Re: UD* and consciousness
On 24 Feb 2012, at 06:20, meekerdb wrote: On 2/23/2012 6:00 PM, Terren Suydam wrote: On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 7:21 PM, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/23/2012 2:49 PM, Terren Suydam wrote: As wild or counter-intuitive as it may be though, it really has no consequences to speak of in the ordinary, mundane living of life. To paraphrase Eliezer Yudkowsky, it has to add up to normal. On the other hand, once AGIs start to appear, or we begin to merge more explicitly with machines, then the theories become more important. Perhaps then comp will be made illegal, so as to constrain freedoms given to machines. I could certainly see there being significant resistance to humans augmenting their brains with computers... maybe that would be illegal too, in the interest of control or keeping a level playing field. Is that what you mean? There will be legal and ethical questions about how we and machines should treat one another. Just being conscious won't mean much though. As Jeremy Bentham said of animals, It's not whether they can think, it's whether they can suffer. Brent That brings up the interesting question of how you could explain which conscious beings are capable of suffering and which ones aren't. I'm sure some people would make the argument that anything we might call conscious would be capable of suffering. One way or the other it would seem to require a theory of consciousness in which the character of experience can be mapped somehow to 3p processes. For instance, pain I can make sense of in terms of what it feels like for a being's structure to become less organized though I'm not sure how to formalize that, and I'm not completely comfortable with that characterization. However, the reverse idea that pleasure might be what it feels like for one's structure to become more organized seems like a stretch and hard to connect with the reality of, for example, a nice massage. I don't think becoming more or less organized has any direct bearing on pain or pleasure. Physical pain and pleasure are reactions built- in by evolution for survival benefits. If a fire makes you too hot, you move away from it, even though it's not disorganizing you. On the other hand, cancer is generally painless in its early stages. And psychological suffering can be very bad without any physical damage. I don't think suffering requires consciousness, ? Suffering is a conscious experience, I would say by definition. at least not human-like consciousness, All right then. Humans, I guess, add a strong emotional response to suffering, because its self-referential means allow them to interpret them as integrity and life threat. but psychological suffering might require consciousness in the form of self-reflection. Pain, and direct suffering, is only a build-in message, making an animal avoiding something threatening its life. This has to be unconscious and non voluntary. If not the animal response would not been made. But the integrated organism will be conscious of something global and easy to remember, so that it can anticipate it in similar situation. Basically, I think the difference between low level direct pain and high level reflexive emotions might occur at the threshold between non Löbianity and Löbianity, which technically is the difference between a six length program and an 8 length program. For the first pain is a sensation to avoid, here and now; for the later pain is a sensation to avoid in general. This difference might have appeared a very long time ago, with the invertebrates like octopi and spider, but perhaps earlier. This does not solve the question of the quale of pain, but this question needs a better understanding of consciousness, and will differ in the case we agree that a UMs is already conscious or not. I am not yet quite sure about this. I have thought for a long time that consciousness begin with Löbianity and is always related with a duration sensation, but I have changed my mind on this. I tend to think now that all UMs are conscious, and that Löbianity is needed only for the higher duration feelings and emotions. For UMs, shit can happen, but only LUMs makes it into a long term problem, eventually a religious/philosophical one. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On 24 Feb 2012, at 21:51, Terren Suydam wrote: On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Terren Suydam terren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 2:27 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/24/2012 10:26 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: I certainly will. In the meantime, do you have an example from Damasio (or any other source) that could shed light on the pain/pleasure phenomenon? Terren http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/damasioreview.html I think emotions represent something above and beyond the more fundamental feelings of pleasure and pain. Fear, for example, is explainable using Damasio's framework as such, and I can translate it to the way I am asking the question as above: Question: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of fear? Answer: A cognitive architecture in which internal body states are modeled and integrated using the same representational apparatus that models the external world, so that one's adaptive responses (fight/flight/freeze) to threatening stimuli become integrated into the organism's cognitive state of affairs. In short, fear is what it feels like to have a fear response (as manifest in the body by various hormonal responses) to some real or imagined stimuli. You can substitute any emotion for fear, so long as you can identify the way that emotion manifests in the body/brain in terms of hormonal or other mechanisms. But when it comes to pain and pleasure, I don't think that it is necessary to have such an advanced cognitive architecture, I think. So on a more fundamental level, the question remains: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of pain and pleasure? Or put another way, what kind of mechanism feels pleasurable or painful from the inside? Presumably the answer to this question occurred earlier in the evolutionary process than the emergence of fear, surprise, hunger, and so on. Terren To go a little further with this, take sexual orgasm. What is happening during orgasm that makes it so pleasurable? Presumably there are special circuits in the brain that get activated, which correlate to the flush of orgasmic pleasure. But what is special about those circuits? From a 3p perspective, how is one brain circuit differentiated from another? It can't be as simple as the neurotransmitters involved; what would make one neurotransmitter be causative of pain and another of pleasure? It's shape? That seems absurd. It seems that the consequence of that neural circuit firing would have to achieve some kind of systemic effect that is characterized... how? Pain is just as mysterious. It's not as simple as what it feels like for a system to become damaged. Phantom limbs, for example, are often excruciatingly painful. Pain is clearly in the mind. What cognitive mechanism could you characterize as feeling painful from the inside? Failure to account for this in mechanistic terms, for me, is a direct threat to the legitimacy of mechanism. Failure to account for this in *any* 3p sense would be a direct threat to the legitimacy of science. I am not sure only mechanism is in difficulty here, unless you have a reason to believe that infinities could explain the pain quale. On the contrary mechanism explains that there is an unavoidable clash between the 1p view and the 3p view. The 1p view (Bp p, say) is the same as the 3p view (Bp), but this is only known by the divine intellect (G*). It cannot be known by the correct machine itself. So mechanism (or weaker) *can* explain why the 1p seems non mechanical, and in some sense is not 1p-mechanical, which explains why we feel something like a dualism. This dualism really exist epistemologically, even if the divine intellect (G*) knows that is an illusion. It is a real self-referentially correct illusion. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 6:20 PM, acw a...@lavabit.com wrote: Pain - immediate actions, random or not, to specific dangerous stimuli. Aversion/avoidance in more complex organisms (such as those capable of expecting or predicting painful stimuli). Pleasure - reduced or repeated same actions, to specific pelasurable stimuli. Pleasure seeking behavior in more complex organisms (such as those capable of expecting or predicting pleasurable stimuli). Stimuli can be both internal (emotion) or external (senses). Obviously for beings as complex as humans the nature of certain emotions can be much more complex than that because they are mixed in with many others, but I think that's what the simplest behavioral characterization of pain/pleasure that I know of. Just a quick response acw, to say thanks for your responses. I basically agree with everything you've said, it makes total sense to me. And yet, I am not doing a very good job of expressing myself (to myself even) because I'm still not satisfied. There's an intuitive sense I have of a problem that's deeper than anything I've been able to express so far... and it may turn out to be something else, but I won't know until I can communicate it. I also won't have much time in the next week for anything so didn't want to leave you hanging. So I will reflect on what you and Bruno have said... thanks again. Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 4:17 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 24 Feb 2012, at 21:51, Terren Suydam wrote: On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Terren Suydam terren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 2:27 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/24/2012 10:26 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: I certainly will. In the meantime, do you have an example from Damasio (or any other source) that could shed light on the pain/pleasure phenomenon? Terren http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/damasioreview.html I think emotions represent something above and beyond the more fundamental feelings of pleasure and pain. Fear, for example, is explainable using Damasio's framework as such, and I can translate it to the way I am asking the question as above: Question: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of fear? Answer: A cognitive architecture in which internal body states are modeled and integrated using the same representational apparatus that models the external world, so that one's adaptive responses (fight/flight/freeze) to threatening stimuli become integrated into the organism's cognitive state of affairs. In short, fear is what it feels like to have a fear response (as manifest in the body by various hormonal responses) to some real or imagined stimuli. You can substitute any emotion for fear, so long as you can identify the way that emotion manifests in the body/brain in terms of hormonal or other mechanisms. But when it comes to pain and pleasure, I don't think that it is necessary to have such an advanced cognitive architecture, I think. So on a more fundamental level, the question remains: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of pain and pleasure? Or put another way, what kind of mechanism feels pleasurable or painful from the inside? Presumably the answer to this question occurred earlier in the evolutionary process than the emergence of fear, surprise, hunger, and so on. Terren To go a little further with this, take sexual orgasm. What is happening during orgasm that makes it so pleasurable? Presumably there are special circuits in the brain that get activated, which correlate to the flush of orgasmic pleasure. But what is special about those circuits? From a 3p perspective, how is one brain circuit differentiated from another? It can't be as simple as the neurotransmitters involved; what would make one neurotransmitter be causative of pain and another of pleasure? It's shape? That seems absurd. It seems that the consequence of that neural circuit firing would have to achieve some kind of systemic effect that is characterized... how? Pain is just as mysterious. It's not as simple as what it feels like for a system to become damaged. Phantom limbs, for example, are often excruciatingly painful. Pain is clearly in the mind. What cognitive mechanism could you characterize as feeling painful from the inside? Failure to account for this in mechanistic terms, for me, is a direct threat to the legitimacy of mechanism. Failure to account for this in *any* 3p sense would be a direct threat to the legitimacy of science. I am not sure only mechanism is in difficulty here, unless you have a reason to believe that infinities could explain the pain quale. On the contrary mechanism explains that there is an unavoidable clash between the 1p view and the 3p view. The 1p view (Bp p, say) is the same as the 3p view (Bp), but this is only known by the divine intellect (G*). It cannot be known by the correct machine itself. So mechanism (or weaker) *can* explain why the 1p seems non mechanical, and in some sense is not 1p-mechanical, which explains why we feel something like a dualism. This dualism really exist epistemologically, even if the divine intellect (G*) knows that is an illusion. It is a real self-referentially correct illusion. Bruno Hi Bruno, I'm with you... See my response to acw... I need to think some more on it. Thanks for your replies. Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On 2/25/2012 7:15 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 6:20 PM, acwa...@lavabit.com wrote: Pain - immediate actions, random or not, to specific dangerous stimuli. Aversion/avoidance in more complex organisms (such as those capable of expecting or predicting painful stimuli). Pleasure - reduced or repeated same actions, to specific pelasurable stimuli. Pleasure seeking behavior in more complex organisms (such as those capable of expecting or predicting pleasurable stimuli). Stimuli can be both internal (emotion) or external (senses). Obviously for beings as complex as humans the nature of certain emotions can be much more complex than that because they are mixed in with many others, but I think that's what the simplest behavioral characterization of pain/pleasure that I know of. Just a quick response acw, to say thanks for your responses. I basically agree with everything you've said, it makes total sense to me. And yet, I am not doing a very good job of expressing myself (to myself even) because I'm still not satisfied. There's an intuitive sense I have of a problem that's deeper than anything I've been able to express so far... and it may turn out to be something else, but I won't know until I can communicate it. You might ask yourself, What form would a satisfactory answer to my problem take? Brent I also won't have much time in the next week for anything so didn't want to leave you hanging. So I will reflect on what you and Bruno have said... thanks again. Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
Saying evolution created pain and pleasure is a bit of a cop out. When we say evolution created mammals, we can theorize about a progression of material forms (and environments) that led to mammals. So *how* did evolution do that? What sort of progression could you theorize about that led to pain and pleasure? I think to do that, assuming mechanism, you still have to come up with something that maps those feelings to 3p processes. Terren On Feb 24, 2012 12:20 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/23/2012 6:00 PM, Terren Suydam wrote: On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 7:21 PM, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/23/2012 2:49 PM, Terren Suydam wrote: As wild or counter-intuitive as it may be though, it really has no consequences to speak of in the ordinary, mundane living of life. To paraphrase Eliezer Yudkowsky, it has to add up to normal. On the other hand, once AGIs start to appear, or we begin to merge more explicitly with machines, then the theories become more important. Perhaps then comp will be made illegal, so as to constrain freedoms given to machines. I could certainly see there being significant resistance to humans augmenting their brains with computers... maybe that would be illegal too, in the interest of control or keeping a level playing field. Is that what you mean? There will be legal and ethical questions about how we and machines should treat one another. Just being conscious won't mean much though. As Jeremy Bentham said of animals, It's not whether they can think, it's whether they can suffer. Brent That brings up the interesting question of how you could explain which conscious beings are capable of suffering and which ones aren't. I'm sure some people would make the argument that anything we might call conscious would be capable of suffering. One way or the other it would seem to require a theory of consciousness in which the character of experience can be mapped somehow to 3p processes. For instance, pain I can make sense of in terms of what it feels like for a being's structure to become less organized though I'm not sure how to formalize that, and I'm not completely comfortable with that characterization. However, the reverse idea that pleasure might be what it feels like for one's structure to become more organized seems like a stretch and hard to connect with the reality of, for example, a nice massage. I don't think becoming more or less organized has any direct bearing on pain or pleasure. Physical pain and pleasure are reactions built-in by evolution for survival benefits. If a fire makes you too hot, you move away from it, even though it's not disorganizing you. On the other hand, cancer is generally painless in its early stages. And psychological suffering can be very bad without any physical damage. I don't think suffering requires consciousness, at least not human-like consciousness, but psychological suffering might require consciousness in the form of self-reflection. Brent Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.**comeverything-list@googlegroups.com . To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@ **googlegroups.com everything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/** group/everything-list?hl=enhttp://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On 23 Feb 2012, at 23:49, Terren Suydam wrote: On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 4:12 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 22 Feb 2012, at 23:07, Terren Suydam wrote: Here was the aha! moment. I get it now. Thanks to you and Quentin. Even though I am well aware of the consequences of MGA, I was focusing on the physical activity of the simulation because I was running it. Yes, that's why reasoning and logic is important. It is understandable that evolution could not have prepared us to the possibly true 'big picture, nor for fundamental science, nor for quickly developing technologies. So it needs some effort to abstract us from build-in prejudices. Nature, a bit like bandits, is opportunist. At the same time we don't have to brush away that intuition, because it is real, and it has succeeded to bring us here and now, and that has to be respected somehow too. Note that the math confirms this misunderstanding between the heart/intuition/first-person/right-brain (modeled by Bp p) and the scientist/reasoner/left-brain (modeled by Bp). The tension appears right at the start, when a self-aware substructure begin to differentiate itself from its neighborhood. The fascinating thing for me is, if instead of a scan of Mary, we run an AGI that embodies a cognitive architecture that satisfies a theory of consciousness (the kind of theory that explains why a particular UM is conscious) so that if we assume the theory, it entails that the AGI is conscious. The AGI will therefore have 1p indeterminacy even if the sim is deterministic, for the same reason Mary does, because there are an infinity of divergent computational paths that go through the AGI's 1p state in any given moment. Trippy! Yeah. Trippy is the word. Many people reacts to comp in a strikingly similar way than other numerous people react to the very potent Salvia divinorum hallucinogen. People needs a very sincere interest in the fundamentals to appreciate the comp consequence, or to appreciate potent dissociative hallucinogen. I should not insist on this. Some would conclude we should make comp illegal. Like thinking by oneself is never appreciated in the neighborhood of those who want to think for the others, and control/manipulate them. As wild or counter-intuitive as it may be though, it really has no consequences to speak of in the ordinary, mundane living of life. Not direct. But it might help to adapt our mentality. It reminds us of many of our possible prejudice, even of comp is revealed false one day. And then it will help in fundamental physics, which can also have indirect repercussion. It can change also the conception of death, and that has always repercussion on life, for the best and the worth. To paraphrase Eliezer Yudkowsky, it has to add up to normal. On the other hand, once AGIs start to appear, or we begin to merge more explicitly with machines, then the theories become more important. Yes, and no. Fundamental theology is negative. It will just warn to people to be cautious with their Gödel number. better to encrypt them, perhaps quantum mechanically, because if you lost some of your number, you might be reconstituted in unexpected places. It warns also on the difficulty and difficulties of afterlife, and some of them will depend on our ability to transmits values to our descendants. Perhaps then comp will be made illegal, so as to constrain freedoms given to machines. I could certainly see there being significant resistance to humans augmenting their brains with computers... maybe that would be illegal too, in the interest of control or keeping a level playing field. Is that what you mean? When liars take power, nothing free is legal, and prohibition rules. It never works on the long run, but people can make enormous benefits in the short run. Prohibition is a gangster technic to steal everybody, by selling fears and lie. It is made possible by that mentality which makes some human accepting that other humans can think for them in the matter of their own happiness. It is the case of many (pseudo) religion and medicine. We have to separate church and state, but also health and state, that's possible with simple and reasonable laws, but the manipulators hate all this. When a government steals your money, it does not like some much that people can think. Not talking about thinking machine, which for them can only be a sort mexicans or something. I mean a foreigner. The unavoidable tension between freedom and security will always incite the fear selling business, so that freedom asks for perpetual vigilance and resistance, out of the net and on internet, actually. Prohibition can never work, unless you send *all* universal numbers in camps. Concretely, starting from a rich position, prohibition always works for some time, because its hidden goal consists in managing untaxed underground mafia economy, not to,
Re: UD* and consciousness
On 2/24/2012 5:54 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: Saying evolution created pain and pleasure is a bit of a cop out. When we say evolution created mammals, we can theorize about a progression of material forms (and environments) that led to mammals. So *how* did evolution do that? Of course evolution does everything the same way: random variation and reproductive selection. What sort of progression could you theorize about that led to pain and pleasure? I think to do that, assuming mechanism, you still have to come up with something that maps those feelings to 3p processes. Sure. Look at some of the books by Anotonio Damasio, e.g. The Feeling of What Happens. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 1:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/24/2012 5:54 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: Saying evolution created pain and pleasure is a bit of a cop out. When we say evolution created mammals, we can theorize about a progression of material forms (and environments) that led to mammals. So *how* did evolution do that? Of course evolution does everything the same way: random variation and reproductive selection. What I mean is, at what point in the evolutionary process does the experience of pain and pleasure emerge? For instance, we could say of the experience of color, that it emerged when evolution produced organisms with multiple photoreceptors that are sensitive to light of different wavelengths. So what kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of pain and pleasure? What sort of progression could you theorize about that led to pain and pleasure? I think to do that, assuming mechanism, you still have to come up with something that maps those feelings to 3p processes. Sure. Look at some of the books by Anotonio Damasio, e.g. The Feeling of What Happens. Brent I certainly will. In the meantime, do you have an example from Damasio (or any other source) that could shed light on the pain/pleasure phenomenon? Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On 2/24/2012 10:26 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: I certainly will. In the meantime, do you have an example from Damasio (or any other source) that could shed light on the pain/pleasure phenomenon? Terren http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/damasioreview.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 2:27 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/24/2012 10:26 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: I certainly will. In the meantime, do you have an example from Damasio (or any other source) that could shed light on the pain/pleasure phenomenon? Terren http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/damasioreview.html I think emotions represent something above and beyond the more fundamental feelings of pleasure and pain. Fear, for example, is explainable using Damasio's framework as such, and I can translate it to the way I am asking the question as above: Question: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of fear? Answer: A cognitive architecture in which internal body states are modeled and integrated using the same representational apparatus that models the external world, so that one's adaptive responses (fight/flight/freeze) to threatening stimuli become integrated into the organism's cognitive state of affairs. In short, fear is what it feels like to have a fear response (as manifest in the body by various hormonal responses) to some real or imagined stimuli. You can substitute any emotion for fear, so long as you can identify the way that emotion manifests in the body/brain in terms of hormonal or other mechanisms. But when it comes to pain and pleasure, I don't think that it is necessary to have such an advanced cognitive architecture, I think. So on a more fundamental level, the question remains: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of pain and pleasure? Or put another way, what kind of mechanism feels pleasurable or painful from the inside? Presumably the answer to this question occurred earlier in the evolutionary process than the emergence of fear, surprise, hunger, and so on. Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Terren Suydam terren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 2:27 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/24/2012 10:26 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: I certainly will. In the meantime, do you have an example from Damasio (or any other source) that could shed light on the pain/pleasure phenomenon? Terren http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/damasioreview.html I think emotions represent something above and beyond the more fundamental feelings of pleasure and pain. Fear, for example, is explainable using Damasio's framework as such, and I can translate it to the way I am asking the question as above: Question: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of fear? Answer: A cognitive architecture in which internal body states are modeled and integrated using the same representational apparatus that models the external world, so that one's adaptive responses (fight/flight/freeze) to threatening stimuli become integrated into the organism's cognitive state of affairs. In short, fear is what it feels like to have a fear response (as manifest in the body by various hormonal responses) to some real or imagined stimuli. You can substitute any emotion for fear, so long as you can identify the way that emotion manifests in the body/brain in terms of hormonal or other mechanisms. But when it comes to pain and pleasure, I don't think that it is necessary to have such an advanced cognitive architecture, I think. So on a more fundamental level, the question remains: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of pain and pleasure? Or put another way, what kind of mechanism feels pleasurable or painful from the inside? Presumably the answer to this question occurred earlier in the evolutionary process than the emergence of fear, surprise, hunger, and so on. Terren To go a little further with this, take sexual orgasm. What is happening during orgasm that makes it so pleasurable? Presumably there are special circuits in the brain that get activated, which correlate to the flush of orgasmic pleasure. But what is special about those circuits? From a 3p perspective, how is one brain circuit differentiated from another? It can't be as simple as the neurotransmitters involved; what would make one neurotransmitter be causative of pain and another of pleasure? It's shape? That seems absurd. It seems that the consequence of that neural circuit firing would have to achieve some kind of systemic effect that is characterized... how? Pain is just as mysterious. It's not as simple as what it feels like for a system to become damaged. Phantom limbs, for example, are often excruciatingly painful. Pain is clearly in the mind. What cognitive mechanism could you characterize as feeling painful from the inside? Failure to account for this in mechanistic terms, for me, is a direct threat to the legitimacy of mechanism. Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On 2/24/2012 20:51, Terren Suydam wrote: On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Terren Suydamterren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 2:27 PM, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/24/2012 10:26 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: I certainly will. In the meantime, do you have an example from Damasio (or any other source) that could shed light on the pain/pleasure phenomenon? Terren http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/damasioreview.html I think emotions represent something above and beyond the more fundamental feelings of pleasure and pain. Fear, for example, is explainable using Damasio's framework as such, and I can translate it to the way I am asking the question as above: Question: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of fear? Answer: A cognitive architecture in which internal body states are modeled and integrated using the same representational apparatus that models the external world, so that one's adaptive responses (fight/flight/freeze) to threatening stimuli become integrated into the organism's cognitive state of affairs. In short, fear is what it feels like to have a fear response (as manifest in the body by various hormonal responses) to some real or imagined stimuli. Yes, that seems to be mostly it, but it's subtler than that. Those internal states that we have also include expectations and emotional memories - it can lead to the memory recall of various past sensations and experiences. Certain internal states will make certain behaviors more likely and certain thoughts (other internal states) more likely. We cannot communicate the exact nature of what internal states actually are - the qualia, but beyond a certain point we cannot say anything more than that we have them and us having them will usually correspond to some internal states in our instance of a cognitive architecture. You can substitute any emotion for fear, so long as you can identify the way that emotion manifests in the body/brain in terms of hormonal or other mechanisms. But when it comes to pain and pleasure, I don't think that it is necessary to have such an advanced cognitive architecture, I think. So on a more fundamental level, the question remains: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of pain and pleasure? That's a very interesting question. Pain and fear means aversion towards certain stimuli - that is, reducing the frequency that some stimuli will be experienced, which can lead to increased survivability. Pain is unfortunately a bit more complicated than that, it leads not only to future aversion, but involuntary action-taking - forcing an immediate quick response, which may not be backed by conscious thought. It can be seen as unpleasant, because it combines the memory of constantly being forced to have to take involuntary actions and the actions being aversive. Such involuntary actions can also be seen as a huge change in attention (allocation) - one becomes much less capable of consciously directing their attention. Pleasure is similar, but in reverse - it makes certain actions more likely to be performed, possibly even leading to some feedback loops. However, it seems that in humans, pleasure and compulsion have similar and almost parallel circuits, but are not identical. Pleasure may also have calming effects by reducing responses/actions instantly, the opposite of pain, while also making it more likely that actions that caused pleasure to be performed again - which is a bit similar to compulsion. In a nutshell, they correspond to mechanisms which lead to certain actions being more or less likely, and this eventually leads to complex goals and behavior - I'd say that's a huge reason for pain/pleasure responses to have evolved. Or put another way, what kind of mechanism feels pleasurable or painful from the inside? The notion of feeling is more complicated because it involves memories and complex feedback loops. Presumably the answer to this question occurred earlier in the evolutionary process than the emergence of fear, surprise, hunger, and so on. I like these articles/videos on how AGIs may get emergent emotions from simple basic drives: http://agi-school.org/2009/dr-joscha-bach-understanding-motivation-emotion-and-mental-representation http://agi-school.org/2009/dr-joscha-bach-understanding-motivation-emotion-and-mental-representation-2 http://agi-school.org/2009/dr-joscha-bach-the-micropsi-architecture http://www.cognitive-ai.com/ Terren To go a little further with this, take sexual orgasm. What is happening during orgasm that makes it so pleasurable? My guess is that it's a fairly complex emotional and somatic response that could get broken down into simpler parts. You could ask the same question differently: what makes some music good? what makes some food delicious? what makes a picture
Re: UD* and consciousness
On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 4:47 PM, acw a...@lavabit.com wrote: On 2/24/2012 20:51, Terren Suydam wrote: On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Terren Suydamterren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 2:27 PM, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/24/2012 10:26 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: I certainly will. In the meantime, do you have an example from Damasio (or any other source) that could shed light on the pain/pleasure phenomenon? Terren http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/damasioreview.html I think emotions represent something above and beyond the more fundamental feelings of pleasure and pain. Fear, for example, is explainable using Damasio's framework as such, and I can translate it to the way I am asking the question as above: Question: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of fear? Answer: A cognitive architecture in which internal body states are modeled and integrated using the same representational apparatus that models the external world, so that one's adaptive responses (fight/flight/freeze) to threatening stimuli become integrated into the organism's cognitive state of affairs. In short, fear is what it feels like to have a fear response (as manifest in the body by various hormonal responses) to some real or imagined stimuli. Yes, that seems to be mostly it, but it's subtler than that. Those internal states that we have also include expectations and emotional memories - it can lead to the memory recall of various past sensations and experiences. Certain internal states will make certain behaviors more likely and certain thoughts (other internal states) more likely. We cannot communicate the exact nature of what internal states actually are - the qualia, but beyond a certain point we cannot say anything more than that we have them and us having them will usually correspond to some internal states in our instance of a cognitive architecture. You can substitute any emotion for fear, so long as you can identify the way that emotion manifests in the body/brain in terms of hormonal or other mechanisms. But when it comes to pain and pleasure, I don't think that it is necessary to have such an advanced cognitive architecture, I think. So on a more fundamental level, the question remains: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of pain and pleasure? That's a very interesting question. Pain and fear means aversion towards certain stimuli - that is, reducing the frequency that some stimuli will be experienced, which can lead to increased survivability. Pain is unfortunately a bit more complicated than that, it leads not only to future aversion, but involuntary action-taking - forcing an immediate quick response, which may not be backed by conscious thought. It can be seen as unpleasant, because it combines the memory of constantly being forced to have to take involuntary actions and the actions being aversive. Such involuntary actions can also be seen as a huge change in attention (allocation) - one becomes much less capable of consciously directing their attention. All of that makes sense, but pain is more than unpleasant. Pain can be blindingly horrible... ask any migraine sufferer. What accounts for the intensity of such experiences? I'm asking this in terms of how, not why. How does it get to be so intense. Pleasure is similar, but in reverse - it makes certain actions more likely to be performed, possibly even leading to some feedback loops. However, it seems that in humans, pleasure and compulsion have similar and almost parallel circuits, but are not identical. Pleasure may also have calming effects by reducing responses/actions instantly, the opposite of pain, while also making it more likely that actions that caused pleasure to be performed again - which is a bit similar to compulsion. In a nutshell, they correspond to mechanisms which lead to certain actions being more or less likely, and this eventually leads to complex goals and behavior - I'd say that's a huge reason for pain/pleasure responses to have evolved. I have the same issue with this description of pleasure. What accounts for the intensity of peak pleasure experiences? Or put another way, what kind of mechanism feels pleasurable or painful from the inside? The notion of feeling is more complicated because it involves memories and complex feedback loops. Presumably the answer to this question occurred earlier in the evolutionary process than the emergence of fear, surprise, hunger, and so on. I like these articles/videos on how AGIs may get emergent emotions from simple basic drives: http://agi-school.org/2009/dr-joscha-bach-understanding-motivation-emotion-and-mental-representation http://agi-school.org/2009/dr-joscha-bach-understanding-motivation-emotion-and-mental-representation-2
Re: UD* and consciousness
On 2/24/2012 22:20, Terren Suydam wrote: On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 4:47 PM, acwa...@lavabit.com wrote: On 2/24/2012 20:51, Terren Suydam wrote: On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Terren Suydamterren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 2:27 PM, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.netwrote: On 2/24/2012 10:26 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: I certainly will. In the meantime, do you have an example from Damasio (or any other source) that could shed light on the pain/pleasure phenomenon? Terren http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/damasioreview.html I think emotions represent something above and beyond the more fundamental feelings of pleasure and pain. Fear, for example, is explainable using Damasio's framework as such, and I can translate it to the way I am asking the question as above: Question: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of fear? Answer: A cognitive architecture in which internal body states are modeled and integrated using the same representational apparatus that models the external world, so that one's adaptive responses (fight/flight/freeze) to threatening stimuli become integrated into the organism's cognitive state of affairs. In short, fear is what it feels like to have a fear response (as manifest in the body by various hormonal responses) to some real or imagined stimuli. Yes, that seems to be mostly it, but it's subtler than that. Those internal states that we have also include expectations and emotional memories - it can lead to the memory recall of various past sensations and experiences. Certain internal states will make certain behaviors more likely and certain thoughts (other internal states) more likely. We cannot communicate the exact nature of what internal states actually are - the qualia, but beyond a certain point we cannot say anything more than that we have them and us having them will usually correspond to some internal states in our instance of a cognitive architecture. You can substitute any emotion for fear, so long as you can identify the way that emotion manifests in the body/brain in terms of hormonal or other mechanisms. But when it comes to pain and pleasure, I don't think that it is necessary to have such an advanced cognitive architecture, I think. So on a more fundamental level, the question remains: What kind of organization arose during the evolutionary process that led directly to the subjective experience of pain and pleasure? That's a very interesting question. Pain and fear means aversion towards certain stimuli - that is, reducing the frequency that some stimuli will be experienced, which can lead to increased survivability. Pain is unfortunately a bit more complicated than that, it leads not only to future aversion, but involuntary action-taking - forcing an immediate quick response, which may not be backed by conscious thought. It can be seen as unpleasant, because it combines the memory of constantly being forced to have to take involuntary actions and the actions being aversive. Such involuntary actions can also be seen as a huge change in attention (allocation) - one becomes much less capable of consciously directing their attention. All of that makes sense, but pain is more than unpleasant. Pain can be blindingly horrible... ask any migraine sufferer. What accounts for the intensity of such experiences? I'm asking this in terms of how, not why. How does it get to be so intense. Intense pain can make us scream or do things we would never do normally - irrational responses, but possibly advantageous when they first evolved. We could make a mechanistic theory for how pain manifests. Someone might suppress their reactions to pain with effort, but that doesn't mean that there weren't circuits triggered that would have led to certain actions if not for conscious effort (attention allocation) involved in preventing such behavior. Maybe we could see pain as the intense desire to perform certain immediate actions in response to some stimuli, against our better judgement. In the mechanistic version (when we look at the architecture and what it represents) we would see that the most likely outcome would be such random actions being performed. Actually accounting for the exact nature of the internal state beyond communicable parts (intensity of desire, involuntary reactions, etc) might not even be possible for any such theory. At best we might end up translating - X is a locally accessible goal, we expect goal X to lead to pleasure or fulfillment of subgoals or expectation of state to change in what we expect to be our favor or ... as we desire X. Many similar translations could be done for other emotional responses and more basic drives - the body can only do, but we think we can want. Thinking about this in detail in the a mechanistic framework tends to end up as a deconstruction/explanation for what exactly will is. Pleasure is similar, but in
Re: UD* and consciousness
On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 4:12 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 22 Feb 2012, at 23:07, Terren Suydam wrote: Here was the aha! moment. I get it now. Thanks to you and Quentin. Even though I am well aware of the consequences of MGA, I was focusing on the physical activity of the simulation because I was running it. Yes, that's why reasoning and logic is important. It is understandable that evolution could not have prepared us to the possibly true 'big picture, nor for fundamental science, nor for quickly developing technologies. So it needs some effort to abstract us from build-in prejudices. Nature, a bit like bandits, is opportunist. At the same time we don't have to brush away that intuition, because it is real, and it has succeeded to bring us here and now, and that has to be respected somehow too. Note that the math confirms this misunderstanding between the heart/intuition/first-person/right-brain (modeled by Bp p) and the scientist/reasoner/left-brain (modeled by Bp). The tension appears right at the start, when a self-aware substructure begin to differentiate itself from its neighborhood. The fascinating thing for me is, if instead of a scan of Mary, we run an AGI that embodies a cognitive architecture that satisfies a theory of consciousness (the kind of theory that explains why a particular UM is conscious) so that if we assume the theory, it entails that the AGI is conscious. The AGI will therefore have 1p indeterminacy even if the sim is deterministic, for the same reason Mary does, because there are an infinity of divergent computational paths that go through the AGI's 1p state in any given moment. Trippy! Yeah. Trippy is the word. Many people reacts to comp in a strikingly similar way than other numerous people react to the very potent Salvia divinorum hallucinogen. People needs a very sincere interest in the fundamentals to appreciate the comp consequence, or to appreciate potent dissociative hallucinogen. I should not insist on this. Some would conclude we should make comp illegal. Like thinking by oneself is never appreciated in the neighborhood of those who want to think for the others, and control/manipulate them. As wild or counter-intuitive as it may be though, it really has no consequences to speak of in the ordinary, mundane living of life. To paraphrase Eliezer Yudkowsky, it has to add up to normal. On the other hand, once AGIs start to appear, or we begin to merge more explicitly with machines, then the theories become more important. Perhaps then comp will be made illegal, so as to constrain freedoms given to machines. I could certainly see there being significant resistance to humans augmenting their brains with computers... maybe that would be illegal too, in the interest of control or keeping a level playing field. Is that what you mean? Terren This I disagree with (or don't understand) because if we acknowledge that as you said even just one emulation can be said involving consciousness then interacting with even a single Mary is an interaction with her soul in platonia. I think the admission of any zombie in any context (assuming comp) is a refutation of comp. You are right. That's why I prefer to say that comp entails non zombie. But let me give you a thought experience which *seems* to show that a notion of zombie looks possible with comp, and let us see what is wrong with that. Let us start from the beginning of MGA, or quite similar. You have a teacher doing a course in math (say). Then, by some weird event, his brain vanishes, but a cosmic explosion, by an extreme luck, send the correct information, with respect to that very particular math lesson, at the entry of the motor nerves interfaces to the muscles of the teacher, so that the lesson continue like normal. The students keep interrupting the teacher, asking questions, and everything is fine; the teacher provides the relevant answers (by luck). Is the teacher-without-brain a zombie? At first sight, it looks like one, even with comp. He behaves like a human, but the processing in the brain is just absent. He acts normal by pure chance, with a very small amount of peripheral interface brain activity. So what? Again, the solution is that the consciousness should not be attributed to the body activity, but to the teaching person and its logically real genuine computation (distributed in Platonia). The concrete brain just interfaces the person in a relative correct way, unlike the absent brain + lucky cosmic ray, which still attaches it, in this experience, but by pure luck. In both case, with real brain or without a brain, the consciousness is attached to the computations, not a particular implementation of it which in fine is a building of your mind itself attached to an infinity of computation. We might say that the teacher was a zombie, because he has no brain activity at all, but then we might say that even with a brain, he is
Re: UD* and consciousness
On 2/23/2012 2:49 PM, Terren Suydam wrote: As wild or counter-intuitive as it may be though, it really has no consequences to speak of in the ordinary, mundane living of life. To paraphrase Eliezer Yudkowsky, it has to add up to normal. On the other hand, once AGIs start to appear, or we begin to merge more explicitly with machines, then the theories become more important. Perhaps then comp will be made illegal, so as to constrain freedoms given to machines. I could certainly see there being significant resistance to humans augmenting their brains with computers... maybe that would be illegal too, in the interest of control or keeping a level playing field. Is that what you mean? There will be legal and ethical questions about how we and machines should treat one another. Just being conscious won't mean much though. As Jeremy Bentham said of animals, It's not whether they can think, it's whether they can suffer. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 7:21 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/23/2012 2:49 PM, Terren Suydam wrote: As wild or counter-intuitive as it may be though, it really has no consequences to speak of in the ordinary, mundane living of life. To paraphrase Eliezer Yudkowsky, it has to add up to normal. On the other hand, once AGIs start to appear, or we begin to merge more explicitly with machines, then the theories become more important. Perhaps then comp will be made illegal, so as to constrain freedoms given to machines. I could certainly see there being significant resistance to humans augmenting their brains with computers... maybe that would be illegal too, in the interest of control or keeping a level playing field. Is that what you mean? There will be legal and ethical questions about how we and machines should treat one another. Just being conscious won't mean much though. As Jeremy Bentham said of animals, It's not whether they can think, it's whether they can suffer. Brent That brings up the interesting question of how you could explain which conscious beings are capable of suffering and which ones aren't. I'm sure some people would make the argument that anything we might call conscious would be capable of suffering. One way or the other it would seem to require a theory of consciousness in which the character of experience can be mapped somehow to 3p processes. For instance, pain I can make sense of in terms of what it feels like for a being's structure to become less organized though I'm not sure how to formalize that, and I'm not completely comfortable with that characterization. However, the reverse idea that pleasure might be what it feels like for one's structure to become more organized seems like a stretch and hard to connect with the reality of, for example, a nice massage. Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On 2/23/2012 6:00 PM, Terren Suydam wrote: On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 7:21 PM, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/23/2012 2:49 PM, Terren Suydam wrote: As wild or counter-intuitive as it may be though, it really has no consequences to speak of in the ordinary, mundane living of life. To paraphrase Eliezer Yudkowsky, it has to add up to normal. On the other hand, once AGIs start to appear, or we begin to merge more explicitly with machines, then the theories become more important. Perhaps then comp will be made illegal, so as to constrain freedoms given to machines. I could certainly see there being significant resistance to humans augmenting their brains with computers... maybe that would be illegal too, in the interest of control or keeping a level playing field. Is that what you mean? There will be legal and ethical questions about how we and machines should treat one another. Just being conscious won't mean much though. As Jeremy Bentham said of animals, It's not whether they can think, it's whether they can suffer. Brent That brings up the interesting question of how you could explain which conscious beings are capable of suffering and which ones aren't. I'm sure some people would make the argument that anything we might call conscious would be capable of suffering. One way or the other it would seem to require a theory of consciousness in which the character of experience can be mapped somehow to 3p processes. For instance, pain I can make sense of in terms of what it feels like for a being's structure to become less organized though I'm not sure how to formalize that, and I'm not completely comfortable with that characterization. However, the reverse idea that pleasure might be what it feels like for one's structure to become more organized seems like a stretch and hard to connect with the reality of, for example, a nice massage. I don't think becoming more or less organized has any direct bearing on pain or pleasure. Physical pain and pleasure are reactions built-in by evolution for survival benefits. If a fire makes you too hot, you move away from it, even though it's not disorganizing you. On the other hand, cancer is generally painless in its early stages. And psychological suffering can be very bad without any physical damage. I don't think suffering requires consciousness, at least not human-like consciousness, but psychological suffering might require consciousness in the form of self-reflection. Brent Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
2012/2/21 Terren Suydam terren.suy...@gmail.com Bruno and others, Here's a thought experiment that for me casts doubt on the notion that consciousness requires 1p indeterminacy. Imagine that we have scanned my friend Mary so that we have a complete functional description of her brain (down to some substitution level that we are betting on). We run the scan in a simulated classical physics. The simulation is completely closed, which is to say, deterministic. In other words, we can run the simulation a million times for a million years each time, and the state of all them will be identical. Now, when we run the simulation, we can ask her (within the context of the simulation) Are you conscious, Mary? Are you aware of your thoughts? She replies yes. Next, we tweak the simulation in the following way. We plug in a source of quantum randomness (random numbers from a quantum random number generator) into a simulated water fountain. Now, the simulation is no longer deterministic. A million runs of the simulation will result in a million different computational states after a million years. We ask the same questions of Mary and she replies yes. In the deterministic scenario, Mary's computational state is traced an infinite number of times in the UD*, but only because of the infinite number of ways a particular computational state can be instantiated in the UD* (different levels, UD implementing other UDs recursively, iteration along the reals, etc). It's a stretch however to say that there is 1p indeterminacy, because her computational state as implemented in the simulation is deterministic. In the second scenario, her computational state is traced in the UD* and it is clear there is 1p indeterminacy, as the splitting entailed by the quantum number generator brings Mary along, so to speak. So if Mary is not conscious in the deterministic scenario, she is a zombie. The only way to be consistent with this conclusion is to insist that the substitution level must be at the quantum level. If OTOH she is conscious, then consciousness does not require 1p indeterminacy. Your determinstic scenario is never alone... there exists (other) continuations (that you do not runs) in the UD deployment that account for the counterfactuals (and hence 1p indeterminacy). You're not outside the UD in the comp frame. It's not because your simulation is deterministic, that it account for all the measure of mary from her POV. The simulation is deterministic only relatively to you, from Mary's POV, all continuations are existing at every point. Quentin Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- 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 post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On 21 Feb 2012, at 21:34, Terren Suydam wrote: On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 12:05 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/21/2012 8:32 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: So if Mary is not conscious in the deterministic scenario, she is a zombie. The only way to be consistent with this conclusion is to insist that the substitution level must be at the quantum level. If OTOH she is conscious, then consciousness does not require 1p indeterminacy. But is it really either-or? Isn't it likely there are different kinds and degrees of consciousness. I'm not clear on what Bruno's theory says about this. On the one hand he says all Lobian machines are (equally?) conscious, but then he says it depends on the program they are executing. Brent I'm not too keen on 'partial zombies'. Partial zombies admit full zombies, as far as I'm concerned. The idea that consciousness depends on the program a UM executes is the point of this thought experiment. The idea that consciousness itself depends on a multiplicity of computational paths going through the current computational state is what I'm questioning. But this is not assumed. Even just one emulation can be said involving consciousness. The first person indeterminacy is just a consequence, and the thought experiment just show that MATTER, not consciousness, requires them to stabilize under the substitution level. So consciousness does not depend on the first person indeterminacy, but it comes from the usual comp-attribution of mind to computations, and is used only to determine my most probable next first states on which the 1-indeterminacy bears on , like in the WM duplication. OK? Bruno PS I hope you will get this answer, because it looks like my server has some trouble in sending mail. More comments later. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On 21 Feb 2012, at 18:05, meekerdb wrote: On 2/21/2012 8:32 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: Bruno and others, Here's a thought experiment that for me casts doubt on the notion that consciousness requires 1p indeterminacy. Imagine that we have scanned my friend Mary so that we have a complete functional description of her brain (down to some substitution level that we are betting on). We run the scan in a simulated classical physics. The simulation is completely closed, which is to say, deterministic. In other words, we can run the simulation a million times for a million years each time, and the state of all them will be identical. Now, when we run the simulation, we can ask her (within the context of the simulation) Are you conscious, Mary? Are you aware of your thoughts? She replies yes. Next, we tweak the simulation in the following way. We plug in a source of quantum randomness (random numbers from a quantum random number generator) into a simulated water fountain. Now, the simulation is no longer deterministic. A million runs of the simulation will result in a million different computational states after a million years. We ask the same questions of Mary and she replies yes. In the deterministic scenario, Mary's computational state is traced an infinite number of times in the UD*, but only because of the infinite number of ways a particular computational state can be instantiated in the UD* (different levels, UD implementing other UDs recursively, iteration along the reals, etc). It's a stretch however to say that there is 1p indeterminacy, because her computational state as implemented in the simulation is deterministic. In the second scenario, her computational state is traced in the UD* and it is clear there is 1p indeterminacy, as the splitting entailed by the quantum number generator brings Mary along, so to speak. So if Mary is not conscious in the deterministic scenario, she is a zombie. The only way to be consistent with this conclusion is to insist that the substitution level must be at the quantum level. If OTOH she is conscious, then consciousness does not require 1p indeterminacy. But is it really either-or? Isn't it likely there are different kinds and degrees of consciousness. I'm not clear on what Bruno's theory says about this. On the one hand he says all Lobian machines are (equally?) conscious, but then he says it depends on the program they are executing. Imagine that I am duplicated in W and M. I would say that the guy in M and the guy in W are equally conscious, and that both are me, although they will feel very different and have different content of consciousness. In that sense I would say that all Löbian machines are equally conscious. Of course the Löbian humans have very different experience than the jumping spider, and even more different than Peano Arithmetic. As I said in another post today, I am not sure why Terren thinks that that the first person indeterminacy is needed for consciousness. First person indeterminacy is implied by the self-multiplication (in the UD, say), as a consequence of comp, but is not presented as something needed for the existence of consciousness. Mary is conscious in both scenario. But comp implies, as Quentin said, that she cannot escape the indeterminacy of its many continuations in the UD. It is hoped that the QM indeterminacy is just the reflect of the comp indeterminacy, so that QM confirms comp. The Everett mutiplication of populations of machines in QM would also be an empirical reason to assess that comp does not lead to solipsism (which I would take as a refutation of comp, if that happen to be the case). The apparition of a quantum logic in the material hypostases is a reassuring step in that direction. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On 22 Feb 2012, at 15:49, Terren Suydam wrote: On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 9:27 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 21 Feb 2012, at 18:05, meekerdb wrote: But is it really either-or? Isn't it likely there are different kinds and degrees of consciousness. I'm not clear on what Bruno's theory says about this. On the one hand he says all Lobian machines are (equally?) conscious, but then he says it depends on the program they are executing. Imagine that I am duplicated in W and M. I would say that the guy in M and the guy in W are equally conscious, and that both are me, although they will feel very different and have different content of consciousness. In that sense I would say that all Löbian machines are equally conscious. Of course the Löbian humans have very different experience than the jumping spider, and even more different than Peano Arithmetic. As I said in another post today, I am not sure why Terren thinks that that the first person indeterminacy is needed for consciousness. First person indeterminacy is implied by the self-multiplication (in the UD, say), as a consequence of comp, but is not presented as something needed for the existence of consciousness. Mary is conscious in both scenario. But comp implies, as Quentin said, that she cannot escape the indeterminacy of its many continuations in the UD. It is hoped that the QM indeterminacy is just the reflect of the comp indeterminacy, so that QM confirms comp. The Everett mutiplication of populations of machines in QM would also be an empirical reason to assess that comp does not lead to solipsism (which I would take as a refutation of comp, if that happen to be the case). The apparition of a quantum logic in the material hypostases is a reassuring step in that direction. Bruno Hey Bruno, I seem to remember reading a while back that you were saying that the 1p consciousness arises necessarily from the many paths in the UD. I'm glad to clear up my misunderstanding. OK. What happens, if there is no flaw in the UDA-MGA, is that your futures can only be determined by the statistics bearing on all computations going through your state. The 1p nature of that consciousness will rely on the logic of (machine) knowledge (or other modalities), which put some structure on the set of accessible computational states. Sorry for being unclear, and for the many misspellings, and other grammatical tenses atrocities. The problem is also related to the difficulty of the subject, which is necessarily counter-intuitive (in the comp theory), so that we have some trouble in using the natural language, which relies on natural intuitive prejudices. In fact I can understand why it might look like I was saying that the 1p needs the many computations. The reality is that one is enough, but the others computations, 1-p undistinguishable, are there to, and even for a slight interval of consciousness, we must take into account that we are in all of them, for the correct statistics. So the 1p is attached to an infinity of computation, once you attach it to just one computation. However I don't understand how Mary could have anything but a single continuation given the determinism of the sim. How could a counterfactual arise in this thought experiment? Can you give a concrete example? You should really find this by yourself, honestly. It is the only way to be really convinced. Normally this follows from the reasoning. Please ask if you don't find your error. Oh! I see Quentin found it. Your mistake consists in believing that when you simulate your friend Mary in the deterministic sim, completely closed, as you say, you have succeeded to prevent Mary, from her own pov, to escape your simulation. Her 1-indeterminacy remains unchanged, and bears on the many computations, existing by the + and * laws, or in the UD. The counterfactuals, and the indeterminacy comes from the existence of an infinity of computations generating Mary's state. Your deterministic sim can be runned a million times, it will not change Mary's indeterminacy, relatively to the infinities of diverging (infinite) computations going through her 1-state. You might also reason like that. The consciousness of Mary is only in Platonia. We have abandoned the idea that consciousness is related to any singular physical activity. Her consciousness and other 1p- attributes depends only on her arithmetical relative state, relatively to the infinity of UMs running her in Platonia. In that sense, all the Mary you interact with are zombie, but this is just due to the trivial fact that you can interact only with Mary's body or local 3p description. Once you grasp that you too are in Platonia, there is no more zombie because bodies become only local interface between soul in Platonia. But intuition fails us, and that's why we need the math and the computer science. The
Re: UD* and consciousness
On 2/22/2012 14:49, Terren Suydam wrote: However I don't understand how Mary could have anything but a single continuation given the determinism of the sim. How could a counterfactual arise in this thought experiment? Can you give a concrete example? Mary's brain/SIM implementation is deterministic. We would associate her 1p with all machines that happen to implement Mary's current state at the substitution level chosen. If Mary is lucky(or not), she might find herself in your digital physics VR simulation, thus your observation and inference of the 3p simulation would match Mary's 1p in that simulation. However, consider that in the UD, there would be many implementations for Mary's mind at that substitution level, some including that environment you chose for her. These implementations may be many times layered, for example, those implementing your physics and eventually you, and those implementing the physics, the simulation and eventually her. Now imagine your simulation has some irrelevant bit of functionality, let's say, an opcode RAND or some register 323, that bit of functionality was never used in Mary's implementation or of implementation of any underlying layers, it's just there in your implementation of the simulation. Mary's consciousness would never be changed by how you implemented RAND or r323, but let's say, she eventually decides to do a bit of programming in her simulation and uses that opcode and/or register by accident. What would happen? There can be many machines implementing (or even not implementing it at all) said opcode and/or register, however since Mary's own experience does not depend at all on it, all that part is indeterminate. Now instead of register 323 or RAND, make everything that Mary does not depend on and that is not inconsistent with her history as something subject to 1p invariancy in the UD - you'll find infinities of possible machines implementing Mary, even cases where the simulation is self-contained and completely disconnected from your physical world, running completely in the UD. Of course, I do wonder how stable such a VR reality would be - it might not be very high measure like our current quantum world where we have degrees of freedom like these everywhere (if MWI). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 12:29 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 22 Feb 2012, at 15:49, Terren Suydam wrote: Hey Bruno, I seem to remember reading a while back that you were saying that the 1p consciousness arises necessarily from the many paths in the UD. I'm glad to clear up my misunderstanding. OK. What happens, if there is no flaw in the UDA-MGA, is that your futures can only be determined by the statistics bearing on all computations going through your state. The 1p nature of that consciousness will rely on the logic of (machine) knowledge (or other modalities), which put some structure on the set of accessible computational states. Sorry for being unclear, and for the many misspellings, and other grammatical tenses atrocities. The problem is also related to the difficulty of the subject, which is necessarily counter-intuitive (in the comp theory), so that we have some trouble in using the natural language, which relies on natural intuitive prejudices. In fact I can understand why it might look like I was saying that the 1p needs the many computations. The reality is that one is enough, but the others computations, 1-p undistinguishable, are there to, and even for a slight interval of consciousness, we must take into account that we are in all of them, for the correct statistics. So the 1p is attached to an infinity of computation, once you attach it to just one computation. Indeed, it is very counter intuitive and full of subtleties. I have been lurking for a few years now and I am finding that only by engaging with you and others on the list do I begin to comprehend the subtleties. However I don't understand how Mary could have anything but a single continuation given the determinism of the sim. How could a counterfactual arise in this thought experiment? Can you give a concrete example? You should really find this by yourself, honestly. It is the only way to be really convinced. Normally this follows from the reasoning. Please ask if you don't find your error. Oh! I see Quentin found it. Your mistake consists in believing that when you simulate your friend Mary in the deterministic sim, completely closed, as you say, you have succeeded to prevent Mary, from her own pov, to escape your simulation. Her 1-indeterminacy remains unchanged, and bears on the many computations, existing by the + and * laws, or in the UD. The counterfactuals, and the indeterminacy comes from the existence of an infinity of computations generating Mary's state. Your deterministic sim can be runned a million times, it will not change Mary's indeterminacy, relatively to the infinities of diverging (infinite) computations going through her 1-state. You might also reason like that. The consciousness of Mary is only in Platonia. We have abandoned the idea that consciousness is related to any singular physical activity. Here was the aha! moment. I get it now. Thanks to you and Quentin. Even though I am well aware of the consequences of MGA, I was focusing on the physical activity of the simulation because I was running it. The fascinating thing for me is, if instead of a scan of Mary, we run an AGI that embodies a cognitive architecture that satisfies a theory of consciousness (the kind of theory that explains why a particular UM is conscious) so that if we assume the theory, it entails that the AGI is conscious. The AGI will therefore have 1p indeterminacy even if the sim is deterministic, for the same reason Mary does, because there are an infinity of divergent computational paths that go through the AGI's 1p state in any given moment. Trippy! Her consciousness and other 1p-attributes depends only on her arithmetical relative state, relatively to the infinity of UMs running her in Platonia. In that sense, all the Mary you interact with are zombie, but this is just due to the trivial fact that you can interact only with Mary's body or local 3p description. This I disagree with (or don't understand) because if we acknowledge that as you said even just one emulation can be said involving consciousness then interacting with even a single Mary is an interaction with her soul in platonia. I think the admission of any zombie in any context (assuming comp) is a refutation of comp. Terren Once you grasp that you too are in Platonia, there is no more zombie because bodies become only local interface between soul in Platonia. But intuition fails us, and that's why we need the math and the computer science. The indeterminacy might be too big, and the comp counterfactuals might be too large, but that remains to be proved, and would be a refutation of comp (CTM, mechanism). Let me comment your last paragraphs (the entire post is below for ease) In the second scenario, her computational state is traced in the UD* and it is clear there is 1p indeterminacy, as the splitting entailed by the quantum number generator brings Mary along, so to speak.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On 2/21/2012 8:32 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: Bruno and others, Here's a thought experiment that for me casts doubt on the notion that consciousness requires 1p indeterminacy. Imagine that we have scanned my friend Mary so that we have a complete functional description of her brain (down to some substitution level that we are betting on). We run the scan in a simulated classical physics. The simulation is completely closed, which is to say, deterministic. In other words, we can run the simulation a million times for a million years each time, and the state of all them will be identical. Now, when we run the simulation, we can ask her (within the context of the simulation) Are you conscious, Mary? Are you aware of your thoughts? She replies yes. Next, we tweak the simulation in the following way. We plug in a source of quantum randomness (random numbers from a quantum random number generator) into a simulated water fountain. Now, the simulation is no longer deterministic. A million runs of the simulation will result in a million different computational states after a million years. We ask the same questions of Mary and she replies yes. In the deterministic scenario, Mary's computational state is traced an infinite number of times in the UD*, but only because of the infinite number of ways a particular computational state can be instantiated in the UD* (different levels, UD implementing other UDs recursively, iteration along the reals, etc). It's a stretch however to say that there is 1p indeterminacy, because her computational state as implemented in the simulation is deterministic. In the second scenario, her computational state is traced in the UD* and it is clear there is 1p indeterminacy, as the splitting entailed by the quantum number generator brings Mary along, so to speak. So if Mary is not conscious in the deterministic scenario, she is a zombie. The only way to be consistent with this conclusion is to insist that the substitution level must be at the quantum level. If OTOH she is conscious, then consciousness does not require 1p indeterminacy. But is it really either-or? Isn't it likely there are different kinds and degrees of consciousness. I'm not clear on what Bruno's theory says about this. On the one hand he says all Lobian machines are (equally?) conscious, but then he says it depends on the program they are executing. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On Feb 21, 11:32 am, Terren Suydam terren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: So if Mary is not conscious in the deterministic scenario, she is a zombie. The only way to be consistent with this conclusion is to insist that the substitution level must be at the quantum level. If OTOH she is conscious, then consciousness does not require 1p indeterminacy. Or, there may be no substitution level at all, in which case the deterministic simulation is a brain puppet, which responds 'yes' when you pull the right string. For the other simulation, I'm not sure why the quantum-random numbers wouldn't change 'Mary' enough to give different answers. You have a brain puppet which is flipping coins...what is the presumed effect of these flips? If we consider instead that the brain (and all of physics) is more like a mass-shadow of experienced events, then we can understand how duplicating the shadow of a tree precisely doesn't render a living tree as the result. To apply this metaphor to our reality, you would have to turn it around to realize that in place of a tree and shadow, there is a dialectic unity where Thesis = Figurative private phenomenology (tree-like experience) and Antithesis = Literal public empiricism (material tree). Since the thesis is fundamental, any change to the antithesis will simultaneously be changing the thesis, as the thesis is an *experience* - a sensorimotive fugue. Emulating the antithesis however, like trying to cast a shadow of a shadow, yields back only universal generic defaults and not idiosyncratic identity grounded in cohesive experience. There is no 'here' there. You have a hologram of a human brain with no I associated with it. The indeterminacy of 1p is caused by the authoritative authenticity of the thesis, not by randomness. 1p awareness could even be deterministic (and it probably is in matter below the cellular threshold) but as awareness scales up through experience over generations and lifetimes, it condenses as qualitative mass: significance. This is figurative mass, not literal mass of a pseudosubstance. It is 'importance', 'specialness', 'meaning', 'feeling', etc. If this signifying condensation is the thesis, we can understand it by looking at the a-signifying antithesis of mass through gravity and density. What happens to motive power and autonomy under high gravity? It is crushed and absorbed into the collective inertia. Separate bodies lose their power to escape the pull...they fall. When this happens to us subjectively, our thesis falls as well - asleep. We feel 'down'. We are 'crushed', depressed, deflated, low, bummed, etc. Because the thesis and antithesis are symmetrical however, significance scales up as freedom, autonomy, high spirits, lifted moods, grandeur, delusions of grandeur, mania, etc. As celebrity and wealth are associated with super-power, freedom, and luxury, the increased autonomy of living organisms is arrived at through historical narrative. You cannot clone Beyonce and expect to make a celebrity automatically. The celebrity-ness is not in her body (although her body image is already part of a cultural narrative which is being exalted at this time, so body similarity gives a head start). What I'm getting at is that human consciousness is the latest chapter in a long story of famous molecules that became famous cells who became famous organisms. A simulation is a mere portrait of the fruits of this fame. The costumes and scenery are there, but not the heroes and heroines. The simulation is not from the right family, has not attended the right schools, did not win American Idol. It isn't a who, it is a pretender - a what. It has no why, only how. Don't be fooled by the four dimensionality of matter's appearance. It is still a shadow/antithesis of our perception of all perceptions of it. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 2:56 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On Feb 21, 11:32 am, Terren Suydam terren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: So if Mary is not conscious in the deterministic scenario, she is a zombie. The only way to be consistent with this conclusion is to insist that the substitution level must be at the quantum level. If OTOH she is conscious, then consciousness does not require 1p indeterminacy. Or, there may be no substitution level at all snip (I only included the relevant parts of your response) My thought experiment assumes comp. T -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 12:05 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/21/2012 8:32 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: So if Mary is not conscious in the deterministic scenario, she is a zombie. The only way to be consistent with this conclusion is to insist that the substitution level must be at the quantum level. If OTOH she is conscious, then consciousness does not require 1p indeterminacy. But is it really either-or? Isn't it likely there are different kinds and degrees of consciousness. I'm not clear on what Bruno's theory says about this. On the one hand he says all Lobian machines are (equally?) conscious, but then he says it depends on the program they are executing. Brent I'm not too keen on 'partial zombies'. Partial zombies admit full zombies, as far as I'm concerned. The idea that consciousness depends on the program a UM executes is the point of this thought experiment. The idea that consciousness itself depends on a multiplicity of computational paths going through the current computational state is what I'm questioning. Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On 2/21/2012 12:34 PM, Terren Suydam wrote: On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 12:05 PM, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/21/2012 8:32 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: So if Mary is not conscious in the deterministic scenario, she is a zombie. The only way to be consistent with this conclusion is to insist that the substitution level must be at the quantum level. If OTOH she is conscious, then consciousness does not require 1p indeterminacy. But is it really either-or? Isn't it likely there are different kinds and degrees of consciousness. I'm not clear on what Bruno's theory says about this. On the one hand he says all Lobian machines are (equally?) conscious, but then he says it depends on the program they are executing. Brent I'm not too keen on 'partial zombies'. Partial zombies admit full zombies, as far as I'm concerned. When I refer to degrees of consciousness I'm not talking about partial zombies (beings that act exactly like humans but are not fully conscious). I'm talking about dogs and chimpanzees and Watson and spiders. The idea that consciousness depends on the program a UM executes is the point of this thought experiment. The idea that consciousness itself depends on a multiplicity of computational paths going through the current computational state is what I'm questioning. Yes, I think that's a dubious proposition. Although brains no doubt have some degree of inherent quantum randomness it's clear that intelligent behavior need not depend on that. But I'm not sure your thought experiment proves its point. It's about simulated Mary. Suppose consciousness depended on quantum entanglements of brain structures with the environment (and they must in order for the brain to quasi-classical). Then in your simulation Mary would be a zombie (because your computation is purely classical and you're not simulating the quantum entanglements). But an actual macroscopic device substituted for part of real Mary's brain would be quantum entangled with the environment even if were at the neuron level. So consciousness would, ex hypothesi, still occur - although it might be different in some way. Brent Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 4:01 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/21/2012 12:34 PM, Terren Suydam wrote: The idea that consciousness depends on the program a UM executes is the point of this thought experiment. The idea that consciousness itself depends on a multiplicity of computational paths going through the current computational state is what I'm questioning. Yes, I think that's a dubious proposition. Although brains no doubt have some degree of inherent quantum randomness it's clear that intelligent behavior need not depend on that. But I'm not sure your thought experiment proves its point. It's about simulated Mary. Suppose consciousness depended on quantum entanglements of brain structures with the environment (and they must in order for the brain to quasi-classical). Then in your simulation Mary would be a zombie (because your computation is purely classical and you're not simulating the quantum entanglements). But an actual macroscopic device substituted for part of real Mary's brain would be quantum entangled with the environment even if were at the neuron level. So consciousness would, ex hypothesi, still occur - although it might be different in some way. Brent Why must consciousness depend on quantum entanglements for the brain to be quasi-classical? Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On 2/21/2012 2:45 PM, Terren Suydam wrote: On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 4:01 PM, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/21/2012 12:34 PM, Terren Suydam wrote: The idea that consciousness depends on the program a UM executes is the point of this thought experiment. The idea that consciousness itself depends on a multiplicity of computational paths going through the current computational state is what I'm questioning. Yes, I think that's a dubious proposition. Although brains no doubt have some degree of inherent quantum randomness it's clear that intelligent behavior need not depend on that. But I'm not sure your thought experiment proves its point. It's about simulated Mary. Suppose consciousness depended on quantum entanglements of brain structures with the environment (and they must in order for the brain to quasi-classical). Then in your simulation Mary would be a zombie (because your computation is purely classical and you're not simulating the quantum entanglements). But an actual macroscopic device substituted for part of real Mary's brain would be quantum entangled with the environment even if were at the neuron level. So consciousness would, ex hypothesi, still occur - although it might be different in some way. Brent Why must consciousness depend on quantum entanglements for the brain to be quasi-classical? The best theory of how the (quasi) classical world arises from the underlying quantum world depends on decoherence, i.e. macroscopic things appear classical because they are entangled with the environment which makes a few variables, like position and momentum, quasi-classical (c.f. Zurek or Schlosshauer). If a thing is isolated from the environment it may be able to exist in a superposition of states, i.e. be non-classical; although internal degrees of freedom might also produce quasi-classical dynamics. Brent Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: UD* and consciousness
On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 7:47 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/21/2012 2:45 PM, Terren Suydam wrote: On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 4:01 PM, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/21/2012 12:34 PM, Terren Suydam wrote: The idea that consciousness depends on the program a UM executes is the point of this thought experiment. The idea that consciousness itself depends on a multiplicity of computational paths going through the current computational state is what I'm questioning. Yes, I think that's a dubious proposition. Although brains no doubt have some degree of inherent quantum randomness it's clear that intelligent behavior need not depend on that. But I'm not sure your thought experiment proves its point. It's about simulated Mary. Suppose consciousness depended on quantum entanglements of brain structures with the environment (and they must in order for the brain to quasi-classical). Then in your simulation Mary would be a zombie (because your computation is purely classical and you're not simulating the quantum entanglements). But an actual macroscopic device substituted for part of real Mary's brain would be quantum entangled with the environment even if were at the neuron level. So consciousness would, ex hypothesi, still occur - although it might be different in some way. Brent Why must consciousness depend on quantum entanglements for the brain to be quasi-classical? The best theory of how the (quasi) classical world arises from the underlying quantum world depends on decoherence, i.e. macroscopic things appear classical because they are entangled with the environment which makes a few variables, like position and momentum, quasi-classical (c.f. Zurek or Schlosshauer). If a thing is isolated from the environment it may be able to exist in a superposition of states, i.e. be non-classical; although internal degrees of freedom might also produce quasi-classical dynamics. OK, but that assumes more than is necessary for the argument. I don't think Bruno's theory demands an account of how the classical arises from the quantum. The brain (or its functional equivalent) just implements computations at or above some substitution level we are willing to bet on... whether they are entangled with a level lower than the substitution level is irrelevant. Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
