Re: Bruno's blasphemy.
Bruno, Why don't you make a course for dummies about this? (For example in Second Life) Evgenii On 11.07.2011 16:01 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 11 Jul 2011, at 14:33, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 10.07.2011 17:32 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 10 Jul 2011, at 15:20, Craig Weinberg wrote: ... Let's take the color yellow for example. If you build a brain out of ideal ping pong balls, or digital molecular emulations, does it perceive yellow from 580nm oscillations of electromagnetism automatically, or does it see yellow when it's own emulated units are vibrating on the functionally proportionate scale to itself? Does the ping pong ball brain see it's own patterns of collisions as yellow or does yellow = electromagnetic ~580nm and nothing else. At what point does the yellow come in? Where did it come from? Were there other options? Can there ever be new colors? From where? What is the minimum mechanical arrangement required to experience yellow? Any mechanical arrangement defining a self-referentially correct machine automatically leads the mechanical arrangement to distinguish third person point of view and first person points of view. The machine already have a theory of qualia, with an explanation of why qualia and quanta seems different. Bruno, Could you please make a reference to a good text for dummies about that statement? (But please not in French) I am afraid the only text which explains this in simple way is my sane04 paper(*). It is in the second part (the interview of the machine), and it uses Smullyan popular explanation of the logic of self-reference (G) from his Forever Undecided popular book. Popular attempts to explain Gödel's theorem are often incorrect, and the whole matter is very delicate. Philosophers, like Lucas, or physicists, like Penrose, illustrate that it is hard to explain Gödel's result to non logicians. I'm afraid the time has not yet come for popular explanation of machine's theology. Let me try a short attempt. By Gödel's theorem we know that for any machine, the set of true propositions about the machine is bigger than the set of the propositions provable by the machine. Now, Gödel already knew that a machine can prove that very fact about herself, and so can be aware of its own limitations. Such a machine is forced to discover a vast range of true proposition about her that she cannot prove, and such a machine can study the logic to which such propositions are obeying. Then, it is a technical fact that such logics (of the non provable, yet discoverable propositions) obeys some theories of qualia which have been proposed in the literature (by J.L. Bell, for example). So the machine which introspects itself (the mystical machine) is bounded to discover the gap between the provable and truth (the G-G* gap), but also the difference between all the points of view (third person = provable, first person = provable-and-true, observable with probability 1 = provable-and-consistent, feelable = provable-and-consistent-and-true, etc.). When the machine studies the logic of those propositions, she rediscovers more or less a picture of reality akin to the mystical rationalists (like Plato, Plotinus, but also Nagasena, and many others). If you are familiar with the logic G, I might be able to explain more. If not, read Smullyan's book, perhaps. All this is new material, and, premature popular version can be misleading. Elementary logic is just not yet well enough known. In fact, the UDA *is* the human-popular version of all this. The AUDA is the proper machine's technical version. If you read the sane04(*) paper, feel free to ask for any precisions. Best, Bruno (*) http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html 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: COMP refutation paper - finally out
On Sat, Jul 09, 2011 at 02:26:19PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: David Deutsch has an interesting discussion about this in his Beginning of Infinity. He actually introduces several notions of universality, one of which is universality of the numbering system. Our numbering system is universal, Well, carefull. It is unidversal in some sense, but is not Turing universal. Of course. This is David's idea (not mine), expounded in Beginning of Infinity, of various sorts of universality, leading up to the idea of a universal knowledge creator. I haven't got to that part of the book yet, but I've noticed a bit of controversy about it on the FOR list. Similarly, Babbage and Lovelace came very close to the Turing universality concept, but again mysteriously shied away from it. Here I disagree. I have made research, and I am convinced that babbage has been aware of the Turing universality, of, its notation system to describe its machine. He said that this was his real big discovery, but none understand it. Fair enough (as far as I am concerned). It is a historical matter, in which I have no stake. But David Deutsch does make this claim on BoI, and in particular refers to the Lovelace objection. I think it would have taken some more centuries. They might have discovered it in the 12 or 13th century. They would not have been able to miss it, especially with the development of math and calculus, which they would have developed much faster than Newton and Leibniz. OK, that is just my current opinion. We can't change history. Fair enough. BTW, in response to your follow-on message when you mention Hypatia, don't take the movie Agora as the gospel truth - certain matters were exaggerated to make it cinematically more interesting. My son discovered this when he wrote a play based on those events for a school assignment (for which he got top marks). Nevertheless, it must be true that the European dark ages set us back several centuries. 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. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales 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: Bruno's blasphemy.
Hi Stephen, I have to do a Part I now and get into Part II later on. How does this causality flows in both directions work? I have a model of something that has that kind of feature, but I am curious about yours. Subjectively we feel, (and see, hear, remember, understand) that we can voluntarily cause our mind to focus on different subjects or to exert our will (motive/motor functionality). We know that this correlates to electromagnetic activity in the brain and nervous system which can physically cause muscles to contract or relax themselves. When we choose to move our arm, it's for a semantic reason known by our conscious mind rather than a biochemical or physiological purpose which we just imagine is meaningful. We do actually control our body and conscious mind to some extent and through that are able to control our responses to our lives to some extent. If you're looking for a more mechanical explanation of how subjective will and objective determinism work I would start with objective properties being rooted in an ontology of separateness added together by relativity while subjective properties are subtractive as well - they use your participation to fill in the blanks between seemingly separate perceptions (I think of 'black magic', the crayon and toothpick kind: http://paintcutpaste.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/DSC_0182.jpg) How, exactly, are you defining identity as implicit in your question here? To say that X is X, as in the phrase ...what they are ..., is to assume that you known what X is exactly, no? Is this public or private information? I try to avoid definitions if I can help it (I think they can detract from meaning as well as clarify), and I'm not very familiar with philosophy conventions. I'm just talking about an atom can do things that my idea of an atom could not, since at some point groups of groups of atoms get together and form a living cell which eventually, we know, can host or facilitate human consciousness. As far as X is X, I don't think that's strictly true. In that sentence the first X is located five chars to the left of the second X, which is followed by a comma rather than a space. X is only X because we subjectively make that semantic equation. In an absolute sense, nothing is anything else but what it is. There is no truly identical identity. Are you taking into account, for example, decoherence? Are you assuming a classical or quantum world? Yes, I'm aware of decoherence. As with probability and superposition it can be used by QM to explain away just about anything that may threaten it. I think that QM is likely to be the postmodern version of Ptolemaic deferent and epicycle as far as it being useful (and precise to a fantastic degree in the case of QM...because it's the consequence of extreme occidental focus rather than pre-occidental archaic) but ultimately getting it completely wrong. I think the whole Standard Model needs to be completely reimagined as a map of observed atomic moods rather than physical phenomena. What difference in kind is there between a component that is equivalent in function *and* is integrable with the system to be substituted? To say that it is made of cobalt alloy would be merely an argument from illicit substitution of identicals! Not entirely sure what you're asking. I'm just saying that the function we assume isn't necessarily the only factor. I don't know if it's an illicit substitution, I'm just saying cobalt blood isn't identical (enough) for the body to treat it as blood for all of the functions that blood performs. If it's not cells for instance, maybe your bone marrow goes crazy and produces leukocytes, or maybe it atrophies and you become dependent on the synthetic blood. You can't assume that just because a fluid delivers oxygen that you can use it instead of blood indefinitely, and you can't assume that a silicon sculpture of neural logic can be used to feel anything. How is the specification of wires relevant to the claim? Earlier I had said that a tangle of wires isn't going to feel anything regardless of how long or tangled it is. Jason responded that he thinks it can. I'm asking what else can wires do? Everything? Can anything do anything if put into the right shape? I think organization doesn't matter at all unless the units you are organizing have potentials to develop those particular emergent properties you desire. Umm, are you not implicitly assuming cartoons in the process of generation where the constructors of the cartoons have, as available information, the changing positions of colored lines and points? I don't think so. I'm looking at a finished cartoon as it is being watched and saying that it is a machine of visual image, different from computer logic only in it's physical substrate. From whence obtains meaning? Is the yellow an illusion or some phantom to bewitch the mind? How do you know what yellow is like from the first person aspect of an algae? I don't
Re: COMP refutation GAME OVER
On 11 Jul 2011, at 20:08, Quentin Anciaux wrote: 2011/7/11 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net On 7/10/2011 8:16 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: You confuse perhaps with Schmidhuber's position, or some digital physicist (DP). But as I have explained many times here that this position does not work. Computationalism or digital mechanism (DM) is the idea that I am a machine, and by the first person indeterminacy, and the way the laws of physics have to emerge from computations, the physical universe (nor the fundamental reality) cannot be described entirely by a computation. On the contrary it is a sum on an infinity of computations. If the universe is a computation, then I am computable, but then it cannot be a computation (by what I say above, it is not obvious). So with comp, or without comp, the physical universe is not a computation. With comp, the laws of nature are not computable, or have strong non computable components. DM - ~DP DP - DM, So DP - ~DP, so ~DP. Bruno This confuses me. When you say the universe is not computable, you mean it is not the process of computing a function. But you think it is generated by a UD. Right? In other words, you are saying what a UD does is *not* a computation. Brent No he is saying that the univese is the result of an infinity of computation going through its current state... an infinity of computation is *not computable*, hence digital physics is false. The UD of course runs all programs and is computable, but the UD generates and runs *all* programs, it's not a program that computes the universe. Yes indeed. I think Brent forgot the first person indeterminacy. The universe is not something computed by the UD. The universe is how the UD is seen from the views of those who are computed by the UD. 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: Bruno's blasphemy.
On 09 Jul 2011, at 04:17, Craig Weinberg wrote: You assumptions are not enough clear so I never know if you talk of what is or of what seems to be. I'm trying for 'what seems to be what is', OK. But what is your assumption? since what is isn't knowable In which theory. I think that a part of 'what is' is knowable (for example consciousness). And I think elementary arithmetical conviction is communicable. I am pretty sure I can prove to you that 17 is a prime number, or even (less obvious) that the equation x^2 = 2 *( y^2) has no non null integers solution. and what seems to be doesn't matter if it doesn't reflect what is. OK. But the question is: what are you assuming? I get the feeling that you assume a primitively physical universe. I am OK with that theory, which might indeed be true, except that even without QM, the question of the interpretation of the physical laws is not entirely trivial for me. But then, as you do, (so you are coherent with comp) you need a non computationalist theory of mind. My point is a proof that you are coherent. Sane04 sum up an argument showing that mechanism (comp) and materialism (physicalism) are logically (with some nuances) incompatible. Now, in the branching dilemma materialism XOR mechanism, you keep materialism, apparently. I keep doubting, but keeping mechanism for the sake of the reasoning, transforms the mind-body problem into a body problem in theoretical computer science (which is a branch of number theory). The mind theory is then very natural: it is the study of what machine can prove, know, observe, feel, hope about herself. The matter theory is counterintuitive. But not so much weird than most interpretation of QM. The theory of everything becomes number theory. And then a miracle occurs! By the incompleteness theorem of Gödel, which is among what machine can prove, numbers can distinguish (or numbers get deluded, I don't know) provability from knowledge, observation, sensations, etc. I limit the mystery to the numbers through the notion of machines and self-reference. If you limit the mystery, then won't what you get back be defined by how you have defined those limits? Sorry. I was unclear. Consciousness and Matter are the mysteries I work on. What I pretend, is two things: 1) if you (at least) agree that your daughter marries a guy who got, to survive some diseases, an artificial heart, an artificial kidney, and an artificial brain. The heart is just a pump, and the brain is just a computer. The idea here is that the brain is a natural carbon based computer. Computer, as it happens, can all emulate each others. Well, If you agree to think about that hypothesis, you can see that we have literally no choice: we have to extract the physical patterns and the reason of their stability in the way machine's dreams can become first person sharable, and relate to more particular universal number. 2) Some Löbian machine already exists, like PA and ZF, and are very well studied, and thanks to the work of Gödel and others, we can axiomatize completely the theology of the universal machine. The proper theology is just computer science minus computer's computer science. In this epoch you can also paraphrazed it by Tarski minus Gödel (truth on computer minus what computers can prove). But computer can do much more things than proving, than can know, observe, etc. Even in the naïve theory of ideally correct machine, with believable = provable, knowable = provable and true, observable = provable and consistent, feelable (sorry for that word) = provable and consistent and true. Consciousness content, like fear, can modify the matter distribution around. At a deeper level, we select the realities which support us since a long time (deep computation). I think that's true or half true, but not even the most evolved lama or enlightened yogi can fail to react to multiple bullets fired through their head or a massive dose of cyanide. Of course. Although we don't know, for sure, their first person experiences. The problem is to relate them to third person sharable notions. They can't be related except through direct neurological intervention. ? Are you using an brain-mind identity thesis. I guess so. It is OK, because, well you believe that your daughter married a (philosophical) zombie. There is never going to be a quantitative expression to bring the color blue to a mind which is part of a brain that has never seen blue. OK. (Except serendipitously) You can, however, potentially intervene upon the brain electronically, perhaps simulate a conjoined twin connection, and create a memory of blue. Blue cannot be described quantitatively however. You are right on this. But Blue cannot be described quantitatively is a qualitative assertion, and machines can make qualitative assertion too. They too can understand that their
Re: Bruno's blasphemy.
Part II
What is your source of that information?
About human tetrachromats?
http://www.klab.caltech.edu/cns186/papers/Jameson01.pdf
Everything else is just my hypothesis.
To suspect that ... is
to bet that ... is true. How different is that from what Bruno is
talking about with the Yes, Doctor? You seem to be using Bruno's
definition of /Theaetetian/ conception of knowledge without even
acknowledging it! What is holding you back?
I don't get the connection. From Bruno's Yes, Doctor I get the idea of
substitution level, although most of what I'm talking about isn't to
do with prosthetic computation, it's about a topological hypothesis of
ontology. I haven't been able to make sense of Bruno's Theaetetian
conception yet so I can't say if I'm telepathically plagiarizing him.
Seriously, Craig, you are asking for too much! A lack of an
explanation that you can understand is not evidence of falsehood! How do
you know that you understand the idea?
I think I understand Jason's idea if that's what you're referring to,
I just reject it on the grounds that it is contingent upon the
existence of something which I consider to be a logical impossibility.
There can be no ancestor of red. It either has red or it doesn't. It
can't be something that is almost color but still a little bit goat
horn. To quote you in the future... non-sequitur,
At best you can bet that you are
correct; you can not be certain. Yes, you can have certainty that X is X
and that it cannot contradict its own existence, but what can this tell
you of the properties of X?
It can tell you that you know more about X or red than you think you
do. If that's what you're asking.
Knowledge of the truth values of questions
about the properties of X implies that you can process the meaning of X
is {a, b, c, ...} statements. How exactly do you process meanings?
Not sure what this means really. Meanings are not processed, they are
revealed. Understood (the etymology of understand gives a better sense
of this *nter-standing as in, entero, something that supports you in
the gut, that settles you as it settles within you). The gap between
the sense of what you are and what the meaning is closes so that the
sensorimotor circuit is completed - irrespective of physical presence.
You can understand things which are not physically present, but some
semblance of their meaning is semantically present.
You use your brain.
More accurate to say that I am my brain? I don't use a brain to think,
I am a brain that thinks.
If that brain is hardwired from DNA to process some
range of frequencies as red then guess what, u will see red when some
EMF excitation stimulated some rod or cone in the retina of your eye...
Where does the DNA get red from?
All of this physical process involves work that generates entropy.
So there is a physical aspect to this.
I would say that since sensorimotive phenomena is the interior side of
electromagnetism, and is it's ontological opposite, that qualia
generates negentropy which balances the existential-relativity-entropy
side.
If that were true, then unplugging your monitor would change the
content of the internet. Regardless of the form a computer presents
it's data to us in, it is processed the same way to itself, machine
language, bytes.
[SPK]
Non-sequitur.
I'm just saying that formatting is important to us, not to the
computer. It's a false equivalence to presume that just because you
see information formatted through a human friendly presentation layer
doesn't mean that that layer has it's own awareness. It's a drawing. A
cartoon.
Don't know. That's more of a cosmological question. The ontology of
awareness is not only mysterious, it is mystery itself.
{SPK]
obscurum per obscurius?
Yes and no. Mystery arises from the privatization of sense through the
subjective topology. Sensorimotive experience gives rise to mystery
just as wealth gives rise to poverty. Knowing means knowing that you
don't know, which is another way of saying that the self feels what it
is by feeling what it is not (how else could there be a self?)
I agree, but we need to show necessitation of the
organic-somatic-neurological.
The interior topology is not about necessity, it's about freedom,
imagination, joy, violence. Color exists because it is desirable. On
the subjective side of the curtain, the universe, she just wanna have
fun.
That is just 'level of substitution specifications!
Not getting the connection.
And what exactly defined sense as in beneath
arithmetic is sense? Whose sense? Are you claiming that Consciousness
is prior to Existence?
I doubt that whatever sense gives rise to arithmetic sense would be
recognizable to us as Consciousness, but since it's beyond time and
space, it could be described as both absolutely omniscient, absolutely
unconscious, and maybe even relatively semi-conscious too. Sort of
like Yahweh-Cthulhu-frisbee-akashic records-interior of the big bang.
What is the
RE: Bruno's blasphemy.
Craig, I wonder what you'd think of Chalmers' Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia argument at http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html which to me makes a strong argument for organizational invariance, which says physical systems organized the same way should produce the same qualia, so for example a computer which simulated each of my neurons and their interactions with sufficient accuracy would give rise to the same qualia as my biological brain. The basic idea of the argument is that if you gradually replaced my brain's neurons with computer chips that simulated the behavior of the removed neurons and had the same input/output relationships, my qualia should not change or fade in any reasonable theory of consciousness (an unreasonable one would be one that had a total disconnect between qualia and behavior, so that for example my qualia could be gradually fading or changing, or even changing on a second-by-second basis, and yet behaviorally I would argue emphatically that they were remaining unchanged) Jesse -- 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: Bruno's blasphemy.
On 11 Jul 2011, at 23:57, Craig Weinberg wrote: I'm having trouble understanding what you're saying. Computer chips don't behave in the same way though. That is just a question of choice of level of description. Unless you believe in substantial infinite souls. Not sure what you mean in either sentence. A plastic flower behaves differently than a biological plant. Sure. But they have not the same function. A computer chip behaves differently than a neuron. Not necessarily. It might, if well programmed enough, do the same thing, and then it is a question of interfacing different sort of hardware, to replace the neuron, by the chips. Why assume that a computer chip can feel what a living cell can feel? Because all known laws of nature, even their approximations, which can still function at some high level, are Turing emulable. In the case of biology, there is strong evidence that nature has already bet on the functional substitution, because it happens all the time at the biomolecular level. Even the quantum level is Turing emulable, but no more in real time, and you need a quantum chips. But few believes the brain can be a quantum computer, and it would change nothing in our argumentation. Your computer can't become an ammoniaholic or commit suicide. Why? I'm talking about your actual computer that you are reading this on. Are you asking me why it can't commit suicide or spontaneously develop a hankering for ammonia? Because, it is a baby, and its universality is exploited by the sellers, or the nerds. And we don't allow it any form of introspection, except some disk verification. So it has no reason, and no real means, to think about suicide. He has still no life, except that (weird) form of blank consciousness I begin to suspect. My computer is not a good example, when talking about computers in general. By computers I mean universal machine, and this is a mathematical notion. A physical computer seems to be a mathematical computer implemented in a well, another probable universal being in some neighborhood. With comp, they are numerous. With QM, too. The other side is well explained in the comp theory. I'm giving it a good try reading your SANE2004 pdf but I think I'm hovering at around 4% comprehension. That's a bad note! What is the first 5th % that you don't understand? If you want me to be able to consider your hypothesis I think that you will have to radically simplify it's insights to concrete examples which are not dependent upon references to anyone else's work, logical/mathematical/or philosophical notation, teleportation, or Turing anything. Read just the UDA. The first seven steps gives the picture. Of course, you have to be able to reason with an hypothesis, keeping it all along in the reasoning. As near as I can tell, it seems like you are looking at the hows and whys of sensation - how physics and sensation are both logical relations No, they are related to arithmetical relations and set of arithmetical relations. rather than noumenal existential artifacts and why it might be necessary. I can't really tell what your answer is though. God create the natural numbers, all the rest is created by the natural numbers. Created or subselected by their ancestors in long computational histories. Comp leads to a many-world interpretation of arithmetic. My focus is on describing what and who we are in the simplest way. To my mind, what and who we are cannot be described in purely arithmetic relations, unless arithmetic relations automatically obscure their origin and present themselves in all possible universes as color, sound, taste, feeling, etc. Nice picture. This is what happens indeed. No problem. That would mean that the substitution level is low. It does no change the conclusion: the physical world is a projection of the mind, and the mind is an inside view of arithmetic (or comp is false, that is, at all level and you need substantial souls). But we don't even find a substance for explaining matter, so that seems a regression to me. Anyway, it is inconsistent with the comp assumption. When you say that the physical world is a projection of the mind, do you mean that in the sense that it might be possible to stop bullets directly with our thoughts or in the sense of physicality only seeming physical because our mind is programmed to read it as such? It is in between. Because physics is not the projection of the human mind, but the projection of all universal (machine (number)) mind. So, we can' change the laws of physics by the power of the mind, but we can develop degrees of independence. That is why we can fly, and go to the moon. I would agree that physicality arises only from the body's own physical composition and our mind's apprehension of the body's awareness of itself in relation to it's world, but I wouldn't say that physical matter
Re: Bruno's blasphemy.
On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 8:17 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: Not sure what the cogito has to do with the presumption of the necessity of color. Omnipotence solves all problems by definition, doesn't it? I'm just using it as an example to show that it's ridiculous to think that the idea of color can just happen in a physical environment that doesn't already support it a priori. It does not evolve as a consequence of natural selection, not only because it serves no special function that unconscious detection would not accomplish, but because there is no precursor for it to evolve from, no mechanism for cells or organs to generate perception of color were it not already a built in possibility. I'm saying that color perception is more unlikely to exist in a purely physical cosmos than time travel or omnipotence as a possible physical adaptation. I'm trying to get at Jason's radical underestimation of the gap between zoological necessity and the possibility of color's existence. I think the problem with Chalmer's view, is that by assuming a universe without qualia (or philosophical zombies) are possible, it inevitably leads to substance dualism or epiphenominalism. If zombies are possible, it means that consciousness is something extra which can be taken away without affecting anything. Thus, conscious would have no effects, which I think is against your view. Are you familiar with this: http://www.philforum.org/documents/An%20Unfortunate%20Dualist%20(Raymond%20Smullyan).pdf? If not, it can give you a feel for why zombies may be logically impossible. So what is your thought on this subject? Can a universe exist just like ours but have different qualia or none at all? My view is that qualia are necessary and identical anywhere an identical processing of information, at some substitution level, is performed. Thus, if it is done by a computer or a human, or a human in this universe or another universe, or a computer in this universe or a person in a different universe, the resulting qualia will be the same, because I believe qualia are a property of the mind, not a property of the physics on which the mind is built. Jason -- 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: Bruno's blasphemy.
Thanks, I always seem to like Chalmers perspectives. In this case I think that the hypothesis of physics I'm working from changes how I see this argument compared to how I would have a couple years ago. My thought now is that although organizational invariance is valid, molecular structure is part of the organization. I think that consciousness is not so much a phenomenon that is produced, but an essential property that is accessed in different ways through different organizations. I'll just throw out some thoughts: If you take an MRI of a silicon brain, it's going to look nothing like a human brain. If an MRI can tell the difference, why can't the brain itself? Can you make synthetic water? Why not? If consciousness is purely organizational, shouldn't we see an example of non-living consciousness in nature? (Maybe we do but why don't we recognize it as such). At least we should see an example of an inorganic organism. My view of awareness is now subtractive and holographic (think pinhole camera), so that I would read fading qualia in a different way. More like dementia.. attenuating connectivity between different aspects of the self, not changing qualia necessarily. The brain might respond to the implanted chips, even ruling out organic rejection, the native neurology may strengthen it's remaining connections and attempt to compensate for the implants with neuroplasticity, routing around the 'damage'. Qualia could also become more intense as the native brain region gets smaller. Loudness seems to correlate with stupidity rather than quiet behavior - maybe there's a reason for that. Maybe people with less integrated neurons live in a coarser, more percussively energitic version of the universe? Of course, it's possible that silicon will not present as much of an organizational incompatibility as I'm guessing, but my hunch is that even if you could pull it off with chips, you would end up having to reinvent living cells in semiconductor form before you can get feeling out of them. I think there is a lot of organic firmware in there that is not going to be supported on a solid state platform. Life needs water. Our feelings need cells that need water. I see no reason to think that water is less of a part of human consciousness than is logic. On Jul 12, 2:16 pm, Jesse Mazer laserma...@hotmail.com wrote: Craig, I wonder what you'd think of Chalmers' Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia argument athttp://consc.net/papers/qualia.htmlwhich to me makes a strong argument for organizational invariance, which says physical systems organized the same way should produce the same qualia, so for example a computer which simulated each of my neurons and their interactions with sufficient accuracy would give rise to the same qualia as my biological brain. The basic idea of the argument is that if you gradually replaced my brain's neurons with computer chips that simulated the behavior of the removed neurons and had the same input/output relationships, my qualia should not change or fade in any reasonable theory of consciousness (an unreasonable one would be one that had a total disconnect between qualia and behavior, so that for example my qualia could be gradually fading or changing, or even changing on a second-by-second basis, and yet behaviorally I would argue emphatically that they were remaining unchanged) Jesse -- 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: Bruno's blasphemy.
Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2011 15:50:12 -0700 Subject: Re: Bruno's blasphemy. From: whatsons...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Thanks, I always seem to like Chalmers perspectives. In this case I think that the hypothesis of physics I'm working from changes how I see this argument compared to how I would have a couple years ago. My thought now is that although organizational invariance is valid, molecular structure is part of the organization. I think that consciousness is not so much a phenomenon that is produced, but an essential property that is accessed in different ways through different organizations. But how does this address the thought-experiment? If each neuron were indeed replaced one by one by a functionally indistinguishable substitute, do you think the qualia would change somehow without the person's behavior changing in any way, so they still maintained that they noticed no differences? I'll just throw out some thoughts: If you take an MRI of a silicon brain, it's going to look nothing like a human brain. If an MRI can tell the difference, why can't the brain itself? Because neurons (including those controlling muscles) don't see each other visually, they only sense one another by certain information channels such as neurotransmitter molecules which go from one neuron to another at the synaptic gap. So if the artificial substitutes gave all the same type of outputs that other neurons could sense, like sending neurotransmitter molecules to other neurons (and perhaps other influences like creating electromagnetic fields which would affect action potentials traveling along nearby neurons), then the system as a whole should behave identically in terms of neural outputs to muscles (including speech acts reporting inner sensations of color and whether or not the qualia are dancing or remaining constant), even if some other system that can sense information about neurons that neurons themselves cannot (like a brain scan which can show something about the material or even shape of neurons) could tell the difference. Can you make synthetic water? Why not? You can simulate the large-scale behavior of water using only the basic quantum laws that govern interactions between the charged particles that make up the atoms in each water molecule--see http://www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2007/mar/water030207.html for a discussion. If you had a robot whose external behavior was somehow determined by the behavior of water in an internal hidden tank (say it had some scanners watching the motion of water in that tank, and the scanners would send signals to the robotic limbs based on what they saw), then the external behavior of the robot should be unchanged if you replaced the actual water tank with a sufficiently detailed simulation of a water tank of that size. If consciousness is purely organizational, shouldn't we see an example of non-living consciousness in nature? (Maybe we do but why don't we recognize it as such). At least we should see an example of an inorganic organism. I don't see why that follows, we don't see darwinian evolution in non-organic systems either but that doesn't prove that darwinian evolution somehow requires something more than just a physical system with the right type of organization (basically a system that can self-replicate, and which has the right sort of stable structure to preserve hereditary information to a high degree but also with enough instability for mutations in this information from one generation to the next). In fact I think most scientists would agree that intelligent purposeful and flexible behavior must have something to do with darwinian or quasi-darwinian processes in the brain (quasi-darwinian to cover something like the way an ant colony selects the best paths to food, which does involve throwing up a lot of variants and then creating new variants closer to successful ones, but doesn't really involve anything directly analogous to genes or self-replication of scent trails). That said, since I am philosophically inclined towards monism I do lean towards the idea that perhaps all physical processes might be associated with some very basic form of qualia, even if the sort of complex, differentiated and meaningful qualia we experience are only possible in adaptive systems like the brain (chalmers discusses this sort of panpsychist idea in his book The Conscious Mind, and there's also a discussion of naturalistic panpsychism at http://www.hedweb.com/lockwood.htm#naturalistic ) My view of awareness is now subtractive and holographic (think pinhole camera), so that I would read fading qualia in a different way. More like dementia.. attenuating connectivity between different aspects of the self, not changing qualia necessarily. The brain might respond to the implanted chips, even ruling out organic rejection, the native neurology may strengthen it's remaining connections and
Re: Bruno's blasphemy.
On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 6:10 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: ** On 7/12/2011 2:30 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 8:17 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: Not sure what the cogito has to do with the presumption of the necessity of color. Omnipotence solves all problems by definition, doesn't it? I'm just using it as an example to show that it's ridiculous to think that the idea of color can just happen in a physical environment that doesn't already support it a priori. It does not evolve as a consequence of natural selection, not only because it serves no special function that unconscious detection would not accomplish, but because there is no precursor for it to evolve from, no mechanism for cells or organs to generate perception of color were it not already a built in possibility. I'm saying that color perception is more unlikely to exist in a purely physical cosmos than time travel or omnipotence as a possible physical adaptation. I'm trying to get at Jason's radical underestimation of the gap between zoological necessity and the possibility of color's existence. I think the problem with Chalmer's view, is that by assuming a universe without qualia (or philosophical zombies) are possible, it inevitably leads to substance dualism or epiphenominalism. If zombies are possible, it means that consciousness is something extra which can be taken away without affecting anything. Thus, conscious would have no effects, which I think is against your view. Are you familiar with this: http://www.philforum.org/documents/An%20Unfortunate%20Dualist%20(Raymond%20Smullyan).pdfhttp://www.philforum.org/documents/An%20Unfortunate%20Dualist%20%28Raymond%20Smullyan%29.pdf? If not, it can give you a feel for why zombies may be logically impossible. So what is your thought on this subject? Can a universe exist just like ours but have different qualia or none at all? I think there are two different questions in play. Usually philosophical zombies are defined as acting just like us; but it is left open as to whether their internal information processing is just like ours. That may be one definition. The way I have heard zombies defined is that they are in all ways, physically indistinguishable; that there is no physical test that could ever tell apart a zombie from a non-zombie. I was using this definition above in my example and reasoning. Jason -- 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: Bruno's blasphemy.
Oh, yeah I would agree with you if you are talking real world live healthy human bodies then they are going to have a human experience. In a hypothetical, you could not know whether a person was a zombie or not for sure, just because subjectivity is airtight, but mechanically there is no way to take away a person's soul without changing them physically. On Jul 12, 9:57 pm, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 6:10 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: ** On 7/12/2011 2:30 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 8:17 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: Not sure what the cogito has to do with the presumption of the necessity of color. Omnipotence solves all problems by definition, doesn't it? I'm just using it as an example to show that it's ridiculous to think that the idea of color can just happen in a physical environment that doesn't already support it a priori. It does not evolve as a consequence of natural selection, not only because it serves no special function that unconscious detection would not accomplish, but because there is no precursor for it to evolve from, no mechanism for cells or organs to generate perception of color were it not already a built in possibility. I'm saying that color perception is more unlikely to exist in a purely physical cosmos than time travel or omnipotence as a possible physical adaptation. I'm trying to get at Jason's radical underestimation of the gap between zoological necessity and the possibility of color's existence. I think the problem with Chalmer's view, is that by assuming a universe without qualia (or philosophical zombies) are possible, it inevitably leads to substance dualism or epiphenominalism. If zombies are possible, it means that consciousness is something extra which can be taken away without affecting anything. Thus, conscious would have no effects, which I think is against your view. Are you familiar with this: http://www.philforum.org/documents/An%20Unfortunate%20Dualist%20(Raym...http://www.philforum.org/documents/An%20Unfortunate%20Dualist%20%28Ra...? If not, it can give you a feel for why zombies may be logically impossible. So what is your thought on this subject? Can a universe exist just like ours but have different qualia or none at all? I think there are two different questions in play. Usually philosophical zombies are defined as acting just like us; but it is left open as to whether their internal information processing is just like ours. That may be one definition. The way I have heard zombies defined is that they are in all ways, physically indistinguishable; that there is no physical test that could ever tell apart a zombie from a non-zombie. I was using this definition above in my example and reasoning. Jason -- 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.
