Re: The Plant Teachers
On 08/02/2013, at 9:09 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:
On 07 Feb 2013, at 10:57, Kim Jones wrote:
Graham Hancock's experiences with Ayahuasca
Of course some will immediately denounce this post as irrelevant to the
search for a TOE. But, recall that CONSCIOUSNESS is the ultimate final
frontier in science and that voyagers in consciousness-altering substances
have a perspective to contribute here. This blog I find to be one of the
more convincingly serious and thought-provoking essays on the use of DMT
that I have yet encountered. In many ways, the experience of Ayahuasca seems
to dovetail with the experience of Salvia Divinorum, as I'm sure Bruno will
agree. I have tried neither, but would leap at the opportunity were it to
present itself to me.
Yes, Plant teacher might be not completely out of topic, if we want study
consciousness. Dale Pendell, the chemist and expert in psychedelic wrote,
provocatively, I think, that humans and animals have no consciousness, and
that only plants have it, and that animal are conscious by eating plant.
That's a very nice provocation. I love it when people provoke me to look at
things differently. Most scientists hate it. I mean, we think we know what
consciousness is, but that is because we are trapped IN it, or whatever we have
that we refer to as consciousness. In order to know what anything really IS,
you have to be SEPARATE from it; don't you? (Sorry about capitals, peeps; I'm
not yelling - think italics)
About DMT and salvia comparison, this is the object of a lasting debate among
those who appreciate them for spiritual purpose. My own experience, perhaps
not successful for having not well done the extraction, is that DMT is just
like some strong mushrooms. Interesting but not so incredible compared to
salvia, about the nature of consciousness and reality.
So, I take it you would prefer a Salvia experience to a DMT experience on the
grounds of its being more…….what, exactly? I think you are about to tell me…..
Salvia, like Ketamine, (but quite less dangerous, and anti-addictive) has a
dissociative effect which might illustrate the Galois connection between
1p-mind (consciousness) and its 3p local handlings (the 3p-brains). By making
a peculiar dissociation at some place in the brain, one are left with the
feeling that we are *less* than we are used to think, and that we are
consequently in front of *more* possibilities. That Galois connection
occurs in many place in math: less equations = more solutions, or less axioms
= more interpretations/models. Somehow less brain = more experience, or more
intense and richer feeling of experience. This would make the brain being
more a filter of consciousness than a producer of consciousness.
Hmmm……less is more. Another of my favourite expressions. Please explain
the Gallic connection (connection galoise à laquelle tu pointe). I am
currently convinced that the brain receives the mind, much as a radio
receiver receives signal, so this makes INTUITIVE sense to me.
Technically, I still have no real clue if this really follows from comp, but
the relation between G and Z suggests that there might be some truth there.
There is something similar already between the box [] and the diamond in
all modal logics, but to apply it to the brain, we need this between G and Z,
and this is partially confirmed (for example t is true and non provable in
G, and it is []t which becomes true but not provable in Z (with the intuitive
meanings that self-consistency is not provable by the correct machines, and
that truth is not an observable for the self-observing machine. There might
be a partial Galois connection here.
According to Ray Kurzweil (everyone's favourite physicalist/materialist) the
structure of the neocortex reflects the hierarchy of the evolution of language.
(see Kurzweil, R {2012} How to Create a Mind). According to Edward de Bono,
the evolution of language has been the biggest stumbling block of all in the
evolution of COMMUNICATION. I see a profound link here in your notion that the
lesser brain experiences more experience of reality. Are we on the same page
with this?
Now, if it is obvious that altered conscious states can be a gold mine for
the researcher in consciousness, there is the obvious problem that they
concern 1p experiences, which are not communicable.
Except via poetry, music, painting, film etc. Even then, the experience is only
partially encoded for safe teleportation into other receiving stations.
Statistics can be done on many reports, but the texts are usually hard to
interpret, and the texts can get influences by each others, etc.
Which is a profound problem that we can lay right at the door of LANGUAGE.
Language is indeed a self-serving thing. A description of something is a dance
of language, not a dance of PERCEPTION. Perception is often throttled by the
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.comwrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. And yes I think there are degrees and kinds of consciousness and that a cat's consciousness differs in both respects. There's consciousness of being an individual and of being located in 3-space and in time. You and the cat have both of those (whereas a Mars rover only has the latter). But there's language and narrative memory that you have and the cat doesn't. There's reflective thought,I'm Telmo and I'm thinking about myself and where I fit in the world. The cat probably doesn't have this because it's not social - but a dog might. But is this really a case of degrees of consciousness or is it just the general property of being conscious instantiated in different contexts? The fact that you believe you can turn me into a cat seems to indicate that ultimately you believe that consciousness is all the same. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group,
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 1:52 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, February 5, 2013 6:00:17 PM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 7:49 PM, John Clark johnk...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, although I know I will never be able to prove it. I question whether it is possible to ask whether your fellow human beings have minds without resorting to sophistry. I say that not because I am incapable of questioning naive reasoning, but because it does not accurately represent the reality of the situation. Just as our 'belief' in our own mind is an a prori ontological condition which cannot be questioned without incurring a paradox (whatever disbelieves in its own mind is by definition a mind), the belief that our fellow human beings have minds does not necessarily require a logical analysis to arrive at. We know that we have access to information beyond what we can consciously understand, and part of that may very well include a capacity to sense, on some level, the authenticity of another mind, barring any prejudices which might interfere. Ok, that is a testable hypotesis (once we have sufficiently advanced AI and robotics). Craig John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@**googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.**com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/** group/everything-list?hl=enhttp://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/**groups/opt_outhttps://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: The Plant Teachers
On Fri, Feb 08, 2013 at 07:31:06PM +1100, Kim Jones wrote: Salvia, like Ketamine, (but quite less dangerous, and anti-addictive) has a dissociative effect which might illustrate the Galois connection between 1p-mind (consciousness) and its 3p local handlings (the 3p-brains). By making a peculiar dissociation at some place in the brain, one are left with the feeling that we are *less* than we are used to think, and that we are consequently in front of *more* possibilities. That Galois connection occurs in many place in math: less equations = more solutions, or less axioms = more interpretations/models. Somehow less brain = more experience, or more intense and richer feeling of experience. This would make the brain being more a filter of consciousness than a producer of consciousness. Hmmm……less is more. Another of my favourite expressions. Please explain the Gallic connection (connection galoise à laquelle tu pointe). I am currently convinced that the brain receives the mind, much as a radio receiver receives signal, so this makes INTUITIVE sense to me. I assume he was referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galois_connection Cheers -- 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 unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: context, comp, and multiverses
On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 5:02 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 06 Feb 2013, at 18:02, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 5:01 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 06 Feb 2013, at 12:19, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:17 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 05 Feb 2013, at 14:14, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno, The definitons of simulation and emulation I can find both use the word imitation. Can you explain what you mean as being the difference between the two ? A computer can simulate a storm. It can also simulate another computer. In this case, when we simulate digital events by a digital machine, we can define a notion of totally faithful simulation. This what is called an emulation. Some mac, for example, emulate some PC. In fact any universal machine can emulate all possible digital machinery. This is why they are said universal. I would argue that totally faithful simulation is not enough. Simulation implies a simulated environment, while emulation has to work in the emulated thing's environment. This is trivial for a mac emulating a PC. It already has a keyboard, a display and a mouse. If you want to emulate fire, it actually has to be able to burn you. Or emulating a complete human being would require a robot. This is not the standard definition in computer science. It has nothing to so with emulating the environment (the data) or not. Bruno, For what it's worth, wikipedia agrees with me: In computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing, an *emulator* is hardware or software or both that duplicates (or *emulates*) the functions of a first computer system (the *guest*) in a different second computer system (the *host*), so that the emulated behavior closely resembles the behavior of the real system. This focus on exact reproduction of behavior is in contrast to some other forms of computer simulationhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_simulation, in which an abstract model of a system is being simulated. For example, a computer simulation of a hurricane or a chemical reaction is not emulation. This concurs with what I said: the emulator does not need to be hardware, still less to contain an environment. That was all I was saying. May be you were just ambiguous on this or I misunderstood you. I have no problem with the Wiki, here. Ok, we agree then, but I still feel I'm not being able to express what I mean. Let's say Wr is a world and Ws is a world simulated in a computer within Wr. There's the system S, which can be instantiated in the real world (Sr) or in the simulation (Ss). Then there's Bruno (B). Finally, part of what we mean by S is the ability to perform some function by interacting with Bruno, let's say F(S, B). I'm saying that: if F(Ss, B) then Ss is an emulation for B, otherwise it's a simulation. Of course we can consider F(Ss, Br) and F(Ss, Bs), but it's still relative to what B we're talking about. Furthermore, for F(Ss, Br) to be true there must exist some interface between Ws and Wr -- which can be uni or bidirectional depending on F. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emulator It just means that there is an exact simulation. The intensional Church thesis (which is a simple consequence of the usual Church's thesis) makes all programs emulable by all universal programs. With a mac, you can emiulate a PC, but you can also emulate a complete PC with the keyboard, and if comp is correct you can emulate the PC, its keyboard, and the user. You can emulate fire on a MAC, and it can burn anyone emulated on that mac and interacting with the emulated fire (again assuming comp). The correct level of comp is defined by the one which make yourself being emulated by the artificial brain or body, or local universe. Ok, I agree with what you say here. You can turn a very good simulation into an emulation (for me) iff you emulate my mind inside the simulation. Yes. And this might help to understand why we don't need a primary (assumed) physical reality, as the number relations contains all possible emulations. Note that the MGA says something stronger: it says that not only we don't need a physical primary reality, but that even if that existed, we can't use it to relate any form of consciousness to it. By the usual Occam, weak-materialism is made into a sort of useless principle, a bit like vitalism in biology. Ok. I have no resistance to the idea to begin with but I'm looking forward to fully understanding the argument. Materialism feels like a cop-out, similar to a god-creator. Bruno Bruno Bruno *Simulation* - *Definition* and More from the Free Merriam-Webster *... * http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/simulation www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/*simulation* a : the *imitative *representation of the functioning of one system or process by means of the functioning of another a computer *simulation*of an
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.comwrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Regards, Quentin And yes I think there are degrees and kinds of consciousness and that a cat's consciousness differs in both respects. There's consciousness of being an individual and of being located in 3-space and in time. You and the cat have both of those (whereas a Mars rover only has the latter). But there's language and narrative memory that you have and the cat doesn't. There's reflective thought,I'm Telmo and I'm thinking about myself and where I fit in the world. The cat probably doesn't have this because it's not social - but a dog might. But is this really a case of degrees of consciousness or is it just the general property of being conscious instantiated in different contexts? The fact that you believe you can turn me into a cat seems to indicate that ultimately you believe that consciousness is all the same. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.comwrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to connect the memories to it, but accessing my human representation of a tree would spoil my cat experience. Regards, Quentin And yes I think there are degrees and kinds of consciousness and that a cat's consciousness differs in both respects. There's consciousness of being an individual and of being located in 3-space and in time. You and the cat have both of those (whereas a Mars rover only has the latter). But there's language and narrative memory that you have and the cat doesn't. There's reflective thought,I'm Telmo and I'm thinking about myself and where I fit in the world. The cat probably doesn't have this because it's not social - but a dog might. But is this really a case of degrees of consciousness or is it just the general property of being conscious instantiated in different contexts? The fact that you believe you can turn me into a cat seems to indicate that ultimately you believe that
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the day we would have the first insight of how to really do it... before, it is just premature to use technical arguments. Regards, Quentin For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to connect the memories to it, but accessing my human representation of a tree would spoil my cat experience. Regards, Quentin And yes I think there are degrees and kinds of consciousness and that a cat's consciousness differs in both respects. There's consciousness of being an individual and of being
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the day we would have the first insight of how to really do it... before, it is just premature to use technical arguments. Fair enough, maybe it's my CS bias. But I'm still not convinced this is a purely technical issue. Can you conceive of any system that stores information in some coherent way that you can write to without reading? Regards, Quentin For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the day we would have the first insight of how to really do it... before, it is just premature to use technical arguments. Fair enough, maybe it's my CS bias. But I'm still not convinced this is a purely technical issue. Can you conceive of any system that stores information in some coherent way that you can write to without reading? Well, yes... with computer you could imagine doing just that... so why not ? Also, the fact that you
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.netwrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the day we would have the first insight of how to really do it... before, it is just premature to use technical arguments. Fair enough, maybe it's my CS bias. But I'm still not convinced this is a purely technical issue. Can you conceive of any system that stores information in some coherent way that you can write to without reading? Well, yes...
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.netwrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the day we would have the first insight of how to really do it... before, it is just premature to use technical arguments. Fair enough, maybe it's my CS bias. But I'm still not convinced this is a purely technical issue. Can you conceive of any system that stores information in some
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Thursday, February 7, 2013 11:35:08 PM UTC-5, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 2/7/2013 9:42 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, February 7, 2013 8:50:09 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote: On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: You're avoiding the question. What is your definitive test for consciousness? If you don't have one, then you have to admit that your friend (who talks to you and behaves like people do, not in a coma, not on a video recording, not dead in the morgue) may not be conscious and your computer may be conscious. No, you are avoiding my answer. What is your definitive test for your own consciousness? The test for my own consciousness is that I feel I am conscious. That is not at issue. At issue is the test for *other* entities' consciousness. Why would the test be any different? You are convinced that computers and other machines don't have consciousness, but you can't say what test you will apply to them and see them fail. I'm convinced of that because I understand why there is no reason why they would have consciousness... there is no 'they' there. Computers are not born in a single moment through cell fertilization, they are assembled by people. Computers have to be programmed to do absolutely everything, they have no capacity to make sense of anything which is not explicitly defined. This is the polar opposite of living organisms which are general purpose entities who explore and adapt when they can, on their own, for their own internally generated motives. Computers lack that completely. We use objects to compute for us, but those objects are not actually computing themselves, just as these letters don't actually mean anything for themselves. When objects can compute 'for themselves' they are conscious. Maybe? Sure, although I think that means that they have to first feel and think for themselves. You can lead a computer to their own computations, but you can't make them drink. My point is that sense is broader, deeper, and more primitive than our cognitive ability to examine it, since cognitive qualities are only the tip of the iceberg of sense. To test is to circumvent direct sense in favor of indirect sense - which is a good thing, but it is by definition not applicable to consciousness itself in any way. There is no test to tell if you are conscious, because none is required. If you need to ask if you are conscious, then you are probably having a lucid dream or in some phase of shock. In those cases, no test will help you as you can dream a test result as easily as you can experience one while awake. The only test for consciousness is the test of time. If you are fooled by some inanimate object, eventually you will probably see through it or outgrow the fantasy. So if, in future, robots live among us for years and are accepted by most people as conscious, does that mean they are conscious? This is essentially a form of the Turing test. I don't think that will happen unless they aren't robots. The whole point is that the degree to which an organism is conscious is inversely proportionate to the degree that the organism is 100% controllable. That's the purpose of intelligence - to advance your own agenda rather than to be overpowered by your environment. So if something is a robot, it will never be accepted by anyone as conscious, and if something is conscious it will never be useful to anyone as a robot - it would in fact be a slave. *L'homme est d'abord ce qui se jette vers un avenir, et ce qui est conscient de se projeter dans l'avenir.* ~ Jean Paul Satre (Man is, before all else, something which propels itself toward a future and is aware that it is doing so.) Cool. I can agree with that. You talk with authority on what can and can't have consciousness but it seems you don't have even an operational definition of the word. Consciousness is what defines, not what can be defined. I am not asking for an explanation or theory of consciousness, just for a test to indicate its presence, which is a much weaker requirement. That is too much to ask, since all tests supervene upon the consciousness to evaluate results. It's the case for any test that you will use your consciousness to evaluate the results. Sure, but for most things you can corroborate and triangulate what you are testing by using a control. With consciousness itself, there is no control possible. You can do tests on the water because you can get out of the water. You can do tests on air because you can evacuate a glass beaker of air and compare your results. With consciousness though, there is no escape possible. You can personally lose your own consciousness, but there is no experience which is not experienced through
Re: Topical combination
On 07 Feb 2013, at 17:46, Quentin Anciaux wrote: 2013/2/7 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be On 06 Feb 2013, at 18:07, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, February 6, 2013 9:37:22 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Feb 2013, at 19:01, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, February 5, 2013 12:51:10 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Feb 2013, at 18:10, Quentin Anciaux wrote: 2013/2/5 Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be On 05 Feb 2013, at 14:34, Roger Clough wrote: Hi meekerdb There's nothing wrong with science as science. But a problem arises when you apply the results to theology. Two completely different worlds. That's indeed a point where string atheists agree with string christian. Let us try to be not serious on theology, so we can assert the fairy tales. Strong Christian are happy because they feel like they can contradict the scientific evidences, and the atheists are happy so they can continue to mock the christians, and continue to sleep on their own (materialist) dogma. You put meaning in atheism which is not there... an atheist can perfectly be an idealist... materialism is not part of the definition of atheism. Definition here are often contradictory. Some years ago, the definition keep changing. Can you give me the name of an atheist who is idealist? I would consider Sam Harris and Daniel Dennet idealists, in the sense that the ideal is reduced to function rather than a material. That is not idealism. That's only the common functionalism. Idealists believe that matter is a production of the mind. I think that the common belief of Harris and Dennett is that the function of mind creates the illusion of matter as we know it. That contradicts what I read. You might give a reference. Beyond our view of matter, I would guess that both of them would agree that matter is a function of quantum functions, which to me is the same thing as an image of the mind made impersonal. But that is not what people means by quantum, which need to refer to the *assumed* (not derived like in comp) physics. Dennett made clear that he is physicalist, naturalist, and weak materialist. I don't know any scientist being idealist, and even in philosophy of mind, most dictionaries describe it as being abandoned. I agree in the sense that you intend, but I think that functionalism is the same thing as impersonal idealism. You can't provide new meaning to terms having standard definition. As you do with term such as God ? On the contrary. I use the original sense, which is still used by philosophers today, and in comparative theological studies. God is not a technical term, unlike idealism and functionalism. Most functionalist are weak-materialist today. Most people that believe in God, believe it is a supreme being/ person which answers the prayer. Do you deny that ? Yes. This is a feature of many religion, but not all. Some people pray also non-Gods, like saint or even Buddha. But all religion accept the idea that God is the ultimate truth, and in science sometimes we enlarge the definition, so as to have a first axiom on which everyone agree. And when weak-materialist defend materialism, they defend a metaphysics, not a scientific fact, meaning that they take the physical universe as the ultimate reality, making it into a god. When they deny this, they impose a religion, and transforms science into psuedo-science. My knowledge of theology comes from the reading of many book in theology. It is quite typical that only atheists have a problem with this, but my experience in life has shown me that indeed the atheists are extremely pseudo-religious people: they forbid the doubt about their God, and confirms the fact that as long as theology doesn't go back to academy, we will remain in the obscurantist era with respect to the fundamental questioning. Do you really think a lot of people use your god = arithmetical truth/existential absolute ? Do you think many people use the term universe in the same sense as quantum mechanician or string theorist? I am not saying that God = arithmetical truth/existencial absolute, I derive this from comp + the large definition of God I provided. Then question like does God as free will are just still open. Even the question does God has white beard is, to be honest (and provocative) open, even if that is hardly plausible of course. If you talk about God to people not reading this list, they would never come to your meaning, as such your usage is a misuse and leads to confusion. No, you are wrong on this. All theologians I met have no problem at all, as they know perfectly well I use the term in his general philosophical sense. They do this also when they compare christians doctrine and neoplatonism. I can give you a list of thousand philosophers, mystics, scientists all using the word God in that general sense. Only
Re: Topical combination
On 07 Feb 2013, at 19:43, meekerdb wrote: On 2/7/2013 8:09 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Beyond our view of matter, I would guess that both of them would agree that matter is a function of quantum functions, which to me is the same thing as an image of the mind made impersonal. But that is not what people means by quantum, which need to refer to the *assumed* (not derived like in comp) physics. Comp is derived from an assumption. Physics is derived from observation. Comp is the assumption. Physics is partially derived from observation, but makes many assumptions, inclduing comp most of the time, and it becomes pseudo- science when it hides the assumption (like when forgetting to relate the assumption about the existence of a (primary) physical universe. Then both comp laws and physical laws rely on observation to be refuted. Dennett made clear that he is physicalist, naturalist, and weak materialist. I don't know any scientist being idealist, and even in philosophy of mind, most dictionaries describe it as being abandoned. I agree in the sense that you intend, but I think that functionalism is the same thing as impersonal idealism. You can't provide new meaning to terms having standard definition. That's pretty funny from a guy who redefines God, theology, and mechanism. :-) I use the original and general definition of God by those who created the subject, as I use theology in the general sense used by even contemporaries philosophers. And the use of mechanism for digital mechanism is the standard term, for example used by Judson Webb, Dennett Hofstadter, etc. Then what I derived might astonished those who have prejudices in the field, but we hardly change a definition due to logical consequences of them. Why does atheists defends so much the over-precision brought by the Romans in the subject can only confirm my (perhaps shocking for some) statement that atheism is but a variant of christianism, except that atheists are far more dogmatic on the definitions. I recommend you stringly the reading of Brian Hines: Return to the One: Plotinus' guide to God-realization, which illustrates well the big similarities between Christian metaphysics and the great differences too. It illustrates well the complete similarities on the question and the notions, and the complete difference in the answers. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Friday, February 8, 2013 11:23:48 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com javascript:wrote: I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. You believe that other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead!?? Do you believe that you have a house when you aren't standing in it? If they have minds under those circumstances then rocks must have them too and whatever you mean by mind can't be anything very interesting and I don't care if something has a mind or not. What you think is a rock is actually an event shaped by experiences on the molecular and geological scale, but not on a biological or zoological or anthropological scale. This means that this event doesn't correspond to a human mind, but a human mind does have access to some of the same kinds of geological and molecular experiences, which are presented to humans as tactile, acoustic, kinetic, visual experiences (and olfactory in the case of sulfurous minerals). for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Yes. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness If Evolution just stumbled onto consciousness by a lucky chance and was not the byproduct of intelligence then it is of neutral survival value and the human race would have lost that property long ago by genetic drift. Exactly. And since we know that all behaviors could be accomplished 'in the dark', as it were, unconsciously and without any magical qualitative presentation (which exists invisibly in never never land), then we should suspect that consciousness, or the potential for consciousness precedes evolution itself. That's the reason creatures that have lived in dark caves for thousands of generations have no eyes; elsewhere a mutation that rendered a creature blind would be a disaster but in a cave it wouldn't hinder its genes getting into the next generation at all. In short if consciousness improves survival It doesn't. If we presume that every other process in the cosmos which operates with fantastic precision by being unconscious is not missing out on anything important, then no, there is no conceivable advantage that some kind of interior presentation of feeling and storytelling would have over biological mechanism. After all, these unconscious mechanisms presumably operate consciousness itself, so anything that could be accomplished through conscious awareness could certainly be accomplished biologically. A human organism looking for food is no more in need of consciousness for their survival than a mitochondria or a T-Cell is. it can only do so by effecting the behavior of the organism and then the Turing Test must work for consciousness as well as intelligence. if consciousness does not effect behavior then if MUST be a byproduct of something that does or Evolution would never have produced it and yet I know for a fact it has at least once and probably many billions of times. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. I am saying A is certainly more intelligent that B and consciousness is a byproduct of intelligence. Consciousness would be the stupidest byproduct of intelligence imaginable. Hey we need a compression algorithm for this data. How about we invent a spectacular multi-dimensional participatory environment with billions of sensations created from nowhere? That should reduce throughput, no? It's like hiring Led Zeppelin to play inside of your motherboard to inspire the data to move faster. What would that even mean? In dealing with consciousness the only experimental subject I have to work with is myself and I note that when I am sleepy I am both less conscious and less intelligent then when I am wide awake That suggests that your intelligence supervenes on your consciousness (how awake you feel), not the other way around. Stupid people aren't always sleepy. My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. You think your cat is conscious even though you're a lot smarter than a cat, so why wouldn't a computer who was a lot smarter than you also seem to be conscious. You could say that you'll never be able to prove the computer is conscious but the exact same thing is true of your cat or even your fellow human beings. If a computer did what it does naturally, without human intention to program a device to mimic mental functions, then
Re: HOW YOU CAN BECOME A LIBERAL THEOLOGIAN IN JUST 4 STEPS.
2013/2/8 John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 7:25 PM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: there is a single result in Bruno's experiment, John K Clark sees Washington and Moscow. But under MWI you agreed you see the photon hit the left or the right plate, not the left side and the right side. So which is it? Yet more confusion and for exactly the same reason, those God damned personal pronouns. John K Clark sees the photon hit the left AND the right side of the plate, however John K Clark has been duplicated so the John K Clark who sees the photon hit the left side of the plate sees the photon hit the left side of the plate and the John K Clark who sees the photon hit the right side of the plate sees the photon hit the right side of the plate. In the same way John K Clark sees Washington AND Moscow although the Washington John K Clark sees only Washington and the Moscow John K Clark sees only Moscow. Yet you agree that if I ask you the question in the MWI context, what is the probability that you see the photon hit the left plate, you'll say 50%, yet you say that in the duplication experience of Bruno, it 100% you see left, 100% you see right which is of course false... the correct one either in MWI or with Bruno's experiment is 50%. If you can do a prediction in MWI so can you *the same way* in Bruno's experiment, only bad faith prevent you to admit it. Quentin John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Lee Smolin and Darwin's Uncommon Success
On 07 Feb 2013, at 20:40, meekerdb wrote: On 2/7/2013 8:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Math is ambiguous on that. A priori, yes. But once we assume computationalism in cognitive science, then we can accept that when numbers, relatively to other numbers, behave in some ways (self-reference, etc.) they get mind, or at least some mind can be associate to them (and then on the infinity of them). But this is very vague. Why should there be more than one mind. What picks out individual minds? And why are they associated with brains? By the computationalist hypothesis. Then, if you accept Theaetetus' method to recover the classical notion of knowledge, and its precise translation in arithmetic, you get all the precision needed. And why do they agree on a common physical world? By the unicity of the measure on the first person indeterminacy, guarantied if comp is true (by UDA). Of course if comp is false, we must solve and address the problem differently, but to say comp false today is just premature, as we have not only no evidence against comp, but we don't even have any alternative theories. Even Craig's attempt to give one illustrates how much his intuition of the mind is close to what the machines already tell us. Arithmetic only shows that some numbers can refer to other numbers, where 'refer' is in terms arithmetic operations. That is very far from showing they are 'minds'. Now, you really talk like if you never heard about the machine's interview (AUDA). All that is explained in the second part of sane2004, and I have made more than one attempt to explain it on this list. It is not easy as it supposes some knowledge in mathematical logic. Numbers have mind is of course a shortcut for numbers' relations emulate (in the math sense) computations supporting a person having a mind, as comp asks us to accept that the brain is Turing emulable, and all brain emulation exists in arithmetic. Not only machines or numbers have mind with comp, but the whole theory of souls and god by Plato, that is a whole theology, containing a complete theory of matter is entirely provided in terms so precise that it gives the most clearly refutable theory of souls and matter actually existing. Of course some literary philosophers, usually of the quite dogmatic and atheist sort, are not happy. But this is a common trends in the development of science. The wishful opportunists are disturbed when some people illustrate the possibility of rigor in their field. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Topical combination
On Friday, February 8, 2013 12:02:57 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 07 Feb 2013, at 19:43, meekerdb wrote: On 2/7/2013 8:09 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Beyond our view of matter, I would guess that both of them would agree that matter is a function of quantum functions, which to me is the same thing as an image of the mind made impersonal. But that is not what people means by quantum, which need to refer to the *assumed* (not derived like in comp) physics. Comp is derived from an assumption. Physics is derived from observation. Comp is the assumption. Physics is partially derived from observation, but makes many assumptions, inclduing comp most of the time, and it becomes pseudo- science when it hides the assumption (like when forgetting to relate the assumption about the existence of a (primary) physical universe. Then both comp laws and physical laws rely on observation to be refuted. Observing, assuming, refuting are all aspects of sense. Sense cannot be refuted or assumed or observed without using sense. Sense cannot be understood as a logical expectation from comp or an observable mechanism in physics, and in fact both physics and comp owe their epistemology to sense. Craig Dennett made clear that he is physicalist, naturalist, and weak materialist. I don't know any scientist being idealist, and even in philosophy of mind, most dictionaries describe it as being abandoned. I agree in the sense that you intend, but I think that functionalism is the same thing as impersonal idealism. You can't provide new meaning to terms having standard definition. That's pretty funny from a guy who redefines God, theology, and mechanism. :-) I use the original and general definition of God by those who created the subject, as I use theology in the general sense used by even contemporaries philosophers. And the use of mechanism for digital mechanism is the standard term, for example used by Judson Webb, Dennett Hofstadter, etc. Then what I derived might astonished those who have prejudices in the field, but we hardly change a definition due to logical consequences of them. Why does atheists defends so much the over-precision brought by the Romans in the subject can only confirm my (perhaps shocking for some) statement that atheism is but a variant of christianism, except that atheists are far more dogmatic on the definitions. I recommend you stringly the reading of Brian Hines: Return to the One: Plotinus' guide to God-realization, which illustrates well the big similarities between Christian metaphysics and the great differences too. It illustrates well the complete similarities on the question and the notions, and the complete difference in the answers. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: You believe that other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead!?? Do you believe that you have a house when you aren't standing in it? Yes. Do you believe that other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead? If they have minds under those circumstances then rocks must have them too and whatever you mean by mind can't be anything very interesting and I don't care if something has a mind or not. What you think is a rock is actually an event shaped by experiences on the molecular and geological scale, but not on a biological or zoological or anthropological scale. This means that this event doesn't correspond to a human mind, but a human mind does have access to some of the same kinds of geological and molecular experiences, which are presented to humans as tactile, acoustic, kinetic, visual experiences (and olfactory in the case of sulfurous minerals). I assume the above mishmash of a word salad is what you mean by mind, if so then I was right and it's not anything very interesting and I don't care if something has a mind or not. In short if consciousness improves survival It doesn't. Then consciousness MUST be the byproduct of something else that does improve survival. Consciousness would be the stupidest byproduct of intelligence imaginable. I don't know what you mean by that, what I mean is that consciousness is a spandrel, it is the unavoidable result of intelligence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_%28biology%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_%28biology%29 John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: The Plant Teachers
On 08 Feb 2013, at 10:09, Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, Feb 08, 2013 at 07:31:06PM +1100, Kim Jones wrote: Salvia, like Ketamine, (but quite less dangerous, and anti- addictive) has a dissociative effect which might illustrate the Galois connection between 1p-mind (consciousness) and its 3p local handlings (the 3p-brains). By making a peculiar dissociation at some place in the brain, one are left with the feeling that we are *less* than we are used to think, and that we are consequently in front of *more* possibilities. That Galois connection occurs in many place in math: less equations = more solutions, or less axioms = more interpretations/models. Somehow less brain = more experience, or more intense and richer feeling of experience. This would make the brain being more a filter of consciousness than a producer of consciousness. Hmmm……less is more. Another of my favourite expressions. Please explain the Gallic connection (connection galoise à laquelle tu pointe). I am currently convinced that the brain receives the mind, much as a radio receiver receives signal, so this makes INTUITIVE sense to me. I assume he was referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galois_connection Not bad article. I was alluding to the syntax/semantics (Galois) connection, and its generalization into machine and machine's behavior, or machine and machine's mind, when the brain becomes a filter of consciousness instead of producer of consciousness, but all this are open problems (in arithmetic/computer science). Bruno Cheers -- 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 unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: The Plant Teachers
On 08 Feb 2013, at 09:31, Kim Jones wrote: On 08/02/2013, at 9:09 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 07 Feb 2013, at 10:57, Kim Jones wrote: Graham Hancock's experiences with Ayahuasca Of course some will immediately denounce this post as irrelevant to the search for a TOE. But, recall that CONSCIOUSNESS is the ultimate final frontier in science and that voyagers in consciousness-altering substances have a perspective to contribute here. This blog I find to be one of the more convincingly serious and thought-provoking essays on the use of DMT that I have yet encountered. In many ways, the experience of Ayahuasca seems to dovetail with the experience of Salvia Divinorum, as I'm sure Bruno will agree. I have tried neither, but would leap at the opportunity were it to present itself to me. Yes, Plant teacher might be not completely out of topic, if we want study consciousness. Dale Pendell, the chemist and expert in psychedelic wrote, provocatively, I think, that humans and animals have no consciousness, and that only plants have it, and that animal are conscious by eating plant. That's a very nice provocation. I love it when people provoke me to look at things differently. Most scientists hate it. I mean, we think we know what consciousness is, but that is because we are trapped IN it, or whatever we have that we refer to as consciousness. In order to know what anything really IS, you have to be SEPARATE from it; don't you? (Sorry about capitals, peeps; I'm not yelling - think italics) I am not sure we can ever know what anything is. We can only propose theories, and make experiences. An experience can refute a theory, and show that something was not what we thought, but an experience cannot show us what something is, beyond the experience itself. About DMT and salvia comparison, this is the object of a lasting debate among those who appreciate them for spiritual purpose. My own experience, perhaps not successful for having not well done the extraction, is that DMT is just like some strong mushrooms. Interesting but not so incredible compared to salvia, about the nature of consciousness and reality. So, I take it you would prefer a Salvia experience to a DMT experience on the grounds of its being more…….what, exactly? I think you are about to tell me….. To be honest (my worst handicap), I have to say that SWIM told me that he had taken DMT only once, perhaps not even well prepared, i.e. with the right concentration and mixture. That's different from salvia, that he took 2965 times, since he begun 5 years ago. That numbers of hits is not so great, as it is the numbers of hits of an average smoker of tobacco, in one week. Unlike some psychedelic, salvia is inverse tolerant, you need less and less salvinorin a (the active components). A non concentrated leave has become as intense than 10X (ten times concentrated) five years ago. It is highly anti-addictive on all products including itself, and has medical benefits. SWIM's reasons are not just spiritual. Salvia, like Ketamine, (but quite less dangerous, and anti- addictive) has a dissociative effect which might illustrate the Galois connection between 1p-mind (consciousness) and its 3p local handlings (the 3p-brains). By making a peculiar dissociation at some place in the brain, one are left with the feeling that we are *less* than we are used to think, and that we are consequently in front of *more* possibilities. That Galois connection occurs in many place in math: less equations = more solutions, or less axioms = more interpretations/models. Somehow less brain = more experience, or more intense and richer feeling of experience. This would make the brain being more a filter of consciousness than a producer of consciousness. Hmmm……less is more. Yes. It is the main thing in Galois connection: except that it involves some structure on which the order (less, more) is defined. Less in A is more in B. Less equations = more varieties, less axioms = more models, less big = go through more holes, etc. Another of my favourite expressions. Please explain the Gallic connection (connection galoise à laquelle tu pointe). Above give the idea. Look at the wiki for more, perhaps. I am currently convinced that the brain receives the mind, much as a radio receiver receives signal, so this makes INTUITIVE sense to me. Because you are use to radio, perhaps. For older people radio was already magic. Invisible waves? That's look like science-fiction, isn't it? If it helps it can be OK, but don't take the entities to much seriously. If you have a serious interest, of course. Thinking twice, if you see how a person-number is related to its domain of indeterminacy, and seeing this should give the Everett Universal wave, that images can be inspiring. Just now, I would not try to link it
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Friday, February 8, 2013 1:49:54 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote: You believe that other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead!?? Do you believe that you have a house when you aren't standing in it? Yes. Do you believe that other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead? I don't believe people have minds so much as people are personal experiences of a human lifetime at any given moment. The mind is the cognitive translation of that experience. When we are not personally conscious, others who see our body will not be able to communicate with us. From our perspective, our personal experience jumps from one conscious episode to another under anesthetic, while it is a bit less dramatic when we are sleeping. When we are dead, our personal experience has come to an end so we no longer need a human mind. If they have minds under those circumstances then rocks must have them too and whatever you mean by mind can't be anything very interesting and I don't care if something has a mind or not. What you think is a rock is actually an event shaped by experiences on the molecular and geological scale, but not on a biological or zoological or anthropological scale. This means that this event doesn't correspond to a human mind, but a human mind does have access to some of the same kinds of geological and molecular experiences, which are presented to humans as tactile, acoustic, kinetic, visual experiences (and olfactory in the case of sulfurous minerals). I assume the above mishmash of a word salad is what you mean by mind, if so then I was right and it's not anything very interesting and I don't care if something has a mind or not. No, it means that what you think is a rock is not the only thing that a rock is. In short if consciousness improves survival It doesn't. Then consciousness MUST be the byproduct of something else that does improve survival. No. The existence of consciousness has nothing to do with survival at all. Given sense as a universal primitive, certainly the development of sense can improve survival, but (as is seen by the relatively few species which we would consider conscious) it doesn't have to, and is not meaningful in natural selection. To understand that though, you would have to be able to consider the possibility that you are wrong. Consciousness would be the stupidest byproduct of intelligence imaginable. I don't know what you mean by that, what I mean is that consciousness is a spandrel, it is the unavoidable result of intelligence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_%28biology%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_%28biology%29 Why would consciousness be unavoidable? Was the color blue unavoidable? Are there new colors which might appear in our consciousness? Your view is that the whole of experienced realism is nothing more than a meaningless side effect of compression algorithms. Except for any kind of experience which supports this idea, apparently. Craig John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: The Plant Teachers
On 2/8/2013 12:31 AM, Kim Jones wrote: Which is a profound problem that we can lay right at the door of LANGUAGE. Language is indeed a self-serving thing. A description of something is a dance of language, not a dance of PERCEPTION. Perception is often throttled by the processes of language. We need to move beyond words. This is the importance of math and music (which is audible math IMO.) That seems contradictory. Mathematics is very restricted language - declaratory sentences, logically consistent. It seems to be an interesting fact that all information can be encoded in binary numbers, but that is the antithesis of you view that the form of representation, painting, dance, music matters in an essential way. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/8/2013 1:02 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com mailto:johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com mailto:te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. And yes I think there are degrees and kinds of consciousness and that a cat's consciousness differs in both respects. There's consciousness of being an individual and of being located in 3-space and in time. You and the cat have both of those (whereas a Mars rover only has the latter). But there's language and narrative memory that you have and the cat doesn't. There's reflective thought,I'm Telmo and I'm thinking about myself and where I fit in the world. The cat probably doesn't have this because it's not social - but a dog might. But is this really a case of degrees of consciousness or is it just the general property of being conscious instantiated in different contexts? The fact that you believe you can turn me into a cat seems to indicate that ultimately you believe that consciousness is all the same. No, because I think I would have to diminish your consciousness to make your brain like a cat's. I think your consciousness is a superset of a cat's. But as I said I think consciouness can differ in kind as well as degree - it's not one-dimensional anymore than intelligence is
Re: The Plant Teachers
Some initial comments, because I´m very interested on these alterations of conscience. The rest of my comments will appear along the conversation: I´m persuaded, by very simple evolutionary analysis that plants produced whatever chemical substance that stops from eating them. this is their only mechanism of defence since they can not run, apart from spines, indigestible tissues and so on (by the way, if you find a plant with spines, it is very likely that this plant is edible). To deter being eaten, the plants produce whatever work for this purpose: from consciousness alteration substances to venoms that interfere critically with varius psysiological functions. The nauseas, diarrea, very bad taste experienced by the plant eater is a logical reaction: the organism detect the alteration and try to stop eating and to expel the substance eaten from the digestive tract (by both orifices ;). By the way when we feel the unnatural sensation of acceleration and movements without walking, for example in a car in a curvy road, it is erroneously interpreted by the organism as an alteration of conscience produced by something eaten, so it trigger the same reaction, trying to expel some substance that we has not eaten. (see Evolutionary Psychology and the generation of *Culture* (ISBN 0195101073)) some drugs seem to debilitate the control centre that integrate information form different modules in the mind-brain. Some people that has suffered a trauma in the brain experience these alterations permanently. This control center is in charge of ordering the relevance of the inputs both the external inputs and the output produced by other mental modules.this mental control center can be called consciousness. That's why under hallucinogenous drugs we receive an stream of non filtered events: We see the furniture, but also the interpretation of the furniture as a monster. This monster interpretation is also produced by the visual interpretation module in a normal state, among other alternative interpretations, but these bizarre interpretations would never arrive to the conscious. The drugs break this filter. What the consciousness perceive in a normal state is a consensual, coherent picture of the environment, according with what existed a moment ago. What the hallucinogen produce is a disruption of this process, Just like a venom interfere in other physiological functions. Plants simply essay different variations of chemicals and the ones that deter being eaten. that why the amazing variety of effect that produce different species. Animals have livers to detoxify these chemicals by enzymes. I have no dout that, we have a mythological religious and social modules that produce their own outputs, in the form of feelings, but also interpretations or colourations of visual images. It also produce hallucinations that are not arbitrary. In a normal state the conscience module produce the effect is a sort of super-ego conversations or a conscientious feeling. I sometimes talk with my father and I don´t think that I´m crazy But when the raw output of the conscience is not filtered, sometimes these outputs associate themselves with the visual output and form of hallucinations who talk to us. The double reaction of fear and admiration , peace and terror are universal against the unknown and hallucinations trigger these reactions. These are the reactions produced by the unscontrolled stream of elaborations that would arrive to the consciousness under hallucinative state. Life is about to deal with the unknowm. According with evolutionary psychologiests, the dreams in normal dream state are probably a training for tuning the mind for possible situations that may happen in the future. The construction if dreams follows the same logic, at other level, than the altered consciousness produced by drugs. Finally, hallucinations don´t say arbitrary things, since they are exaggerated products of our own mind. The conscience speak in favour of the social interests and the own long term interest, and also about what we have to fear and what we have to love. If a mythical entity talk with us in an altered state, he is talking about us and about how we must feel and behave about others, and its narration is a result of our evolutionary past in combination with event of the personal experience That´t why religious people in a society are very important. They are in more close contact with this spiritual self and know the best practices -traditions- of the society. Lastly, Reality is our shared consciousness. we have no other reality reachable to us. The rejection of any of the phenomenological elaborations of our mind is not only an impoverishment of our life, but an unscientific rejection of study the reality available to us, and -for the matherialist minded ones- an impairment of our possibilities of survival as individuals and as a society. 2013/2/8 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be On 08 Feb 2013, at 10:09, Russell
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/8/2013 3:19 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to connect the memories to it, but accessing my human representation of a tree would spoil my cat experience. An interesting question. In people with multiple personalities the memories may go only one way, Eve-2 remembers what Eve-1 experiences but not vice versa; but of course they are still human memories. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 4:06 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.netwrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the day we would have the first insight of how to really do it... before, it is just premature to use technical arguments. Fair enough, maybe it's my CS bias. But I'm still not convinced this is a purely
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 9:57 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/8/2013 3:19 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to connect the memories to it, but accessing my human representation of a tree would spoil my cat experience. An interesting question. In people with multiple personalities the memories may go only one way, Eve-2 remembers what Eve-1 experiences but not vice versa; but of course they are still human memories. How does Eve-2 remember Eve-1's experiences? As if she was Eve-1 or as if she was watching a movie? And how does each personality remember popping in and out of existence? Do they feel they felt assleep or that they were suddenly teleported? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Friday, February 8, 2013 4:18:02 PM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 9:57 PM, meekerdb meek...@verizon.netjavascript: wrote: On 2/8/2013 3:19 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to connect the memories to it, but accessing my human representation of a tree would spoil my cat experience. An interesting question. In people with multiple personalities the memories may go only one way, Eve-2 remembers what Eve-1 experiences but not vice versa; but of course they are still human memories. How does Eve-2 remember Eve-1's experiences? As if she was Eve-1 or as if she was watching a movie? And how does each personality remember popping in and out of existence? Do they feel they felt assleep or that they were suddenly teleported? It's like having a dream that you are still in college. When you wake up, you remember being in the dream and having no knowledge of your life after college. Craig Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript: . Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 4:06 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.netwrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the day we would have the first insight of how to really do it... before, it is just premature to use technical arguments. Fair enough, maybe it's
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Wednesday, February 6, 2013 3:34:36 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/6/2013 11:42 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, February 6, 2013 2:29:12 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/6/2013 5:09 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, February 6, 2013 5:13:03 AM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote: 2013/2/5 Roger Clough rcl...@verizon.net Hi Alberto G. Corona Your concept is incomplete, because geometry is what Plato called forms, which he gave the Greek name of ideas. So you have a thought without a thinker. Yes, the greeks did not conceive an empty space without forms. For them it was the forms what created the space. I think that they were right. What I propose about light, and all forms of energy, is that they do not literally radiate through space as waves or projectiles independently of forms, but that what we experience as light is exactly what it seems to be: how we sense the world visually. A rather useless model of light. The EM field in spacetime also predicts the existence of lasers, infrared radiation, radio, light pressure, the CMB, atomic spectra, and thousands of other phenomena that are just 'magic' in your 'sensory-motor' theory. It's not intended to replace EM field equations, only to interpret them in a way which better reflect nature. We can explain many things about human civilization without noting the existence of emotion or sensation. Political theories, economic theories, industrial production, etc can all be understood without modeling emotion but using impersonal theoretical drivers 'supply and demand', individual and state, raw materials and finished products. This is a perfectly adequate level of description for engineering or control of a process, but it is not the whole story. Why my theory offers is the last link which makes sense of the whole story. Your 'theory' just amounts to a bald assertion that somewhere, somehow when some nerves/molecules/atoms/quarks in a human being get perturbed by some energy No. The human being is the top level experience. The nerves/molecules/atoms/quarks are associated with lower level, sub-personal experiences. Nothing gets perturbed by energy as energy is nothing but the will of sub-persons. that came from a photon that vision magically takes place. You aren't listening to me. My hypothesis is that photons are not literally real, just as 'money' isn't literally real. It doesn't explain why vision doesn't happen in a camera Optical stimulation happens in a camera, but it may or may not be experienced in something resembling a visual way. When light hits our skin, we feel warmth. There could be some similar tactile stimulation on a sub-personal level of a camera's sensor, bit that stimulation never scales up to a more deeply subjective level. Not only can it not see, but it can't evolve into anything which sees. or why people dont' see infrared People don't see infrared because it is beyond the range of our specifications as humans. Same reason why we can't eat planets. or why the same neurons are active when imagining something as when seeing it. Why wouldn't they be? If you turn on a TV, the same circuits are active regardless of the content of what you are watching. It makes no testable predictions. You don't know that. One possible test would be to see if people who had PTSD could alleviate their symptoms by focusing on the objects in front of them, specifically their spatial arrangement and three dimensionality. My hypothesis is that subjects who do this will have reduced suffering and that subjects who focus on their own memories of their life, even happy unrelated memories, or their future and time passing...they will be more stuck in reliving their traumas more. It's not a comprehensive scientific test, but many such experiments could very well be developed. The thing is though, I don't care about that. My hypothesis only seeks to understand the relation of subjectivity to physics. Since subjectivity cannot be tested, the expectations of a theory of this kind to be testable are really borne of ignorance and prejudice. Craig Brent There is no other way to get from matter to mind. We can use different terms, but in the end, it is only through sense that matter and 'information' come to exist. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 10:38 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 4:06 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.netwrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the day we would have the first insight of how to really do
Re: Topical combination
On 2/8/2013 8:48 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: If you talk about God to people not reading this list, they would never come to your meaning, as such your usage is a misuse and leads to confusion. No, you are wrong on this. All theologians I met have no problem at all Of course theologians constitute about 0.01% of the people who have not read this list. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/8/2013 10:49 AM, John Clark wrote: I don't know what you mean by that, what I mean is that consciousness is a spandrel, it is the unavoidable result of intelligence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_%28biology%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_%28biology%29 Or it could be an accidental byproduct of the way human intelligence developed - unavoidable only in the sense that it was the only reachable intelligent starting from hominds. Evolution can only move species to local maxima of fitness. In Roland Omnes recent book he imagines an alien race that has enormous memory capacity, so that simply remember everything that has happened and what was done and when the need to make a decision they just do the thing that turned out best in the past. It's Omnes caricature of Hume's theory of cause and effect. But his idea is that such aliens wouldn't develop 'theories' as we do to summarize past events. Would they be conscious? I don't know, but I'd guess they wouldn't be conscious in the way I am (I don't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday...but I have a theory). Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: The Plant Teachers
This documentary is very good. it is about alterations of consciouness produced by accidents. This case has a injured temporal lobe. The effect is very similar to a psychotropic drug, religious feelings included: . http://www. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry8wwV50ylQlist=PLyXtpSZUDSjzBluIm4CL5Dbf4F65B0t24.com/secrets-of-the-mind 2013/2/8 Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com Some initial comments, because I´m very interested on these alterations of conscience. The rest of my comments will appear along the conversation: I´m persuaded, by very simple evolutionary analysis that plants produced whatever chemical substance that stops from eating them. this is their only mechanism of defence since they can not run, apart from spines, indigestible tissues and so on (by the way, if you find a plant with spines, it is very likely that this plant is edible). To deter being eaten, the plants produce whatever work for this purpose: from consciousness alteration substances to venoms that interfere critically with varius psysiological functions. The nauseas, diarrea, very bad taste experienced by the plant eater is a logical reaction: the organism detect the alteration and try to stop eating and to expel the substance eaten from the digestive tract (by both orifices ;). By the way when we feel the unnatural sensation of acceleration and movements without walking, for example in a car in a curvy road, it is erroneously interpreted by the organism as an alteration of conscience produced by something eaten, so it trigger the same reaction, trying to expel some substance that we has not eaten. (see Evolutionary Psychology and the generation of *Culture* (ISBN 0195101073)) some drugs seem to debilitate the control centre that integrate information form different modules in the mind-brain. Some people that has suffered a trauma in the brain experience these alterations permanently. This control center is in charge of ordering the relevance of the inputs both the external inputs and the output produced by other mental modules.this mental control center can be called consciousness. That's why under hallucinogenous drugs we receive an stream of non filtered events: We see the furniture, but also the interpretation of the furniture as a monster. This monster interpretation is also produced by the visual interpretation module in a normal state, among other alternative interpretations, but these bizarre interpretations would never arrive to the conscious. The drugs break this filter. What the consciousness perceive in a normal state is a consensual, coherent picture of the environment, according with what existed a moment ago. What the hallucinogen produce is a disruption of this process, Just like a venom interfere in other physiological functions. Plants simply essay different variations of chemicals and the ones that deter being eaten. that why the amazing variety of effect that produce different species. Animals have livers to detoxify these chemicals by enzymes. I have no dout that, we have a mythological religious and social modules that produce their own outputs, in the form of feelings, but also interpretations or colourations of visual images. It also produce hallucinations that are not arbitrary. In a normal state the conscience module produce the effect is a sort of super-ego conversations or a conscientious feeling. I sometimes talk with my father and I don´t think that I´m crazy But when the raw output of the conscience is not filtered, sometimes these outputs associate themselves with the visual output and form of hallucinations who talk to us. The double reaction of fear and admiration , peace and terror are universal against the unknown and hallucinations trigger these reactions. These are the reactions produced by the unscontrolled stream of elaborations that would arrive to the consciousness under hallucinative state. Life is about to deal with the unknowm. According with evolutionary psychologiests, the dreams in normal dream state are probably a training for tuning the mind for possible situations that may happen in the future. The construction if dreams follows the same logic, at other level, than the altered consciousness produced by drugs. Finally, hallucinations don´t say arbitrary things, since they are exaggerated products of our own mind. The conscience speak in favour of the social interests and the own long term interest, and also about what we have to fear and what we have to love. If a mythical entity talk with us in an altered state, he is talking about us and about how we must feel and behave about others, and its narration is a result of our evolutionary past in combination with event of the personal experience That´t why religious people in a society are very important. They are in more close contact with this spiritual self and know the best practices -traditions- of the society. Lastly, Reality is our
Re: HOW YOU CAN BECOME A LIBERAL THEOLOGIAN IN JUST 4 STEPS.
On 2/8/2013 12:04 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 1:23 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/7/2013 3:15 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 10:53 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/7/2013 12:01 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: “A secular purpose” is a nice ruse, because it is “theology-free”, right? Yes it is. It's not dependent on any ultimate foundation of the universe (per Bruno's definition of 'theology') or even any agreement about what that might be. It only depends on the public subjective non-religious values of society as expressed in their laws. That's what 'secular' means. By what mechanism does a value become non-religious? How did marriage become secular for instance? Can you define non-religious values? I can where religions are certified by the state. Care to share an example of a secular value stripped of all religious and transcendental connotations? Sure, murder is bad. Of course this may be incoporated into many different religions as a value imposed by some transcendental force - but it's constancy across many cultures and religions, it's obvious relation to evolutionary survival makes it pretty clear that it's a secular value. Brent Not trying to make a point. Just interested :) PGC - Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com http://www.avg.com Version: 2013.0.2897 / Virus Database: 2639/6085 - Release Date: 02/06/13 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/8/2013 1:18 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 9:57 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/8/2013 3:19 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to connect the memories to it, but accessing my human representation of a tree would spoil my cat experience. An interesting question. In people with multiple personalities the memories may go only one way, Eve-2 remembers what Eve-1 experiences but not vice versa; but of course they are still human memories. How does Eve-2 remember Eve-1's experiences? As if she was Eve-1 or as if she was watching a movie? And how does each personality remember popping in and out of existence? Do they feel they felt assleep or that they were suddenly teleported? As I understand the case histories, Eve-2 remembers what Eve-1 did as if she were a detached observer but one who can observe inner thoughts, as novelists often write from the internal viewpoint of a character. Eve-1 doesn't even know of the existence of Eve-2 and has gaps in her memory as if asleep or anesthetized. Brent Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com http://www.avg.com Version: 2013.0.2897 / Virus Database: 2639/6085 - Release Date: 02/06/13 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/8/2013 2:14 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: My point is that the only possible write algorithm that doesn't read information that is already stored is one that starts writing at random in any position. You could erase or corrupt previous information and you have no index. I don't see why that should be the case. The write can be to an allocated memory area that maintains a pointer. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: The Plant Teachers
On Friday, February 8, 2013 3:38:06 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/8/2013 12:31 AM, Kim Jones wrote: Which is a profound problem that we can lay right at the door of LANGUAGE. Language is indeed a self-serving thing. A description of something is a dance of language, not a dance of PERCEPTION. Perception is often throttled by the processes of language. We need to move beyond words. This is the importance of math and music (which is audible math IMO.) That seems contradictory.� Mathematics is very restricted language - declaratory sentences, logically consistent.� It seems to be an interesting fact that all information can be encoded in binary numbers, but that is the antithesis of you view that the form of representation, painting, dance, music matters in an essential way. Yes, math and music are both just other languages. Music, math, and language all have musical, mathematical, and linguistic aspects. If music were just an audible math though, then people should enjoy watching oscilloscope renditions of songs with no sound as much as they do listening to them. Since is it so clear that is not the case, we should consider that it might be the perceptual modality, not the sequences and logical relations which are of prime significance. Craig Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
Outside of consciousness, there is no possibility of discerning any difference between accidental byproducts and selected products. Only consciousness selects. Only consciousness has accidents. Craig On Friday, February 8, 2013 5:53:18 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/8/2013 10:49 AM, John Clark wrote: I don't know what you mean by that, what I mean is that consciousness is a spandrel, it is the unavoidable result of intelligence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_%28biology%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_%28biology%29 Or it could be an accidental byproduct of the way human intelligence developed - unavoidable only in the sense that it was the only reachable intelligent starting from hominds. Evolution can only move species to local maxima of fitness. In Roland Omnes recent book he imagines an alien race that has enormous memory capacity, so that simply remember everything that has happened and what was done and when the need to make a decision they just do the thing that turned out best in the past. It's Omnes caricature of Hume's theory of cause and effect. But his idea is that such aliens wouldn't develop 'theories' as we do to summarize past events. Would they be conscious? I don't know, but I'd guess they wouldn't be conscious in the way I am (I don't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday...but I have a theory). Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 10:38 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 4:06 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.netwrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 10:38 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 4:06 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.netwrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the
