But then the argument slips over to replacing the black box with a recording which just happens to produce the same I/O and we're led to an absurdum that a recording is conscious. But what step of the argument should we reject? The plausible possibility is that it is the different response to counterfactuals that the functional box and the recording realize. That would seem like magic - a different response depending on all the things that don't happen - except in the MWI of QM all those counterfactuals are available to make a difference.. I think that was Jack's problem with the fading qualia argument: it would imply that a recording or random process could be conscious, which is a no-no. He therefore contrives to explain how fading qualia (with identical behaviour) could in fact happen. But I don't buy it: I still think the idea of the partial zombie is incoherent. If a chunk were removed out of my computer's CPU and replaced with a black box which accidentally reproduces the I/O behaviour of the missing part the computer would function perfectly normally. We would not say that it isn't really running Windows and Firefox. Why do we say this about consciousness? Is it coherent to say a black box accidentally reproduces the I/O? It is over some relatively small number to of I/Os, but over a large enough number and range to sustain human behavior - that seems very doubtful. One would be tempted to say the black box was obeying a natural law. It would be the same as the problem of induction. How do we know natural laws are consistent - because we define them to be so. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@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.
