Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 21 Jun 2015, at 19:55, meekerdb wrote: On 6/21/2015 8:16 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Z is what the machine can say about the []p t points of view (like the bet that you will have coffee in the modified step 3 protocol).[]coffee means you get coffee in all consistent extensions (which in this protocol are W and M), and t is the explicit conditioning that there is at least one consistent extension, which does not follow from []p due to incompleteness. You can see that []p t is a weakening of the []p p move. Incompleteness forces the machine to provides different logics for those nuances. I don't understand this use of consistent. At first I thought it meant logical consistency, i.e. not proving false. That is what I mean. But in the above you use it as though it meant something like nomologically consistent. I don't see why. I use the completeness theorem. A theory/machine is consistent iff it admits a model. To be consistent = having a reality satisfying or verifying the beliefs. Bruno PS I will have to go. Some other posts could be commented tomorrow. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 6/21/2015 8:16 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Z is what the machine can say about the []p t points of view (like the bet that you will have coffee in the modified step 3 protocol).[]coffee means you get coffee in all consistent extensions (which in this protocol are W and M), and t is the explicit conditioning that there is at least one consistent extension, which does not follow from []p due to incompleteness. You can see that []p t is a weakening of the []p p move. Incompleteness forces the machine to provides different logics for those nuances. I don't understand this use of consistent. At first I thought it meant logical consistency, i.e. not proving false. But in the above you use it as though it meant something like nomologically consistent. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 19 Jun 2015, at 18:36, Terren Suydam wrote: On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 3:23 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 15 Jun 2015, at 15:32, Terren Suydam wrote: On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 10:27 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: We can, as nobody could pretend to have the right intepretation of Plotinus. In fact that very question has been addressed to Plotinus's interpretation of Plato. Now, it would be necessary to quote large passage of Plotinus to explain why indeed, even without comp, the two matters (the intelligible et the sensible one) are arguably sort of hypostases, even in the mind of Plotionus, but as a platonist, he is forced to consider them degenerate and belonging to the realm where God loses control, making matter a quasi synonym of evil (!). The primary hypostase are the three one on the top right of this diagram (T, for truth, G* and S4Grz) T G G* S4Grz Z Z* X X* Making Z, Z*, X, X* into hypostases homogenizes nicely Plotinus presentation, and put a lot of pieces of the platonist puzzle into place. It makes other passage of Plotinus completely natural. Note that for getting the material aspect of the (degenerate, secondary) hypostases, we still need to make comp explicit, by restricting the arithmetical intepretation of the modal logics on the sigma- (UD-accessible) propositions (leading to the logic (below G1 and G1*) S4Grz1, Z1*, X1*, where the quantum quantization appears. The plain language rational is that both in Plotinus, (according to some passagethis is accepted by many scholars too) and in the universal machine mind, UDA show that psychology, theology, even biology, are obtained by intensional (modal) variant of the intellect and the ONE. By incompleteness, provability is of the type belief. We lost knowledge here, we don't have []p - p in G. This makes knowledge emulable, and meta-definable, in the language of the machine, by the Theaetetus method: [1]p = []p p. UDA justifies for matter: []p t (cf the coffee modification of the step 3: a physical certainty remains true in all consistent continuations ([]p), and such continuation exist (t). It is the Timaeus bastard calculus, referred to by Plotinus in his two- matters chapter (ennead II-6). Sensible matter is just a reapplication of the theaetetus, on intelligible matter. I hope this helps, ask anything. Bruno I'm not conversant in modal logic, so a lot of that went over my head. Maybe the problem is here. Modal logic, or even just modal notation are supposed to make things more easy. For example, I am used to explain the difference between agnosticism and beliefs, by using the modality []p, that you can in this context read as I believe p. If ~ represents the negation, the old definition of atheism was []~g (the belief that God does not exist), and agnosticism is ~[]g (and perhaps ~[]~g too). The language of modal logic, is the usual language of logic (p q, p v q, p - q, ~p, etc.) + the symbol [], usually read as it is necessary (in the alethic context), or it is obligatory (in the deontic context), or forever (in some temporal context), or It is known that (in some epistemic context), or it is asserted by a machine (in the computer science context), etc... p abbreviates ~[] ~(possible p = Non necessary that non p). All good here. Thus my request for plain language justifications. In spite of that language barrier I'd like to understand what I can about this model because it is the basis for your formal argument AUDA and much of what you've created seems to depend on it. In AUDA, the theory is elementary arithmetic (Robinson Arithmetic). I define in that theory the statement PA asserts F, with F an arithmetical formula. Then RA is used only as the universal system emulating the conversation that I have with PA. Everything is derived from the axioms of elementary arithmetic (but I could have used the combinators, the game of life, etc.). So I don't create anything. I interview a machine which proves proposition about itself, and by construction, I limit myself to consistent, arithmetically sound (lost of the time) machine. This determined all the hypostases. It is many years years of work and the hard work has been done by Gödel, Löb, Grzegorczyck, Boolos, Goldblatt, Solovay. I think it's debatable that you didn't create anything. I think reasonable people could disagree on whether the 8 hypostases you've put forward as the basis for your AUDA argument are created vs discovered. Not only they are discovered, but I show that *all* self-referentially correct machine discover them when looking inward. I'm coming from an open-minded position here - but trying to
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 3:23 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 15 Jun 2015, at 15:32, Terren Suydam wrote: On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 10:27 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: We can, as nobody could pretend to have the right intepretation of Plotinus. In fact that very question has been addressed to Plotinus's interpretation of Plato. Now, it would be necessary to quote large passage of Plotinus to explain why indeed, even without comp, the two matters (the intelligible et the sensible one) are arguably sort of hypostases, even in the mind of Plotionus, but as a platonist, he is forced to consider them degenerate and belonging to the realm where God loses control, making matter a quasi synonym of evil (!). The primary hypostase are the three one on the top right of this diagram (T, for truth, G* and S4Grz) T G G* S4Grz Z Z* X X* Making Z, Z*, X, X* into hypostases homogenizes nicely Plotinus presentation, and put a lot of pieces of the platonist puzzle into place. It makes other passage of Plotinus completely natural. Note that for getting the material aspect of the (degenerate, secondary) hypostases, we still need to make comp explicit, by restricting the arithmetical intepretation of the modal logics on the sigma- (UD-accessible) propositions (leading to the logic (below G1 and G1*) S4Grz1, Z1*, X1*, where the quantum quantization appears. The plain language rational is that both in Plotinus, (according to some passagethis is accepted by many scholars too) and in the universal machine mind, UDA show that psychology, theology, even biology, are obtained by intensional (modal) variant of the intellect and the ONE. By incompleteness, provability is of the type belief. We lost knowledge here, we don't have []p - p in G. This makes knowledge emulable, and meta-definable, in the language of the machine, by the Theaetetus method: [1]p = []p p. UDA justifies for matter: []p t (cf the coffee modification of the step 3: a physical certainty remains true in all consistent continuations ([]p), and such continuation exist (t). It is the Timaeus bastard calculus, referred to by Plotinus in his two-matters chapter (ennead II-6). Sensible matter is just a reapplication of the theaetetus, on intelligible matter. I hope this helps, ask anything. Bruno I'm not conversant in modal logic, so a lot of that went over my head. Maybe the problem is here. Modal logic, or even just modal notation are supposed to make things more easy. For example, I am used to explain the difference between agnosticism and beliefs, by using the modality []p, that you can in this context read as I believe p. If ~ represents the negation, the old definition of atheism was []~g (the belief that God does not exist), and agnosticism is ~[]g (and perhaps ~[]~g too). The language of modal logic, is the usual language of logic (p q, p v q, p - q, ~p, etc.) + the symbol [], usually read as it is necessary (in the alethic context), or it is obligatory (in the deontic context), or forever (in some temporal context), or It is known that (in some epistemic context), or it is asserted by a machine (in the computer science context), etc... p abbreviates ~[] ~(possible p = Non necessary that non p). All good here. Thus my request for plain language justifications. In spite of that language barrier I'd like to understand what I can about this model because it is the basis for your formal argument AUDA and much of what you've created seems to depend on it. In AUDA, the theory is elementary arithmetic (Robinson Arithmetic). I define in that theory the statement PA asserts F, with F an arithmetical formula. Then RA is used only as the universal system emulating the conversation that I have with PA. Everything is derived from the axioms of elementary arithmetic (but I could have used the combinators, the game of life, etc.). So I don't create anything. I interview a machine which proves proposition about itself, and by construction, I limit myself to consistent, arithmetically sound (lost of the time) machine. This determined all the hypostases. It is many years years of work and the hard work has been done by Gödel, Löb, Grzegorczyck, Boolos, Goldblatt, Solovay. I think it's debatable that you didn't create anything. I think reasonable people could disagree on whether the 8 hypostases you've put forward as the basis for your AUDA argument are created vs discovered. I'm coming from an open-minded position here - but trying to assert that you're not creating anything strikes me as a move to grant unearned legitimacy to it. I still am not clear on why you invent three new hypostases, granting the five from Plotinus (by creating G/G*, X/X*, and Z/Z* instead
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 10:27 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Jun 2015, at 20:50, Terren Suydam wrote: On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 2:20 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Jun 2015, at 15:58, Terren Suydam wrote: On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 1:59 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 04 Jun 2015, at 18:01, Terren Suydam wrote: OK, so given a certain interpretation, some scholars added two hypostases to the original three. It is very natural to do. The ennead VI.1 describes the three initial hypostases, and the subject of what is matter, notably the intelligible matter and the sensible matter, is the subject of the ennead II.4. It is a simplification of vocabulary, more than another interpretation. Then, it appears that you make a third interpretation by splitting the intellect, and the two matters. What justifies these splits? I am not sure I understand? Plotinus splits them too, as they are different subject matter. The intellect is the nous, the worlds of idea, and here the world of what the machine can prove (seen by her, and by God: G and G*). But matter is what you can predict with the FPI, and so it is a different notion, and likewise, in Plotinus, matter is given by a platonist rereading of Aristotle theory of indetermination. This is done in the ennead II-4. Why should we not split intellect and matter, which in appearance are very different, and the problem is more in consistently relating them. If we don't distinguish them, we cannot explain the problem of relating them. Sorry, my question was ambiguous. What I mean is that after adding the two hypostases for the two matters, you have five hypostases, the initial three plus the two for matter. Then, you arrive at 8 hypostases by splitting the intellect into two, and you do the same for each of the matter hyspostases. My question is what plain-language rationale justifies creating these three extra hypostases? And can we really say we're still talking about Plotinus's hypostases at this point? We can, as nobody could pretend to have the right intepretation of Plotinus. In fact that very question has been addressed to Plotinus's interpretation of Plato. Now, it would be necessary to quote large passage of Plotinus to explain why indeed, even without comp, the two matters (the intelligible et the sensible one) are arguably sort of hypostases, even in the mind of Plotionus, but as a platonist, he is forced to consider them degenerate and belonging to the realm where God loses control, making matter a quasi synonym of evil (!). The primary hypostase are the three one on the top right of this diagram (T, for truth, G* and S4Grz) T G G* S4Grz Z Z* X X* Making Z, Z*, X, X* into hypostases homogenizes nicely Plotinus presentation, and put a lot of pieces of the platonist puzzle into place. It makes other passage of Plotinus completely natural. Note that for getting the material aspect of the (degenerate, secondary) hypostases, we still need to make comp explicit, by restricting the arithmetical intepretation of the modal logics on the sigma- (UD-accessible) propositions (leading to the logic (below G1 and G1*) S4Grz1, Z1*, X1*, where the quantum quantization appears. The plain language rational is that both in Plotinus, (according to some passagethis is accepted by many scholars too) and in the universal machine mind, UDA show that psychology, theology, even biology, are obtained by intensional (modal) variant of the intellect and the ONE. By incompleteness, provability is of the type belief. We lost knowledge here, we don't have []p - p in G. This makes knowledge emulable, and meta-definable, in the language of the machine, by the Theaetetus method: [1]p = []p p. UDA justifies for matter: []p t (cf the coffee modification of the step 3: a physical certainty remains true in all consistent continuations ([]p), and such continuation exist (t). It is the Timaeus bastard calculus, referred to by Plotinus in his two-matters chapter (ennead II-6). Sensible matter is just a reapplication of the theaetetus, on intelligible matter. I hope this helps, ask anything. Bruno I'm not conversant in modal logic, so a lot of that went over my head. Thus my request for plain language justifications. In spite of that language barrier I'd like to understand what I can about this model because it is the basis for your formal argument AUDA and much of what you've created seems to depend on it. I still am not clear on why you invent three new hypostases, granting the five from Plotinus (by creating G/G*, X/X*, and Z/Z* instead of just G, X, and Z), except that you say [it] homogenizes nicely Plotinus presentation, and put a lot of pieces of the platonist
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 15 Jun 2015, at 15:32, Terren Suydam wrote: On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 10:27 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Jun 2015, at 20:50, Terren Suydam wrote: On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 2:20 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Jun 2015, at 15:58, Terren Suydam wrote: On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 1:59 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 04 Jun 2015, at 18:01, Terren Suydam wrote: OK, so given a certain interpretation, some scholars added two hypostases to the original three. It is very natural to do. The ennead VI.1 describes the three initial hypostases, and the subject of what is matter, notably the intelligible matter and the sensible matter, is the subject of the ennead II.4. It is a simplification of vocabulary, more than another interpretation. Then, it appears that you make a third interpretation by splitting the intellect, and the two matters. What justifies these splits? I am not sure I understand? Plotinus splits them too, as they are different subject matter. The intellect is the nous, the worlds of idea, and here the world of what the machine can prove (seen by her, and by God: G and G*). But matter is what you can predict with the FPI, and so it is a different notion, and likewise, in Plotinus, matter is given by a platonist rereading of Aristotle theory of indetermination. This is done in the ennead II-4. Why should we not split intellect and matter, which in appearance are very different, and the problem is more in consistently relating them. If we don't distinguish them, we cannot explain the problem of relating them. Sorry, my question was ambiguous. What I mean is that after adding the two hypostases for the two matters, you have five hypostases, the initial three plus the two for matter. Then, you arrive at 8 hypostases by splitting the intellect into two, and you do the same for each of the matter hyspostases. My question is what plain-language rationale justifies creating these three extra hypostases? And can we really say we're still talking about Plotinus's hypostases at this point? We can, as nobody could pretend to have the right intepretation of Plotinus. In fact that very question has been addressed to Plotinus's interpretation of Plato. Now, it would be necessary to quote large passage of Plotinus to explain why indeed, even without comp, the two matters (the intelligible et the sensible one) are arguably sort of hypostases, even in the mind of Plotionus, but as a platonist, he is forced to consider them degenerate and belonging to the realm where God loses control, making matter a quasi synonym of evil (!). The primary hypostase are the three one on the top right of this diagram (T, for truth, G* and S4Grz) T G G* S4Grz Z Z* X X* Making Z, Z*, X, X* into hypostases homogenizes nicely Plotinus presentation, and put a lot of pieces of the platonist puzzle into place. It makes other passage of Plotinus completely natural. Note that for getting the material aspect of the (degenerate, secondary) hypostases, we still need to make comp explicit, by restricting the arithmetical intepretation of the modal logics on the sigma- (UD-accessible) propositions (leading to the logic (below G1 and G1*) S4Grz1, Z1*, X1*, where the quantum quantization appears. The plain language rational is that both in Plotinus, (according to some passagethis is accepted by many scholars too) and in the universal machine mind, UDA show that psychology, theology, even biology, are obtained by intensional (modal) variant of the intellect and the ONE. By incompleteness, provability is of the type belief. We lost knowledge here, we don't have []p - p in G. This makes knowledge emulable, and meta-definable, in the language of the machine, by the Theaetetus method: [1]p = []p p. UDA justifies for matter: []p t (cf the coffee modification of the step 3: a physical certainty remains true in all consistent continuations ([]p), and such continuation exist (t). It is the Timaeus bastard calculus, referred to by Plotinus in his two- matters chapter (ennead II-6). Sensible matter is just a reapplication of the theaetetus, on intelligible matter. I hope this helps, ask anything. Bruno I'm not conversant in modal logic, so a lot of that went over my head. Maybe the problem is here. Modal logic, or even just modal notation are supposed to make things more easy. For example, I am used to explain the difference between agnosticism and beliefs, by using the modality []p, that you can in this context read as I believe p. If ~ represents the negation, the old definition of atheism was []~g (the belief that God does not exist), and agnosticism is ~[]g (and
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 08 Jun 2015, at 20:50, Terren Suydam wrote: On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 2:20 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Jun 2015, at 15:58, Terren Suydam wrote: On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 1:59 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 04 Jun 2015, at 18:01, Terren Suydam wrote: OK, so given a certain interpretation, some scholars added two hypostases to the original three. It is very natural to do. The ennead VI.1 describes the three initial hypostases, and the subject of what is matter, notably the intelligible matter and the sensible matter, is the subject of the ennead II.4. It is a simplification of vocabulary, more than another interpretation. Then, it appears that you make a third interpretation by splitting the intellect, and the two matters. What justifies these splits? I am not sure I understand? Plotinus splits them too, as they are different subject matter. The intellect is the nous, the worlds of idea, and here the world of what the machine can prove (seen by her, and by God: G and G*). But matter is what you can predict with the FPI, and so it is a different notion, and likewise, in Plotinus, matter is given by a platonist rereading of Aristotle theory of indetermination. This is done in the ennead II-4. Why should we not split intellect and matter, which in appearance are very different, and the problem is more in consistently relating them. If we don't distinguish them, we cannot explain the problem of relating them. Sorry, my question was ambiguous. What I mean is that after adding the two hypostases for the two matters, you have five hypostases, the initial three plus the two for matter. Then, you arrive at 8 hypostases by splitting the intellect into two, and you do the same for each of the matter hyspostases. My question is what plain-language rationale justifies creating these three extra hypostases? And can we really say we're still talking about Plotinus's hypostases at this point? We can, as nobody could pretend to have the right intepretation of Plotinus. In fact that very question has been addressed to Plotinus's interpretation of Plato. Now, it would be necessary to quote large passage of Plotinus to explain why indeed, even without comp, the two matters (the intelligible et the sensible one) are arguably sort of hypostases, even in the mind of Plotionus, but as a platonist, he is forced to consider them degenerate and belonging to the realm where God loses control, making matter a quasi synonym of evil (!). The primary hypostase are the three one on the top right of this diagram (T, for truth, G* and S4Grz) T G G* S4Grz Z Z* X X* Making Z, Z*, X, X* into hypostases homogenizes nicely Plotinus presentation, and put a lot of pieces of the platonist puzzle into place. It makes other passage of Plotinus completely natural. Note that for getting the material aspect of the (degenerate, secondary) hypostases, we still need to make comp explicit, by restricting the arithmetical intepretation of the modal logics on the sigma- (UD-accessible) propositions (leading to the logic (below G1 and G1*) S4Grz1, Z1*, X1*, where the quantum quantization appears. The plain language rational is that both in Plotinus, (according to some passagethis is accepted by many scholars too) and in the universal machine mind, UDA show that psychology, theology, even biology, are obtained by intensional (modal) variant of the intellect and the ONE. By incompleteness, provability is of the type belief. We lost knowledge here, we don't have []p - p in G. This makes knowledge emulable, and meta-definable, in the language of the machine, by the Theaetetus method: [1]p = []p p. UDA justifies for matter: []p t (cf the coffee modification of the step 3: a physical certainty remains true in all consistent continuations ([]p), and such continuation exist (t). It is the Timaeus bastard calculus, referred to by Plotinus in his two-matters chapter (ennead II-6). Sensible matter is just a reapplication of the theaetetus, on intelligible matter. I hope this helps, ask anything. Bruno Terren And can you make this justification in plain language in a way that doesn't appear to be a just so interpretation that makes it easier for AUDA to go through? God, or the One, is played by the notion of Arithmetical Truth. Machines and humans cannot know it, or explore it mechanically, and it is the roots of the web of machines dreams, but also of their semantics, in a large part. The Nous, is what machine can prove about themselves, and their remation with God, etc. The Soul, is where the machine proves true things, but not accidentally: as it is defined by the conjunction of p
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 08 Jun 2015, at 15:58, Terren Suydam wrote: On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 1:59 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 04 Jun 2015, at 18:01, Terren Suydam wrote: On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 9:31 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 03 Jun 2015, at 14:58, Terren Suydam wrote: It would be like saying that bats' echolocation is an illusion. Not a perfect analogy, because a bat's facility for echolocation is rooted in its physiology, not constructed, but the point is that with both the ego and echolocation, the experiencer's consciousness is provided with a particular character it would not otherwise have been able to experience. I usually distinguish 8 forms of ego (the eight hypostases). Each time it is the sigma_1 reality, but viewed from a different angle. The illusion (with the negative connotations) are more in the confusion between two hypostases, than each hypostase per se. I am not sure we disagree, except on some choice of words. Bruno I agree that we agree :-) I agree with this to :) I know you've posted it in the past but can you point me to a summary of the original Plotinus model with the 8 hypostases? My cursory googling reveals only 3 attributed to Plotinus (One, Intellect, Soul). That is what Plotinus called the primary hypostases. But there is no secondary hypostases, but then some sholars, and myself, agree that his two matters ennead describes actually two (degenerate, secondary) hypostases. So in the enneads ypu have the three primary hypostases, which in the machine theology is given by truth (One, p), provable (Intellect, []p) and Soul (that we get with the theatetus idea on the One and Intellect, []p p), and the two matters: intelligible matter ([]p t) and sensible matter ([]p t p). One = p Intellect = []p (splits in two: G and G*) Soul = []p p (does not split: S4Grz) Intelligible matter = []p t (splits in two Z and Z*) Sensible matter = []p t p.(splits in two: X and X*). To get the propositional physics, you have to restrict the p on the sigma_1 truth (the computable, the UD-accessible states). For the neoplatonist; matter is almost where God loses control, and can't intervene, it is close to the FPI idea, as you know that even God cannot predict to you, when in Helsinki, where you will feel to be after the split. For the platonist, matter is really where even the form can't handle the indetermination. It is of the type ~[]#, or #. It is also the place giving rooms for the contingencies, and what we can hope and eventually build or recover. Bruno OK, so given a certain interpretation, some scholars added two hypostases to the original three. It is very natural to do. The ennead VI.1 describes the three initial hypostases, and the subject of what is matter, notably the intelligible matter and the sensible matter, is the subject of the ennead II.4. It is a simplification of vocabulary, more than another interpretation. Then, it appears that you make a third interpretation by splitting the intellect, and the two matters. What justifies these splits? I am not sure I understand? Plotinus splits them too, as they are different subject matter. The intellect is the nous, the worlds of idea, and here the world of what the machine can prove (seen by her, and by God: G and G*). But matter is what you can predict with the FPI, and so it is a different notion, and likewise, in Plotinus, matter is given by a platonist rereading of Aristotle theory of indetermination. This is done in the ennead II-4. Why should we not split intellect and matter, which in appearance are very different, and the problem is more in consistently relating them. If we don't distinguish them, we cannot explain the problem of relating them. And can you make this justification in plain language in a way that doesn't appear to be a just so interpretation that makes it easier for AUDA to go through? God, or the One, is played by the notion of Arithmetical Truth. Machines and humans cannot know it, or explore it mechanically, and it is the roots of the web of machines dreams, but also of their semantics, in a large part. The Nous, is what machine can prove about themselves, and their remation with God, etc. The Soul, is where the machine proves true things, but not accidentally: as it is defined by the conjunction of p and the provability of p, for any (arithmetical) p. It is the idea of Theaetetus, that Plotinus might use implicitly (according to Bréhier), and which just works: it give a logic of an unameable, non-machine, knower. For matter; you want that the measure one for an event/proposition is certain, when it is true in all consistent continuation (this asks for []p, technically), but also, by incompleteness, this asks fro the diamond t (consistency, having a model, having at least one continuation, not belonging to a cul-de-sac world
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 2:20 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Jun 2015, at 15:58, Terren Suydam wrote: On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 1:59 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 04 Jun 2015, at 18:01, Terren Suydam wrote: OK, so given a certain interpretation, some scholars added two hypostases to the original three. It is very natural to do. The ennead VI.1 describes the three initial hypostases, and the subject of what is matter, notably the intelligible matter and the sensible matter, is the subject of the ennead II.4. It is a simplification of vocabulary, more than another interpretation. Then, it appears that you make a third interpretation by splitting the intellect, and the two matters. What justifies these splits? I am not sure I understand? Plotinus splits them too, as they are different subject matter. The intellect is the nous, the worlds of idea, and here the world of what the machine can prove (seen by her, and by God: G and G*). But matter is what you can predict with the FPI, and so it is a different notion, and likewise, in Plotinus, matter is given by a platonist rereading of Aristotle theory of indetermination. This is done in the ennead II-4. Why should we not split intellect and matter, which in appearance are very different, and the problem is more in consistently relating them. If we don't distinguish them, we cannot explain the problem of relating them. Sorry, my question was ambiguous. What I mean is that after adding the two hypostases for the two matters, you have five hypostases, the initial three plus the two for matter. Then, you arrive at 8 hypostases by splitting the intellect into two, and you do the same for each of the matter hyspostases. My question is what plain-language rationale justifies creating these three extra hypostases? And can we really say we're still talking about Plotinus's hypostases at this point? Terren And can you make this justification in plain language in a way that doesn't appear to be a just so interpretation that makes it easier for AUDA to go through? God, or the One, is played by the notion of Arithmetical Truth. Machines and humans cannot know it, or explore it mechanically, and it is the roots of the web of machines dreams, but also of their semantics, in a large part. The Nous, is what machine can prove about themselves, and their remation with God, etc. The Soul, is where the machine proves true things, but not accidentally: as it is defined by the conjunction of p and the provability of p, for any (arithmetical) p. It is the idea of Theaetetus, that Plotinus might use implicitly (according to Bréhier), and which just works: it give a logic of an unameable, non-machine, knower. For matter; you want that the measure one for an event/proposition is certain, when it is true in all consistent continuation (this asks for []p, technically), but also, by incompleteness, this asks fro the diamond t (consistency, having a model, having at least one continuation, not belonging to a cul-de-sac world (all those things are mathematically equivalent in our setting). So prediction 1 (like the coffee-cup in the WM-duplication + promise of coffee made at both reconstitution place) would be []coffee coffee. There is a coffee in all my extensions, and there is at least one extension (the act of faith made explicit). So the logic of physical yes is given by []p t, with p sigma_1 (to get the restriction on the universal dovetailing). That corresponds to Plotinus theory of the intelligible matter, and that gives a pair of quantum logic (by applying a result of Goldblatt). The same with the sensible matter, where we replay the original idea of Theatetus, on intelligible matter. Actually, we get also a quantum logic with the first application of the Theaetetus, which put some light perhaps why Plotinus ascribe the roots of matter already to the soul activity. I thought at first that arithmetic would refute that idea of Plotinus, but the math confirms this. I will have to go, and will be slowed down more and more, as I have the June exams now. Feel free to ask any question though. But you might need to be patient for the comment/answers. Bruno Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 1:59 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 04 Jun 2015, at 18:01, Terren Suydam wrote: On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 9:31 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 03 Jun 2015, at 14:58, Terren Suydam wrote: It would be like saying that bats' echolocation is an illusion. Not a perfect analogy, because a bat's facility for echolocation is rooted in its physiology, not constructed, but the point is that with both the ego and echolocation, the experiencer's consciousness is provided with a particular character it would not otherwise have been able to experience. I usually distinguish 8 forms of ego (the eight hypostases). Each time it is the sigma_1 reality, but viewed from a different angle. The illusion (with the negative connotations) are more in the confusion between two hypostases, than each hypostase per se. I am not sure we disagree, except on some choice of words. Bruno I agree that we agree :-) I agree with this to :) I know you've posted it in the past but can you point me to a summary of the original Plotinus model with the 8 hypostases? My cursory googling reveals only 3 attributed to Plotinus (One, Intellect, Soul). That is what Plotinus called the primary hypostases. But there is no secondary hypostases, but then some sholars, and myself, agree that his two matters ennead describes actually two (degenerate, secondary) hypostases. So in the enneads ypu have the three primary hypostases, which in the machine theology is given by truth (One, p), provable (Intellect, []p) and Soul (that we get with the theatetus idea on the One and Intellect, []p p), and the two matters: intelligible matter ([]p t) and sensible matter ([]p t p). One = p Intellect = []p (splits in two: G and G*) Soul = []p p (does not split: S4Grz) Intelligible matter = []p t (splits in two Z and Z*) Sensible matter = []p t p.(splits in two: X and X*). To get the propositional physics, you have to restrict the p on the sigma_1 truth (the computable, the UD-accessible states). For the neoplatonist; matter is almost where God loses control, and can't intervene, it is close to the FPI idea, as you know that even God cannot predict to you, when in Helsinki, where you will feel to be after the split. For the platonist, matter is really where even the form can't handle the indetermination. It is of the type ~[]#, or #. It is also the place giving rooms for the contingencies, and what we can hope and eventually build or recover. Bruno OK, so given a certain interpretation, some scholars added two hypostases to the original three. Then, it appears that you make a third interpretation by splitting the intellect, and the two matters. What justifies these splits? And can you make this justification in plain language in a way that doesn't appear to be a just so interpretation that makes it easier for AUDA to go through? Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 04 Jun 2015, at 18:01, Terren Suydam wrote: On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 9:31 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 03 Jun 2015, at 14:58, Terren Suydam wrote: It would be like saying that bats' echolocation is an illusion. Not a perfect analogy, because a bat's facility for echolocation is rooted in its physiology, not constructed, but the point is that with both the ego and echolocation, the experiencer's consciousness is provided with a particular character it would not otherwise have been able to experience. I usually distinguish 8 forms of ego (the eight hypostases). Each time it is the sigma_1 reality, but viewed from a different angle. The illusion (with the negative connotations) are more in the confusion between two hypostases, than each hypostase per se. I am not sure we disagree, except on some choice of words. Bruno I agree that we agree :-) I agree with this to :) I know you've posted it in the past but can you point me to a summary of the original Plotinus model with the 8 hypostases? My cursory googling reveals only 3 attributed to Plotinus (One, Intellect, Soul). That is what Plotinus called the primary hypostases. But there is no secondary hypostases, but then some sholars, and myself, agree that his two matters ennead describes actually two (degenerate, secondary) hypostases. So in the enneads ypu have the three primary hypostases, which in the machine theology is given by truth (One, p), provable (Intellect, []p) and Soul (that we get with the theatetus idea on the One and Intellect, []p p), and the two matters: intelligible matter ([]p t) and sensible matter ([]p t p). One = p Intellect = []p (splits in two: G and G*) Soul = []p p (does not split: S4Grz) Intelligible matter = []p t (splits in two Z and Z*) Sensible matter = []p t p.(splits in two: X and X*). To get the propositional physics, you have to restrict the p on the sigma_1 truth (the computable, the UD-accessible states). For the neoplatonist; matter is almost where God loses control, and can't intervene, it is close to the FPI idea, as you know that even God cannot predict to you, when in Helsinki, where you will feel to be after the split. For the platonist, matter is really where even the form can't handle the indetermination. It is of the type ~[]#, or #. It is also the place giving rooms for the contingencies, and what we can hope and eventually build or recover. Bruno Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 9:31 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 03 Jun 2015, at 14:58, Terren Suydam wrote: It would be like saying that bats' echolocation is an illusion. Not a perfect analogy, because a bat's facility for echolocation is rooted in its physiology, not constructed, but the point is that with both the ego and echolocation, the experiencer's consciousness is provided with a particular character it would not otherwise have been able to experience. I usually distinguish 8 forms of ego (the eight hypostases). Each time it is the sigma_1 reality, but viewed from a different angle. The illusion (with the negative connotations) are more in the confusion between two hypostases, than each hypostase per se. I am not sure we disagree, except on some choice of words. Bruno I agree that we agree :-) I know you've posted it in the past but can you point me to a summary of the original Plotinus model with the 8 hypostases? My cursory googling reveals only 3 attributed to Plotinus (One, Intellect, Soul). Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 10:34 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 28 May 2015, at 20:12, Terren Suydam wrote: On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:20 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 28 May 2015, at 05:16, Terren Suydam wrote: Language starts to get in the way here, but what you're suggesting is akin to someone who is blind-drunk - they will have no memory of their experience, but I think most would say a blind-drunk is conscious. But I think the driving scenario is different in that my conscious attention is elsewhere... there's competition for the resource of attention. I don't really think I'm conscious of the feeling of the floor pressing my feet until I pay attention to it. My thinking on this is that human consciousness involves a unified/global dynamic, and the unifying thread is the self-model or ego. This allows for top-down control of attention. When parts of the sensorium (and other aspects of the mind) are not involved or included in this global dynamic, there is a significant sense in which it does not participate in that human consciousness. This is not to say that there is no other consciousness - just that it is perhaps of a lower form in a hierarchy of consciousness. I would highlight that human consciousness is somewhat unique in that the ego - a cultural innovation dependent on the development of language - is not present in animals. Without that unifying thread of ego, I suggest that animal consciousness is not unlike our dream consciousness, which is an arena of awareness when the thread of our ego dissolves. A visual I have is that in the waking state, the ego is a bag that encapsulates all the parts that make up our psyche. In dreamtime, the drawstring on the bag loosens and the parts float out, and get activated according to whatever seemingly random processes that constitute dreams. In lucid dreams, the ego is restored (i.e. we say to ourselves, *I* *am* dreaming) - and we regain consciousness. We regain the ego (perhaps the ego illusion), but as you say yourself above, we are conscious in the non-lucid dream too. Lucidity might be a relative notion, as we can never be sure to be awaken. The false-awakening, very frequent for people trained in lucid dreaming, illustrate somehow this phenomena. Right. My point is not that we aren't conscious in non-lucid dream states, but that there is a qualitative difference in consciousness between those two states, and that lucid-dream consciousness is much closer to waking consciousness than to dream consciousness, almost by definition. It's this fact I'm trying to explain by proposing the role of the ego in human consciousness. OK. usually I make that difference between simple universality (conscious, but not necessarily self-conscious), and Löbianity (self-conscious). It is the difference between Robinson Arithmetic and Peano Arithmetic (= RA + the induction axioms). It is an open problem for me if RA is more or less conscious than PA. PA has much stronger cognitive abilities, but this can filter more consciousness and leads to more delusion, notably that ego. I don't insist too much on this, as I am not yet quite sure. It leads to the idea that brains filter consciousness, by hallucinating the person. I'm not so sure that filtering is the best analogy, by itself anyway. No doubt that there is filtering going on, but I think the forms constructed by the brain may also have a *transforming *or *focusing* effect as well. It may not the case, in other words, that consciousness is merely, destructively, filtered by our egos, but there is a sense too in which the consciousness we experience is made sharper by virtue of being shaped or transformed, particularly by this adaptation of reifying the self-model. I make this remark because most of the time I use consciousness in its rough general sense, in which animals, dreamers, ... are conscious. Of course... my points are about what kinds of aspects of being human might privilege our consciousness, in an attempt to understand consciousness better. OK. I understand. Then, I am not sure higher mammals have not yet already some ego, and self-consciousness, well before language. Language just put the ego in evidence, and that allows further reflexive loops, which can lead to further illusions and soul falling situation. Right, one could argue that even insects have some kind of self-model. There is no doubt a spectrum of sophistication of self-models, but I would distinguish all of them from the human ego. I guess I was too quick before when I equated the two. The key distinction between a self-model and an ego is the ability to refer to oneself as an object - this, and the ability to *identify* with that object, reifies the self model in a way that appears to me to be crucial to human consciousness. I don't think this is really possible without language. Probably. But that identification is
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 03 Jun 2015, at 14:58, Terren Suydam wrote: On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 10:34 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 28 May 2015, at 20:12, Terren Suydam wrote: On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:20 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 28 May 2015, at 05:16, Terren Suydam wrote: Language starts to get in the way here, but what you're suggesting is akin to someone who is blind-drunk - they will have no memory of their experience, but I think most would say a blind-drunk is conscious. But I think the driving scenario is different in that my conscious attention is elsewhere... there's competition for the resource of attention. I don't really think I'm conscious of the feeling of the floor pressing my feet until I pay attention to it. My thinking on this is that human consciousness involves a unified/ global dynamic, and the unifying thread is the self-model or ego. This allows for top-down control of attention. When parts of the sensorium (and other aspects of the mind) are not involved or included in this global dynamic, there is a significant sense in which it does not participate in that human consciousness. This is not to say that there is no other consciousness - just that it is perhaps of a lower form in a hierarchy of consciousness. I would highlight that human consciousness is somewhat unique in that the ego - a cultural innovation dependent on the development of language - is not present in animals. Without that unifying thread of ego, I suggest that animal consciousness is not unlike our dream consciousness, which is an arena of awareness when the thread of our ego dissolves. A visual I have is that in the waking state, the ego is a bag that encapsulates all the parts that make up our psyche. In dreamtime, the drawstring on the bag loosens and the parts float out, and get activated according to whatever seemingly random processes that constitute dreams. In lucid dreams, the ego is restored (i.e. we say to ourselves, I am dreaming) - and we regain consciousness. We regain the ego (perhaps the ego illusion), but as you say yourself above, we are conscious in the non-lucid dream too. Lucidity might be a relative notion, as we can never be sure to be awaken. The false-awakening, very frequent for people trained in lucid dreaming, illustrate somehow this phenomena. Right. My point is not that we aren't conscious in non-lucid dream states, but that there is a qualitative difference in consciousness between those two states, and that lucid-dream consciousness is much closer to waking consciousness than to dream consciousness, almost by definition. It's this fact I'm trying to explain by proposing the role of the ego in human consciousness. OK. usually I make that difference between simple universality (conscious, but not necessarily self-conscious), and Löbianity (self- conscious). It is the difference between Robinson Arithmetic and Peano Arithmetic (= RA + the induction axioms). It is an open problem for me if RA is more or less conscious than PA. PA has much stronger cognitive abilities, but this can filter more consciousness and leads to more delusion, notably that ego. I don't insist too much on this, as I am not yet quite sure. It leads to the idea that brains filter consciousness, by hallucinating the person. I'm not so sure that filtering is the best analogy, by itself anyway. No doubt that there is filtering going on, but I think the forms constructed by the brain may also have a transforming or focusing effect as well. It may not the case, in other words, that consciousness is merely, destructively, filtered by our egos, but there is a sense too in which the consciousness we experience is made sharper by virtue of being shaped or transformed, particularly by this adaptation of reifying the self-model. I am OK with this. Brain does not just filter, they do a lot of information processing which adds a lot to the filtering, including the angles or points of view. I make this remark because most of the time I use consciousness in its rough general sense, in which animals, dreamers, ... are conscious. Of course... my points are about what kinds of aspects of being human might privilege our consciousness, in an attempt to understand consciousness better. OK. I understand. Then, I am not sure higher mammals have not yet already some ego, and self-consciousness, well before language. Language just put the ego in evidence, and that allows further reflexive loops, which can lead to further illusions and soul falling situation. Right, one could argue that even insects have some kind of self- model. There is no doubt a spectrum of sophistication of self- models, but I would distinguish all of them from the human ego. I guess I was too quick before when I equated the two. The key distinction between a self-model and an ego is the ability
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 28 May 2015, at 20:12, Terren Suydam wrote: On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:20 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 28 May 2015, at 05:16, Terren Suydam wrote: Language starts to get in the way here, but what you're suggesting is akin to someone who is blind-drunk - they will have no memory of their experience, but I think most would say a blind-drunk is conscious. But I think the driving scenario is different in that my conscious attention is elsewhere... there's competition for the resource of attention. I don't really think I'm conscious of the feeling of the floor pressing my feet until I pay attention to it. My thinking on this is that human consciousness involves a unified/ global dynamic, and the unifying thread is the self-model or ego. This allows for top-down control of attention. When parts of the sensorium (and other aspects of the mind) are not involved or included in this global dynamic, there is a significant sense in which it does not participate in that human consciousness. This is not to say that there is no other consciousness - just that it is perhaps of a lower form in a hierarchy of consciousness. I would highlight that human consciousness is somewhat unique in that the ego - a cultural innovation dependent on the development of language - is not present in animals. Without that unifying thread of ego, I suggest that animal consciousness is not unlike our dream consciousness, which is an arena of awareness when the thread of our ego dissolves. A visual I have is that in the waking state, the ego is a bag that encapsulates all the parts that make up our psyche. In dreamtime, the drawstring on the bag loosens and the parts float out, and get activated according to whatever seemingly random processes that constitute dreams. In lucid dreams, the ego is restored (i.e. we say to ourselves, I am dreaming) - and we regain consciousness. We regain the ego (perhaps the ego illusion), but as you say yourself above, we are conscious in the non-lucid dream too. Lucidity might be a relative notion, as we can never be sure to be awaken. The false-awakening, very frequent for people trained in lucid dreaming, illustrate somehow this phenomena. Right. My point is not that we aren't conscious in non-lucid dream states, but that there is a qualitative difference in consciousness between those two states, and that lucid-dream consciousness is much closer to waking consciousness than to dream consciousness, almost by definition. It's this fact I'm trying to explain by proposing the role of the ego in human consciousness. OK. usually I make that difference between simple universality (conscious, but not necessarily self-conscious), and Löbianity (self- conscious). It is the difference between Robinson Arithmetic and Peano Arithmetic (= RA + the induction axioms). It is an open problem for me if RA is more or less conscious than PA. PA has much stronger cognitive abilities, but this can filter more consciousness and leads to more delusion, notably that ego. I don't insist too much on this, as I am not yet quite sure. It leads to the idea that brains filter consciousness, by hallucinating the person. I make this remark because most of the time I use consciousness in its rough general sense, in which animals, dreamers, ... are conscious. Of course... my points are about what kinds of aspects of being human might privilege our consciousness, in an attempt to understand consciousness better. OK. I understand. Then, I am not sure higher mammals have not yet already some ego, and self-consciousness, well before language. Language just put the ego in evidence, and that allows further reflexive loops, which can lead to further illusions and soul falling situation. Right, one could argue that even insects have some kind of self- model. There is no doubt a spectrum of sophistication of self- models, but I would distinguish all of them from the human ego. I guess I was too quick before when I equated the two. The key distinction between a self-model and an ego is the ability to refer to oneself as an object - this, and the ability to identify with that object, reifies the self model in a way that appears to me to be crucial to human consciousness. I don't think this is really possible without language. Probably. But that identification is already a sort of illusion. It is very useful in practice, to survive, when being alive. But the truth, including possible afterlives is more complex. Nor am I sure that our ego dissolves in non-lucid dream, although it seems to disappear in the non-REM dreams, and other sleep states. For me, the key insight I had in trying to describe the difference between lucid and non-lucid dreams is the ability to say I am dreaming, which is an ego statement. What other explanations could account for the difference
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 29 May 2015 at 00:09, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 10:55 PM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 01:23:20PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: A stroke results in objective and subjective changes, such as the inability to move a limb, understand language or see. These are gross examples of fading qualia. What you are proposing, as I understand it, is that if the damaged brain is replaced neuron by neuron, function and qualia would be restored, but at a certain point when you installed the artificial neuron, the patient would suddenly lose all consciousness, although to an outside observer he would seem to be continuing to improve. Rather than focus on the term fading qualia, to which we seem to have derived a different understanding from the same paper, what you're saying is that a stroke victim can suffer diminished qualia, ie qualia no longer existing where once there was some. Eg no longer being able to smell a banana, or gone colour blind, or similar. That same person may or may not be aware of the fact that they've lost their qualia. The we can consider a nonfunctionalist response to the experiment where neurons are replaced by functionally equivalent artificial replacements. A nonfunctionalist ought to treat this like the stroke case - at some point qualia will disappear. If the person notices the qualia disappearing, the functionalist would simply say that the replacement parts are not functionally equivalent, or that the subsitution level was wrong. This is not an interesting case. A partial zombie, by defintion will always report that the full qualia were present, just as a full zombie would. If, however, the person fails to notice the disappearing qualia, a functionalist would say that the full set of qualia was being experienced, whereas a nonfunctionalist would say that the person might be experiencing a reduced set of qualia, even though e reports all er faculties being sound. Is this absurd? - no more absurd than the notion of a full zombie, I would say. But quales, as continua, which I took to be Chalmers' absurdity, simply are not implied. Quales exist discretely. To be clear, Chalmers didn't say fading qualia were implied, he said if consciousness is not present in an artificial brain that it follows that during a neuron-by-neuron replacement a biological brain would eventually become an artificial brain, which is presumed to have no consciousness. He concludes that one of two things must have happened: 1. Suddenly disappearing qualia 2. Fading qualia He acknowledges his paper is not a proof of functionalism, but instead just shows that the non-functionalist has to swallow at least one of these outcomes, furthering the argument for functionalism. A good summary. I think the argument is even stronger than Chalmers claims. Fading qualia would mean consciousness did not exist (which apparently not everyone thinks is absurd), and suddenly disappearing qualia, while logically possible, is ad hoc, contrary to any naturalistic explanation of how the brain functions (the artificial neurons would initially have to support consciousness, then suddenly destroy the consciousness that would have been there in their absence) and lead to the conclusion that computationalism is partly true. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 4:20 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 28 May 2015, at 05:16, Terren Suydam wrote: Language starts to get in the way here, but what you're suggesting is akin to someone who is blind-drunk - they will have no memory of their experience, but I think most would say a blind-drunk is conscious. But I think the driving scenario is different in that my conscious attention is elsewhere... there's competition for the resource of attention. I don't really think I'm conscious of the feeling of the floor pressing my feet until I pay attention to it. My thinking on this is that human consciousness involves a unified/global dynamic, and the unifying thread is the self-model or ego. This allows for top-down control of attention. When parts of the sensorium (and other aspects of the mind) are not involved or included in this global dynamic, there is a significant sense in which it does not participate in that human consciousness. This is not to say that there is no other consciousness - just that it is perhaps of a lower form in a hierarchy of consciousness. I would highlight that human consciousness is somewhat unique in that the ego - a cultural innovation dependent on the development of language - is not present in animals. Without that unifying thread of ego, I suggest that animal consciousness is not unlike our dream consciousness, which is an arena of awareness when the thread of our ego dissolves. A visual I have is that in the waking state, the ego is a bag that encapsulates all the parts that make up our psyche. In dreamtime, the drawstring on the bag loosens and the parts float out, and get activated according to whatever seemingly random processes that constitute dreams. In lucid dreams, the ego is restored (i.e. we say to ourselves, *I* *am* dreaming) - and we regain consciousness. We regain the ego (perhaps the ego illusion), but as you say yourself above, we are conscious in the non-lucid dream too. Lucidity might be a relative notion, as we can never be sure to be awaken. The false-awakening, very frequent for people trained in lucid dreaming, illustrate somehow this phenomena. Right. My point is not that we aren't conscious in non-lucid dream states, but that there is a qualitative difference in consciousness between those two states, and that lucid-dream consciousness is much closer to waking consciousness than to dream consciousness, almost by definition. It's this fact I'm trying to explain by proposing the role of the ego in human consciousness. I make this remark because most of the time I use consciousness in its rough general sense, in which animals, dreamers, ... are conscious. Of course... my points are about what kinds of aspects of being human might privilege our consciousness, in an attempt to understand consciousness better. Then, I am not sure higher mammals have not yet already some ego, and self-consciousness, well before language. Language just put the ego in evidence, and that allows further reflexive loops, which can lead to further illusions and soul falling situation. Right, one could argue that even insects have some kind of self-model. There is no doubt a spectrum of sophistication of self-models, but I would distinguish all of them from the human ego. I guess I was too quick before when I equated the two. The key distinction between a self-model and an ego is the ability to refer to oneself as an object - this, and the ability to *identify* with that object, reifies the self model in a way that appears to me to be crucial to human consciousness. I don't think this is really possible without language. Nor am I sure that our ego dissolves in non-lucid dream, although it seems to disappear in the non-REM dreams, and other sleep states. For me, the key insight I had in trying to describe the difference between lucid and non-lucid dreams is the ability to say I am dreaming, which is an ego statement. What other explanations could account for the difference between lucid and non-lucid dreams? Terren Bruno Terren On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 10:10 PM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: Are we any less conscious of as it happens, or perhaps our brains are simply not forming as many memories of usual/uneventful tasks. Jason On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 9:06 PM, Terren Suydam terren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: In the driving scenario it is clear that computation is involved, because all sorts of contingent things can be going on (e.g. dynamics of driving among other cars), yet this occurs without crossing the threshold of consciousness. Relying on some kind of caching mechanism under such circumstances would quickly fail one way or another. Terren On May 27, 2015 7:38 PM, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday, May 28, 2015 at 6:06:22 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/26/2015 10:31 PM, Pierz wrote: Where I see lookup tables fail is that they seem to operate
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 29 May 2015 at 02:09, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: To be clear, Chalmers didn't say fading qualia were implied, he said if consciousness is not present in an artificial brain that it follows that during a neuron-by-neuron replacement a biological brain would eventually become an artificial brain, which is presumed to have no consciousness. He concludes that one of two things must have happened: 1. Suddenly disappearing qualia 2. Fading qualia He acknowledges his paper is not a proof of functionalism, but instead just shows that the non-functionalist has to swallow at least one of these outcomes, furthering the argument for functionalism. This is assuming such a replacement is possible (in principle). Is it possible that the brain can't be broken down in that sort of reductionist way, that you can't replace neurons one at a time even in principle (seems unlikely, but no one knows for sure. Though I guess quantum entanglement can't be implicated in this case, if Tegmark is correct abuot decoherence times in the brain). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 29 May 2015 at 10:52, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: A good summary. I think the argument is even stronger than Chalmers claims. Fading qualia would mean consciousness did not exist (which apparently not everyone thinks is absurd), Indeed not. Brent implied it in a recent post (but I can't remember exactly which one it was now). Dennett is also of this opinion. It can probably be summed up as consciousness is an illusion experienced by an illusory person. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 28 May 2015 at 13:55, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 01:23:20PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: A stroke results in objective and subjective changes, such as the inability to move a limb, understand language or see. These are gross examples of fading qualia. What you are proposing, as I understand it, is that if the damaged brain is replaced neuron by neuron, function and qualia would be restored, but at a certain point when you installed the artificial neuron, the patient would suddenly lose all consciousness, although to an outside observer he would seem to be continuing to improve. Rather than focus on the term fading qualia, to which we seem to have derived a different understanding from the same paper, what you're saying is that a stroke victim can suffer diminished qualia, ie qualia no longer existing where once there was some. Eg no longer being able to smell a banana, or gone colour blind, or similar. That same person may or may not be aware of the fact that they've lost their qualia. We might not notice a small or gradual change in our qualia, such as fading of the senses as we age. Also, with some neurological conditions patients develop anosognosia, which is a type of delusional disorder where they don't recognise they have an illness in spite of the evidence. But these are not the cases to consider. The cases to consider are the ones where the subject has an obvious deficit, can recognise it, describe it, is upset by it. The we can consider a nonfunctionalist response to the experiment where neurons are replaced by functionally equivalent artificial replacements. A nonfunctionalist ought to treat this like the stroke case - at some point qualia will disappear. If the person notices the qualia disappearing, the functionalist would simply say that the replacement parts are not functionally equivalent, or that the subsitution level was wrong. This is not an interesting case. The functionalist and non-functionalist alike will agree that if the person behaves differently the replacement parts are not functionally equivalent, by definition. Functionally equivalent here refers only to observable function - not to subjectivity, which is the point at issue where functionalist and non-functionalist will disagree. Note also that the functionalist and non-functionalist may agree that it is impossible to make a functionally equivalent part using a particular approach; for example, if the brain utilises non-computable functions it will be impossible to make a computerised artificial neuron. A partial zombie, by defintion will always report that the full qualia were present, just as a full zombie would. If, however, the person fails to notice the disappearing qualia, a functionalist would say that the full set of qualia was being experienced, whereas a nonfunctionalist would say that the person might be experiencing a reduced set of qualia, even though e reports all er faculties being sound. Is this absurd? - no more absurd than the notion of a full zombie, I would say. If, in general rather than in special cases, it is possible to lack qualia but not notice, that means there is no objective or subjective difference between having qualia and not having them, which is equivalent to saying qualia, and consciousness, do not exist. But quales, as continua, which I took to be Chalmers' absurdity, simply are not implied. Quales exist discretely. Qualia can disappear continuously or in a piecemeal fashion. For example, you could have uniformly diminished sensation in a part of the body or patches of anaesthesia bordering areas of normal sensation. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 28 May 2015, at 05:16, Terren Suydam wrote: Language starts to get in the way here, but what you're suggesting is akin to someone who is blind-drunk - they will have no memory of their experience, but I think most would say a blind-drunk is conscious. But I think the driving scenario is different in that my conscious attention is elsewhere... there's competition for the resource of attention. I don't really think I'm conscious of the feeling of the floor pressing my feet until I pay attention to it. My thinking on this is that human consciousness involves a unified/ global dynamic, and the unifying thread is the self-model or ego. This allows for top-down control of attention. When parts of the sensorium (and other aspects of the mind) are not involved or included in this global dynamic, there is a significant sense in which it does not participate in that human consciousness. This is not to say that there is no other consciousness - just that it is perhaps of a lower form in a hierarchy of consciousness. I would highlight that human consciousness is somewhat unique in that the ego - a cultural innovation dependent on the development of language - is not present in animals. Without that unifying thread of ego, I suggest that animal consciousness is not unlike our dream consciousness, which is an arena of awareness when the thread of our ego dissolves. A visual I have is that in the waking state, the ego is a bag that encapsulates all the parts that make up our psyche. In dreamtime, the drawstring on the bag loosens and the parts float out, and get activated according to whatever seemingly random processes that constitute dreams. In lucid dreams, the ego is restored (i.e. we say to ourselves, I am dreaming) - and we regain consciousness. We regain the ego (perhaps the ego illusion), but as you say yourself above, we are conscious in the non-lucid dream too. Lucidity might be a relative notion, as we can never be sure to be awaken. The false- awakening, very frequent for people trained in lucid dreaming, illustrate somehow this phenomena. I make this remark because most of the time I use consciousness in its rough general sense, in which animals, dreamers, ... are conscious. Then, I am not sure higher mammals have not yet already some ego, and self-consciousness, well before language. Language just put the ego in evidence, and that allows further reflexive loops, which can lead to further illusions and soul falling situation. Nor am I sure that our ego dissolves in non-lucid dream, although it seems to disappear in the non-REM dreams, and other sleep states. Bruno Terren On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 10:10 PM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: Are we any less conscious of as it happens, or perhaps our brains are simply not forming as many memories of usual/uneventful tasks. Jason On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 9:06 PM, Terren Suydam terren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: In the driving scenario it is clear that computation is involved, because all sorts of contingent things can be going on (e.g. dynamics of driving among other cars), yet this occurs without crossing the threshold of consciousness. Relying on some kind of caching mechanism under such circumstances would quickly fail one way or another. Terren On May 27, 2015 7:38 PM, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday, May 28, 2015 at 6:06:22 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/26/2015 10:31 PM, Pierz wrote: Where I see lookup tables fail is that they seem to operate above the probable necessary substation level. (Despite having the same inputs/outputs at the higher levels). But your memoization example still makes a good point - namely that some computations can be bypassed in favour of recordings, yet presumably this doesn't lead to fading qualia. We don't need anything as silly as a gigantic lookup table of all possible responses. We only need to acknowledge that we can store the results of recordings of computations we've already completed, and that this should not result in any strange degradation of consciousness. Isn't that what allows me to drive home from work without being conscious of it? People keep making this point, which is one that I myself made in the past - and I believe you argued with me at the time, saying that it's not clear that the mechanism for automating brain functions is anything like the same as caching the results of a computation. I think that objection is actually fair enough. With automated actions it's not clear that the computations aren't being carried out any more, just that they no longer require conscious attention because the neuronal pathways for those computations have become sufficiently reinforced that they no longer require concentration. I think this model (automated computation rather than cached computation) fits our experience of this phenomenon. Sometimes I
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 10:55 PM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 01:23:20PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: A stroke results in objective and subjective changes, such as the inability to move a limb, understand language or see. These are gross examples of fading qualia. What you are proposing, as I understand it, is that if the damaged brain is replaced neuron by neuron, function and qualia would be restored, but at a certain point when you installed the artificial neuron, the patient would suddenly lose all consciousness, although to an outside observer he would seem to be continuing to improve. Rather than focus on the term fading qualia, to which we seem to have derived a different understanding from the same paper, what you're saying is that a stroke victim can suffer diminished qualia, ie qualia no longer existing where once there was some. Eg no longer being able to smell a banana, or gone colour blind, or similar. That same person may or may not be aware of the fact that they've lost their qualia. The we can consider a nonfunctionalist response to the experiment where neurons are replaced by functionally equivalent artificial replacements. A nonfunctionalist ought to treat this like the stroke case - at some point qualia will disappear. If the person notices the qualia disappearing, the functionalist would simply say that the replacement parts are not functionally equivalent, or that the subsitution level was wrong. This is not an interesting case. A partial zombie, by defintion will always report that the full qualia were present, just as a full zombie would. If, however, the person fails to notice the disappearing qualia, a functionalist would say that the full set of qualia was being experienced, whereas a nonfunctionalist would say that the person might be experiencing a reduced set of qualia, even though e reports all er faculties being sound. Is this absurd? - no more absurd than the notion of a full zombie, I would say. But quales, as continua, which I took to be Chalmers' absurdity, simply are not implied. Quales exist discretely. To be clear, Chalmers didn't say fading qualia were implied, he said if consciousness is not present in an artificial brain that it follows that during a neuron-by-neuron replacement a biological brain would eventually become an artificial brain, which is presumed to have no consciousness. He concludes that one of two things must have happened: 1. Suddenly disappearing qualia 2. Fading qualia He acknowledges his paper is not a proof of functionalism, but instead just shows that the non-functionalist has to swallow at least one of these outcomes, furthering the argument for functionalism. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 27 May 2015, at 03:27, Jason Resch wrote: On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 1:46 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 25 May 2015, at 02:06, Jason Resch wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 3:52 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 23 May 2015, at 17:07, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: The consciousness (if there is one) is the consciousness of the person, incarnated in the program. It is not the consciousness of the low level processor, no more than the physicality which supports the ant and the table. Again, with comp there is never any problem with all of this. The consciousness is an immaterial attribute of an immaterial program/ machine's soul, which is defined exclusively by a class of true number relations. While I can see certain very complex number relations leading to a human-level consciousness, I don't find that kind of complexity present in the relations defining a lookup table. Especially because any meaning or interpretation of the output depends on the person querying it, there's no self-contained understanding of the program's own output. Why? When you get the output, you need to re-entry it, and ask the look-up table again. It will works only because we suppose armies of daemon having already done the computations. Determining the answers the first time might require computations that lead to consciousness, but later invocations of the stored memory in the lookup table doesn't lead to those original computations being performed again. It is just a memory access. No, because you agree that the system remains counterfactually correct, so it is not just a memory access, there is a conditional which is satisfied by the process, and indeed, if the loop-up table is miniaturized and put in the brain, with an army of super-fast little daemons managing it in real time, the person will pass the infinite Turing test, so, why not bet (correctly here by construction) that it manifests the correct platonic person? Again, it just mean that only person are conscious, not processes, nor computations, programs, machines, or anything 3p describable. That is what is given with the p hypostases. They describe the logic of something not nameable by the machine itself, but which directly concerns the machine selves, and its consistent extensions. The person is defined by its truth and beliefs and relation in between truth and beliefs, from the different person points of view (defined in the Theaetetus' manner ([]p, []p p, etc.). Bruno But are not computations something different beyond mere inputs and outputs of functions? Yes. It is like Putnam's objection to functionalism: there are multiple ways of realizing each function, and they are not necessarily equivalent. I think once one admits that the inputs and outputs are not all that matters, this leads to abandoning functionalism for computationalism, which also necessitates the concept of a substitution level. OK. But Putnam's original functionalism was just fuzzy on this. It assumes some high level of substitution, around the neurons. It is not the high level function of the person seen from outside (that would be behaviorism). Where I see lookup tables fail is that they seem to operate above the probable necessary substation level. (Despite having the same inputs/outputs at the higher levels). I thought so. But then we agree. It is just that if they have the same input-output, for a long period of time, it means that the subst level is plausibly correct. We might have to define formally look-up table. My attempt to do so led me to redefine the notion of Turing machine. Bruno Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 26 May 2015, at 22:11, meekerdb wrote: On 5/26/2015 1:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 25 May 2015, at 22:49, meekerdb wrote: On 5/25/2015 5:16 AM, Pierz wrote: On Monday, May 25, 2015 at 4:58:53 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/24/2015 4:09 AM, Pierz wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 4:47:12 PM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 12:40 AM, Pierz pie...@gmail.com wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 1:07:15 AM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: I SNIP Bruno's theory is that consciousness and the physical world are all just relations between numbers and things like brains, computers, recordings, and lookup tables and just ways for manifesting consciousness and 2 and II are ways of manifesting the number two. Except that consciousness is not an illusion. The physical universe is only an appearance from inside. It is phenomenological. Comp explains why our embedding in arithmetic makes us believe intuitively the contrary. I only had to look back one post to find: There is no universe, if we are machine. It is only a stable and persistent illusion (assuming mechanism)Bruno Marchal Stable and persistent illusion is what is generally referred to as the world. I prefer to call that a dream. But It is OK. The existence of other people is only a stable and persistent illusion - yet you accept them as real. Yes, but non fundamentally real. I don't have to assume them at the start. The physical universe(s) is real, too. But again,n I argue that comp makes it non primitive, but emerging from the dreams/computations- seen-from-inside. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 27 May 2015, at 09:00, Jason Resch wrote: On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 12:31 AM, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: On Wednesday, May 27, 2015 at 11:27:26 AM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 1:46 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 25 May 2015, at 02:06, Jason Resch wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 3:52 AM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 23 May 2015, at 17:07, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space– time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual- correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? A lookup table might have some primitive conscious, but I think any consciousness it has would be more or less the same regardless of the number of entries within that lookup table. With more entries, its information content grows, but it's capacity to process, interpret, or understand that information remains constant. You can emulate the brain of Einstein with a (ridiculously large) look-up table, assuming you are ridiculously patient---or we slow down your own brain so that you are as slow as einstein. Is that incarnation a zombie? Again, with comp, all incarnations are zombie, because bodies do not think. It is the abstract person which thinks, and in this case Einstein will still be defined by the simplest normal computations, which here, and only here, have taken the form of that unplausible giant Einstein look-up table emulation at the right level. That last bit is the part I have difficulty with. How can a a single call to a lookup table ever be at the right level. Actually, the Turing machine formalism is a type of look-up table: if you are scanning input i (big numbers describing all your current sensitive entries, while you are in state
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 27 May 2015, at 07:31, Pierz wrote: On Wednesday, May 27, 2015 at 11:27:26 AM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 1:46 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 25 May 2015, at 02:06, Jason Resch wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 3:52 AM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 23 May 2015, at 17:07, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space– time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual- correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? A lookup table might have some primitive conscious, but I think any consciousness it has would be more or less the same regardless of the number of entries within that lookup table. With more entries, its information content grows, but it's capacity to process, interpret, or understand that information remains constant. You can emulate the brain of Einstein with a (ridiculously large) look-up table, assuming you are ridiculously patient---or we slow down your own brain so that you are as slow as einstein. Is that incarnation a zombie? Again, with comp, all incarnations are zombie, because bodies do not think. It is the abstract person which thinks, and in this case Einstein will still be defined by the simplest normal computations, which here, and only here, have taken the form of that unplausible giant Einstein look-up table emulation at the right level. That last bit is the part I have difficulty with. How can a a single call to a lookup table ever be at the right level. Actually, the Turing machine formalism is a type of look-up table: if you are scanning input i (big numbers describing all your current sensitive entries, while you are in state q_169757243685173427379910054234647572376400064994542424646334345787910190034 676754100687. (big number describing
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Wednesday, May 27, 2015, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 08:17:39PM -0500, Jason Resch wrote: Not at all. My suggestion is that there wouldn't be any partial zombies, just normally functioning consciousness, and full zombies, with respect to Chalmers fading qualia experiment, due to network effects. Doesn't this lead to the problem of suddenly disappearing qualia, which Chalmers describes? What do you think about Chalmers's objections to suddenly disappearing qualia? Obviously, with functionalism (and computationalism), consciousness is retained throughout, and no zombies appear. Chalmers was trying to show an absurdity with non-functionalism, and I don't think it works, except insofar as full zombies are absurd. Why do you think it fails? Because you can accept the possibility of suddenly disappearing qualia? Jason It fails, because it relies on the absurdity of partial zombies, which I don't think non-functionalism implies. We can remove functionalism from the equation by just considering what happens as we remove neurons from a brain. I would seriously expect that the qualia will switch off one-by-one as the necessary network connections are broken, rather than fading into nothing as Chalmers supposes. But that is not what happens when brain tissue is destroyed, as in a stroke. Qualia do actually fade, and entire sensory and cognitive modalities fade, leaving others intact. What you are proposing is that with the replacement neurons the qualia do not fade - so to this extent the replacement neurons support consciousness; then, at a certain point, all the qualia suddenly disappear, whereas if the neurons had simply been replaced rather than destroyed the qualia would have faded and overall consciousness maintained. Therefore in the fading qualia setup, a non-functionalist ought to think the same way - qualia switching off one-by-one until complete zombiehood is achieved, well pior to complete replacement of the brain by it's functional equivalents. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au javascript:; University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com javascript:;. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com javascript:;. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Wednesday, May 27, 2015, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Wednesday, May 27, 2015, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','li...@hpcoders.com.au'); wrote: On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 08:17:39PM -0500, Jason Resch wrote: Not at all. My suggestion is that there wouldn't be any partial zombies, just normally functioning consciousness, and full zombies, with respect to Chalmers fading qualia experiment, due to network effects. Doesn't this lead to the problem of suddenly disappearing qualia, which Chalmers describes? What do you think about Chalmers's objections to suddenly disappearing qualia? Obviously, with functionalism (and computationalism), consciousness is retained throughout, and no zombies appear. Chalmers was trying to show an absurdity with non-functionalism, and I don't think it works, except insofar as full zombies are absurd. Why do you think it fails? Because you can accept the possibility of suddenly disappearing qualia? Jason It fails, because it relies on the absurdity of partial zombies, which I don't think non-functionalism implies. We can remove functionalism from the equation by just considering what happens as we remove neurons from a brain. I would seriously expect that the qualia will switch off one-by-one as the necessary network connections are broken, rather than fading into nothing as Chalmers supposes. But that is not what happens when brain tissue is destroyed, as in a stroke. Qualia do actually fade, and entire sensory and cognitive modalities fade, leaving others intact. What you are proposing is that with the replacement neurons the qualia do not fade - so to this extent the replacement neurons support consciousness; then, at a certain point, all the qualia suddenly disappear, whereas if the neurons had simply been replaced rather than destroyed the qualia would have faded and overall consciousness maintained. I meant to say here if the neurons had simply been destroyed rather than replaced the qualia would have faded... Therefore in the fading qualia setup, a non-functionalist ought to think the same way - qualia switching off one-by-one until complete zombiehood is achieved, well pior to complete replacement of the brain by it's functional equivalents. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 5/26/2015 10:31 PM, Pierz wrote: Where I see lookup tables fail is that they seem to operate above the probable necessary substation level. (Despite having the same inputs/outputs at the higher levels). But your memoization example still makes a good point - namely that some computations can be bypassed in favour of recordings, yet presumably this doesn't lead to fading qualia. We don't need anything as silly as a gigantic lookup table of all possible responses. We only need to acknowledge that we can store the results of recordings of computations we've already completed, and that this should not result in any strange degradation of consciousness. Isn't that what allows me to drive home from work without being conscious of it? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 12:31 AM, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: On Wednesday, May 27, 2015 at 11:27:26 AM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 1:46 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 25 May 2015, at 02:06, Jason Resch wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 3:52 AM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 23 May 2015, at 17:07, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? A lookup table might have some primitive conscious, but I think any consciousness it has would be more or less the same regardless of the number of entries within that lookup table. With more entries, its information content grows, but it's capacity to process, interpret, or understand that information remains constant. You can emulate the brain of Einstein with a (ridiculously large) look-up table, assuming you are ridiculously patient---or we slow down your own brain so that you are as slow as einstein. Is that incarnation a zombie? Again, with comp, all incarnations are zombie, because bodies do not think. It is the abstract person which thinks, and in this case Einstein will still be defined by the simplest normal computations, which here, and only here, have taken the form of that unplausible giant Einstein look-up table emulation at the right level. That last bit is the part I have difficulty with. How can a a single call to a lookup table ever be at the right level. Actually, the Turing machine formalism is a type of look-up table: if you are scanning input i (big numbers describing all your current sensitive entries, while you are in state q_169757243685173427379910054234647572376400064994542424646334345787910190034676754100687. (big number
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
Language starts to get in the way here, but what you're suggesting is akin to someone who is blind-drunk - they will have no memory of their experience, but I think most would say a blind-drunk is conscious. But I think the driving scenario is different in that my conscious attention is elsewhere... there's competition for the resource of attention. I don't really think I'm conscious of the feeling of the floor pressing my feet until I pay attention to it. My thinking on this is that human consciousness involves a unified/global dynamic, and the unifying thread is the self-model or ego. This allows for top-down control of attention. When parts of the sensorium (and other aspects of the mind) are not involved or included in this global dynamic, there is a significant sense in which it does not participate in that human consciousness. This is not to say that there is no other consciousness - just that it is perhaps of a lower form in a hierarchy of consciousness. I would highlight that human consciousness is somewhat unique in that the ego - a cultural innovation dependent on the development of language - is not present in animals. Without that unifying thread of ego, I suggest that animal consciousness is not unlike our dream consciousness, which is an arena of awareness when the thread of our ego dissolves. A visual I have is that in the waking state, the ego is a bag that encapsulates all the parts that make up our psyche. In dreamtime, the drawstring on the bag loosens and the parts float out, and get activated according to whatever seemingly random processes that constitute dreams. In lucid dreams, the ego is restored (i.e. we say to ourselves, *I* *am* dreaming) - and we regain consciousness. Terren On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 10:10 PM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: Are we any less conscious of as it happens, or perhaps our brains are simply not forming as many memories of usual/uneventful tasks. Jason On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 9:06 PM, Terren Suydam terren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: In the driving scenario it is clear that computation is involved, because all sorts of contingent things can be going on (e.g. dynamics of driving among other cars), yet this occurs without crossing the threshold of consciousness. Relying on some kind of caching mechanism under such circumstances would quickly fail one way or another. Terren On May 27, 2015 7:38 PM, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday, May 28, 2015 at 6:06:22 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/26/2015 10:31 PM, Pierz wrote: Where I see lookup tables fail is that they seem to operate above the probable necessary substation level. (Despite having the same inputs/outputs at the higher levels). But your memoization example still makes a good point - namely that some computations can be bypassed in favour of recordings, yet presumably this doesn't lead to fading qualia. We don't need anything as silly as a gigantic lookup table of all possible responses. We only need to acknowledge that we can store the results of recordings of computations we've already completed, and that this should not result in any strange degradation of consciousness. Isn't that what allows me to drive home from work without being conscious of it? People keep making this point, which is one that I myself made in the past - and I believe you argued with me at the time, saying that it's not clear that the mechanism for automating brain functions is anything like the same as caching the results of a computation. I think that objection is actually fair enough. With automated actions it's not clear that the computations aren't being carried out any more, just that they no longer require conscious attention because the neuronal pathways for those computations have become sufficiently reinforced that they no longer require concentration. I think this model (automated computation rather than cached computation) fits our experience of this phenomenon. Sometimes I suspect we're really talking out of our proverbial arses with these speculations as we still have so little idea about how the brain works. It may be a computer in the sense that it is Turing emulable, but then we talk as if it were squishy laptop or something, and that analogy can be misleading in many ways. For example, our memories are nothing like RAM. They are distributed like a hologram, constructive and fuzzy, whereas computer memory is localised, passive and accurate to the bit. I'm probably guilty of the same over-zealous computationalism with my lookup table analogy above, but I was thinking more of an AI and the in-principle point that cached computation results may be employed at a fine grained level. I would continue to insist that it is meaningless to say that a brain that employs cached results of computations is a zombie to the extent that it does so, because it is meaningless to speak of the when of qualia. (You never replied to my
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 08:22:58PM -0500, Jason Resch wrote: On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 2:17 AM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 08:17:39PM -0500, Jason Resch wrote: Not at all. My suggestion is that there wouldn't be any partial zombies, just normally functioning consciousness, and full zombies, with respect to Chalmers fading qualia experiment, due to network effects. Doesn't this lead to the problem of suddenly disappearing qualia, which Chalmers describes? What do you think about Chalmers's objections to suddenly disappearing qualia? Obviously, with functionalism (and computationalism), consciousness is retained throughout, and no zombies appear. Chalmers was trying to show an absurdity with non-functionalism, and I don't think it works, except insofar as full zombies are absurd. Why do you think it fails? Because you can accept the possibility of suddenly disappearing qualia? Jason It fails, because it relies on the absurdity of partial zombies, which I don't think non-functionalism implies. So are you saying it fails because you think partial zombies are not absurd, but rather are possible? No, it fails because non-functionlism doesn't imply their existence. The absurdity or not of partial zombies is irrelevant. We can remove functionalism from the equation by just considering what happens as we remove neurons from a brain. I would seriously expect that the qualia will switch off one-by-one as the necessary network connections are broken, rather than fading into nothing as Chalmers supposes. This is the suddenly disappearing qualia which is the other of the two possibilities Chalmers suggests for non-functionalism, is it not? Yes. Therefore in the fading qualia setup, a non-functionalist ought to think the same way - qualia switching off one-by-one until complete zombiehood is achieved, well pior to complete replacement of the brain by it's functional equivalents. Do you think we could we interview the person after the fact about at what point their qualia disappeared? No - because if we could, then they're not a (partial-)zombie. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
Are we any less conscious of as it happens, or perhaps our brains are simply not forming as many memories of usual/uneventful tasks. Jason On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 9:06 PM, Terren Suydam terren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: In the driving scenario it is clear that computation is involved, because all sorts of contingent things can be going on (e.g. dynamics of driving among other cars), yet this occurs without crossing the threshold of consciousness. Relying on some kind of caching mechanism under such circumstances would quickly fail one way or another. Terren On May 27, 2015 7:38 PM, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday, May 28, 2015 at 6:06:22 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/26/2015 10:31 PM, Pierz wrote: Where I see lookup tables fail is that they seem to operate above the probable necessary substation level. (Despite having the same inputs/outputs at the higher levels). But your memoization example still makes a good point - namely that some computations can be bypassed in favour of recordings, yet presumably this doesn't lead to fading qualia. We don't need anything as silly as a gigantic lookup table of all possible responses. We only need to acknowledge that we can store the results of recordings of computations we've already completed, and that this should not result in any strange degradation of consciousness. Isn't that what allows me to drive home from work without being conscious of it? People keep making this point, which is one that I myself made in the past - and I believe you argued with me at the time, saying that it's not clear that the mechanism for automating brain functions is anything like the same as caching the results of a computation. I think that objection is actually fair enough. With automated actions it's not clear that the computations aren't being carried out any more, just that they no longer require conscious attention because the neuronal pathways for those computations have become sufficiently reinforced that they no longer require concentration. I think this model (automated computation rather than cached computation) fits our experience of this phenomenon. Sometimes I suspect we're really talking out of our proverbial arses with these speculations as we still have so little idea about how the brain works. It may be a computer in the sense that it is Turing emulable, but then we talk as if it were squishy laptop or something, and that analogy can be misleading in many ways. For example, our memories are nothing like RAM. They are distributed like a hologram, constructive and fuzzy, whereas computer memory is localised, passive and accurate to the bit. I'm probably guilty of the same over-zealous computationalism with my lookup table analogy above, but I was thinking more of an AI and the in-principle point that cached computation results may be employed at a fine grained level. I would continue to insist that it is meaningless to say that a brain that employs cached results of computations is a zombie to the extent that it does so, because it is meaningless to speak of the when of qualia. (You never replied to my argument about poking a recorded Einstein with a stick, which I think makes a compelling case for this.) We have to rigorously divide the subjective and the objective. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Thursday, May 28, 2015, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 11:22:59PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: But that is not what happens when brain tissue is destroyed, as in a stroke. Qualia do actually fade, and entire sensory and cognitive modalities fade, leaving others intact. What you are proposing is Then perhaps we're talking at cross purposes. Do you really think the person with a stroke experiences (say) half the quale of red? Is that some sort of pink then? Or what? I suspect they either experience red, or they don't. Or substitute you own quale here if it helps the argument. A stroke results in objective and subjective changes, such as the inability to move a limb, understand language or see. These are gross examples of fading qualia. What you are proposing, as I understand it, is that if the damaged brain is replaced neuron by neuron, function and qualia would be restored, but at a certain point when you installed the artificial neuron, the patient would suddenly lose all consciousness, although to an outside observer he would seem to be continuing to improve. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 01:23:20PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: A stroke results in objective and subjective changes, such as the inability to move a limb, understand language or see. These are gross examples of fading qualia. What you are proposing, as I understand it, is that if the damaged brain is replaced neuron by neuron, function and qualia would be restored, but at a certain point when you installed the artificial neuron, the patient would suddenly lose all consciousness, although to an outside observer he would seem to be continuing to improve. Rather than focus on the term fading qualia, to which we seem to have derived a different understanding from the same paper, what you're saying is that a stroke victim can suffer diminished qualia, ie qualia no longer existing where once there was some. Eg no longer being able to smell a banana, or gone colour blind, or similar. That same person may or may not be aware of the fact that they've lost their qualia. The we can consider a nonfunctionalist response to the experiment where neurons are replaced by functionally equivalent artificial replacements. A nonfunctionalist ought to treat this like the stroke case - at some point qualia will disappear. If the person notices the qualia disappearing, the functionalist would simply say that the replacement parts are not functionally equivalent, or that the subsitution level was wrong. This is not an interesting case. A partial zombie, by defintion will always report that the full qualia were present, just as a full zombie would. If, however, the person fails to notice the disappearing qualia, a functionalist would say that the full set of qualia was being experienced, whereas a nonfunctionalist would say that the person might be experiencing a reduced set of qualia, even though e reports all er faculties being sound. Is this absurd? - no more absurd than the notion of a full zombie, I would say. But quales, as continua, which I took to be Chalmers' absurdity, simply are not implied. Quales exist discretely. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
A small correction: I said ... and the unifying thread is the self-model or ego. This allows for top-down control of attention. What I mean to say is This allows for a narrative of top-down control. It is not actually clear that there is any such thing as top-down control, although we routinely justify such in the service of maintaining our self models. On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 11:16 PM, Terren Suydam terren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: Language starts to get in the way here, but what you're suggesting is akin to someone who is blind-drunk - they will have no memory of their experience, but I think most would say a blind-drunk is conscious. But I think the driving scenario is different in that my conscious attention is elsewhere... there's competition for the resource of attention. I don't really think I'm conscious of the feeling of the floor pressing my feet until I pay attention to it. My thinking on this is that human consciousness involves a unified/global dynamic, and the unifying thread is the self-model or ego. This allows for top-down control of attention. When parts of the sensorium (and other aspects of the mind) are not involved or included in this global dynamic, there is a significant sense in which it does not participate in that human consciousness. This is not to say that there is no other consciousness - just that it is perhaps of a lower form in a hierarchy of consciousness. I would highlight that human consciousness is somewhat unique in that the ego - a cultural innovation dependent on the development of language - is not present in animals. Without that unifying thread of ego, I suggest that animal consciousness is not unlike our dream consciousness, which is an arena of awareness when the thread of our ego dissolves. A visual I have is that in the waking state, the ego is a bag that encapsulates all the parts that make up our psyche. In dreamtime, the drawstring on the bag loosens and the parts float out, and get activated according to whatever seemingly random processes that constitute dreams. In lucid dreams, the ego is restored (i.e. we say to ourselves, *I* *am* dreaming) - and we regain consciousness. Terren On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 10:10 PM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: Are we any less conscious of as it happens, or perhaps our brains are simply not forming as many memories of usual/uneventful tasks. Jason On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 9:06 PM, Terren Suydam terren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: In the driving scenario it is clear that computation is involved, because all sorts of contingent things can be going on (e.g. dynamics of driving among other cars), yet this occurs without crossing the threshold of consciousness. Relying on some kind of caching mechanism under such circumstances would quickly fail one way or another. Terren On May 27, 2015 7:38 PM, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday, May 28, 2015 at 6:06:22 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/26/2015 10:31 PM, Pierz wrote: Where I see lookup tables fail is that they seem to operate above the probable necessary substation level. (Despite having the same inputs/outputs at the higher levels). But your memoization example still makes a good point - namely that some computations can be bypassed in favour of recordings, yet presumably this doesn't lead to fading qualia. We don't need anything as silly as a gigantic lookup table of all possible responses. We only need to acknowledge that we can store the results of recordings of computations we've already completed, and that this should not result in any strange degradation of consciousness. Isn't that what allows me to drive home from work without being conscious of it? People keep making this point, which is one that I myself made in the past - and I believe you argued with me at the time, saying that it's not clear that the mechanism for automating brain functions is anything like the same as caching the results of a computation. I think that objection is actually fair enough. With automated actions it's not clear that the computations aren't being carried out any more, just that they no longer require conscious attention because the neuronal pathways for those computations have become sufficiently reinforced that they no longer require concentration. I think this model (automated computation rather than cached computation) fits our experience of this phenomenon. Sometimes I suspect we're really talking out of our proverbial arses with these speculations as we still have so little idea about how the brain works. It may be a computer in the sense that it is Turing emulable, but then we talk as if it were squishy laptop or something, and that analogy can be misleading in many ways. For example, our memories are nothing like RAM. They are distributed like a hologram, constructive and fuzzy, whereas computer memory is localised, passive and accurate to the bit. I'm probably
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Thursday, May 28, 2015 at 6:06:22 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/26/2015 10:31 PM, Pierz wrote: Where I see lookup tables fail is that they seem to operate above the probable necessary substation level. (Despite having the same inputs/outputs at the higher levels). But your memoization example still makes a good point - namely that some computations can be bypassed in favour of recordings, yet presumably this doesn't lead to fading qualia. We don't need anything as silly as a gigantic lookup table of all possible responses. We only need to acknowledge that we can store the results of recordings of computations we've already completed, and that this should not result in any strange degradation of consciousness. Isn't that what allows me to drive home from work without being conscious of it? People keep making this point, which is one that I myself made in the past - and I believe you argued with me at the time, saying that it's not clear that the mechanism for automating brain functions is anything like the same as caching the results of a computation. I think that objection is actually fair enough. With automated actions it's not clear that the computations aren't being carried out any more, just that they no longer require conscious attention because the neuronal pathways for those computations have become sufficiently reinforced that they no longer require concentration. I think this model (automated computation rather than cached computation) fits our experience of this phenomenon. Sometimes I suspect we're really talking out of our proverbial arses with these speculations as we still have so little idea about how the brain works. It may be a computer in the sense that it is Turing emulable, but then we talk as if it were squishy laptop or something, and that analogy can be misleading in many ways. For example, our memories are nothing like RAM. They are distributed like a hologram, constructive and fuzzy, whereas computer memory is localised, passive and accurate to the bit. I'm probably guilty of the same over-zealous computationalism with my lookup table analogy above, but I was thinking more of an AI and the in-principle point that cached computation results may be employed at a fine grained level. I would continue to insist that it is meaningless to say that a brain that employs cached results of computations is a zombie to the extent that it does so, because it is meaningless to speak of the when of qualia. (You never replied to my argument about poking a recorded Einstein with a stick, which I think makes a compelling case for this.) We have to rigorously divide the subjective and the objective. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
In the driving scenario it is clear that computation is involved, because all sorts of contingent things can be going on (e.g. dynamics of driving among other cars), yet this occurs without crossing the threshold of consciousness. Relying on some kind of caching mechanism under such circumstances would quickly fail one way or another. Terren On May 27, 2015 7:38 PM, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday, May 28, 2015 at 6:06:22 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/26/2015 10:31 PM, Pierz wrote: Where I see lookup tables fail is that they seem to operate above the probable necessary substation level. (Despite having the same inputs/outputs at the higher levels). But your memoization example still makes a good point - namely that some computations can be bypassed in favour of recordings, yet presumably this doesn't lead to fading qualia. We don't need anything as silly as a gigantic lookup table of all possible responses. We only need to acknowledge that we can store the results of recordings of computations we've already completed, and that this should not result in any strange degradation of consciousness. Isn't that what allows me to drive home from work without being conscious of it? People keep making this point, which is one that I myself made in the past - and I believe you argued with me at the time, saying that it's not clear that the mechanism for automating brain functions is anything like the same as caching the results of a computation. I think that objection is actually fair enough. With automated actions it's not clear that the computations aren't being carried out any more, just that they no longer require conscious attention because the neuronal pathways for those computations have become sufficiently reinforced that they no longer require concentration. I think this model (automated computation rather than cached computation) fits our experience of this phenomenon. Sometimes I suspect we're really talking out of our proverbial arses with these speculations as we still have so little idea about how the brain works. It may be a computer in the sense that it is Turing emulable, but then we talk as if it were squishy laptop or something, and that analogy can be misleading in many ways. For example, our memories are nothing like RAM. They are distributed like a hologram, constructive and fuzzy, whereas computer memory is localised, passive and accurate to the bit. I'm probably guilty of the same over-zealous computationalism with my lookup table analogy above, but I was thinking more of an AI and the in-principle point that cached computation results may be employed at a fine grained level. I would continue to insist that it is meaningless to say that a brain that employs cached results of computations is a zombie to the extent that it does so, because it is meaningless to speak of the when of qualia. (You never replied to my argument about poking a recorded Einstein with a stick, which I think makes a compelling case for this.) We have to rigorously divide the subjective and the objective. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 5/27/2015 7:06 PM, Terren Suydam wrote: In the driving scenario it is clear that computation is involved, because all sorts of contingent things can be going on (e.g. dynamics of driving among other cars), yet this occurs without crossing the threshold of consciousness. Relying on some kind of caching mechanism under such circumstances would quickly fail one way or another. Terren On May 27, 2015 7:38 PM, Pierz pier...@gmail.com mailto:pier...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday, May 28, 2015 at 6:06:22 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/26/2015 10:31 PM, Pierz wrote: Where I see lookup tables fail is that they seem to operate above the probable necessary substation level. (Despite having the same inputs/outputs at the higher levels). But your memoization example still makes a good point - namely that some computations can be bypassed in favour of recordings, yet presumably this doesn't lead to fading qualia. We don't need anything as silly as a gigantic lookup table of all possible responses. We only need to acknowledge that we can store the results of recordings of computations we've already completed, and that this should not result in any strange degradation of consciousness. Isn't that what allows me to drive home from work without being conscious of it? People keep making this point, which is one that I myself made in the past - and I believe you argued with me at the time, saying that it's not clear that the mechanism for automating brain functions is anything like the same as caching the results of a computation. I think that objection is actually fair enough. With automated actions it's not clear that the computations aren't being carried out any more, just that they no longer require conscious attention because the neuronal pathways for those computations have become sufficiently reinforced that they no longer require concentration. I think this model (automated computation rather than cached computation) fits our experience of this phenomenon. Sometimes I suspect we're really talking out of our proverbial arses with these speculations as we still have so little idea about how the brain works. It may be a computer in the sense that it is Turing emulable, but then we talk as if it were squishy laptop or something, and that analogy can be misleading in many ways. For example, our memories are nothing like RAM. They are distributed like a hologram, constructive and fuzzy, whereas computer memory is localised, passive and accurate to the bit. I'm probably guilty of the same over-zealous computationalism with my lookup table analogy above, but I was thinking more of an AI and the in-principle point that cached computation results may be employed at a fine grained level. I would continue to insist that it is meaningless to say that a brain that employs cached results of computations is a zombie to the extent that it does so, because it is meaningless to speak of the when of qualia. (You never replied to my argument about poking a recorded Einstein with a stick, which I think makes a compelling case for this.) We have to rigorously divide the subjective and the objective. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 11:22:59PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: But that is not what happens when brain tissue is destroyed, as in a stroke. Qualia do actually fade, and entire sensory and cognitive modalities fade, leaving others intact. What you are proposing is Then perhaps we're talking at cross purposes. Do you really think the person with a stroke experiences (say) half the quale of red? Is that some sort of pink then? Or what? I suspect they either experience red, or they don't. Or substitute you own quale here if it helps the argument. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 2:17 AM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 08:17:39PM -0500, Jason Resch wrote: Not at all. My suggestion is that there wouldn't be any partial zombies, just normally functioning consciousness, and full zombies, with respect to Chalmers fading qualia experiment, due to network effects. Doesn't this lead to the problem of suddenly disappearing qualia, which Chalmers describes? What do you think about Chalmers's objections to suddenly disappearing qualia? Obviously, with functionalism (and computationalism), consciousness is retained throughout, and no zombies appear. Chalmers was trying to show an absurdity with non-functionalism, and I don't think it works, except insofar as full zombies are absurd. Why do you think it fails? Because you can accept the possibility of suddenly disappearing qualia? Jason It fails, because it relies on the absurdity of partial zombies, which I don't think non-functionalism implies. So are you saying it fails because you think partial zombies are not absurd, but rather are possible? We can remove functionalism from the equation by just considering what happens as we remove neurons from a brain. I would seriously expect that the qualia will switch off one-by-one as the necessary network connections are broken, rather than fading into nothing as Chalmers supposes. This is the suddenly disappearing qualia which is the other of the two possibilities Chalmers suggests for non-functionalism, is it not? Therefore in the fading qualia setup, a non-functionalist ought to think the same way - qualia switching off one-by-one until complete zombiehood is achieved, well pior to complete replacement of the brain by it's functional equivalents. Do you think we could we interview the person after the fact about at what point their qualia disappeared? Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 08:17:39PM -0500, Jason Resch wrote: Not at all. My suggestion is that there wouldn't be any partial zombies, just normally functioning consciousness, and full zombies, with respect to Chalmers fading qualia experiment, due to network effects. Doesn't this lead to the problem of suddenly disappearing qualia, which Chalmers describes? What do you think about Chalmers's objections to suddenly disappearing qualia? Obviously, with functionalism (and computationalism), consciousness is retained throughout, and no zombies appear. Chalmers was trying to show an absurdity with non-functionalism, and I don't think it works, except insofar as full zombies are absurd. Why do you think it fails? Because you can accept the possibility of suddenly disappearing qualia? Jason It fails, because it relies on the absurdity of partial zombies, which I don't think non-functionalism implies. We can remove functionalism from the equation by just considering what happens as we remove neurons from a brain. I would seriously expect that the qualia will switch off one-by-one as the necessary network connections are broken, rather than fading into nothing as Chalmers supposes. Therefore in the fading qualia setup, a non-functionalist ought to think the same way - qualia switching off one-by-one until complete zombiehood is achieved, well pior to complete replacement of the brain by it's functional equivalents. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 7:15 PM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 07:19:46PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 May 2015, at 10:21, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: I can't really see an alternative other than Russel's suggestion that the random activity might perfectly sustain consciousness until a certain point, then all consciousness would abruptly stop. That would lead to the non sensical partial zombie. Those who says I don't feel any difference. Not at all. My suggestion is that there wouldn't be any partial zombies, just normally functioning consciousness, and full zombies, with respect to Chalmers fading qualia experiment, due to network effects. Doesn't this lead to the problem of suddenly disappearing qualia, which Chalmers describes? What do you think about Chalmers's objections to suddenly disappearing qualia? Obviously, with functionalism (and computationalism), consciousness is retained throughout, and no zombies appear. Chalmers was trying to show an absurdity with non-functionalism, and I don't think it works, except insofar as full zombies are absurd. Why do you think it fails? Because you can accept the possibility of suddenly disappearing qualia? Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 1:46 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 25 May 2015, at 02:06, Jason Resch wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 3:52 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 23 May 2015, at 17:07, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? A lookup table might have some primitive conscious, but I think any consciousness it has would be more or less the same regardless of the number of entries within that lookup table. With more entries, its information content grows, but it's capacity to process, interpret, or understand that information remains constant. You can emulate the brain of Einstein with a (ridiculously large) look-up table, assuming you are ridiculously patient---or we slow down your own brain so that you are as slow as einstein. Is that incarnation a zombie? Again, with comp, all incarnations are zombie, because bodies do not think. It is the abstract person which thinks, and in this case Einstein will still be defined by the simplest normal computations, which here, and only here, have taken the form of that unplausible giant Einstein look-up table emulation at the right level. That last bit is the part I have difficulty with. How can a a single call to a lookup table ever be at the right level. Actually, the Turing machine formalism is a type of look-up table: if you are scanning input i (big numbers describing all your current sensitive entries, while you are in state q_169757243685173427379910054234647572376400064994542424646334345787910190034676754100687. (big number describing one of your many possible mental state, then change the state into q_888..99 and look what next. By construction that
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Wednesday, May 27, 2015 at 11:27:26 AM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 1:46 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be javascript: wrote: On 25 May 2015, at 02:06, Jason Resch wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 3:52 AM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be javascript: wrote: On 23 May 2015, at 17:07, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be javascript: wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? A lookup table might have some primitive conscious, but I think any consciousness it has would be more or less the same regardless of the number of entries within that lookup table. With more entries, its information content grows, but it's capacity to process, interpret, or understand that information remains constant. You can emulate the brain of Einstein with a (ridiculously large) look-up table, assuming you are ridiculously patient---or we slow down your own brain so that you are as slow as einstein. Is that incarnation a zombie? Again, with comp, all incarnations are zombie, because bodies do not think. It is the abstract person which thinks, and in this case Einstein will still be defined by the simplest normal computations, which here, and only here, have taken the form of that unplausible giant Einstein look-up table emulation at the right level. That last bit is the part I have difficulty with. How can a a single call to a lookup table ever be at the right level. Actually, the Turing machine formalism is a type of look-up table: if you are scanning input i (big numbers describing all your current sensitive entries, while you are in state
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 25 May 2015, at 22:49, meekerdb wrote: On 5/25/2015 5:16 AM, Pierz wrote: On Monday, May 25, 2015 at 4:58:53 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/24/2015 4:09 AM, Pierz wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 4:47:12 PM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 12:40 AM, Pierz pie...@gmail.com wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 1:07:15 AM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space– time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual- correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? I really like this argument, even though I once came up with a (bad) attempt to refute it. I wish it received more attention because it does cast quite a penetrating light on the issue. What you're suggesting is effectively the cache pattern in computer programming, where we trade memory resources for computational resources. Instead of repeating a resource-intensive computation, we store the inputs and outputs for later regurgitation. How is this different from a movie recording of brain activity (which most on the list seem to agree is not conscious)? The lookup table is just a really long recording, only we use the input to determine to which section of the recording to fast- forward/rewind to. It isn't different to a recording. But here's the thing: when we ask if the lookup machine is conscious, we are kind of implicitly asking: is it having an experience *now*, while I ask the question and see a response. But what does such a question actually even mean? If a computation is underway in time when the machine responds, then I assume it is having a co-temporal experience. But the lookup machine idea forces us to the realization that different observers' subjective experiences (the pure qualia) can't be mapped to one another in objective time. The
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 26 May 2015, at 00:55, meekerdb wrote: On 5/25/2015 11:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 May 2015, at 23:51, meekerdb wrote: On 5/24/2015 11:28 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Monday, May 25, 2015, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 1:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Again, with comp, all incarnations are zombie, because bodies do not think. It is the abstract person which thinks But a few thumps on the body and the abstract person won't think either. So far as we have observered *only* bodies think. If comp implies the contrary isn't that so much the worse for comp. In a virtual environment, destroying the body destroys the consciousness, but both are actually due to the underlying computations. How can those thumped know it's virtual. A virtual environment with virtual people doing virtual actions seems to make virtual virtually meaningless. It is the difference between life and second life. Reality, and relative dreams. That's the question, can such a difference be meaningful if the world is defined by conscious experience. In the examples you give, the virtual is distinguished because it is not a rich and complete and consistent as real life. With computationalism (and its consequences) there is a real physical bottom, which is the same for all creature. In that sense, comp makes physics much more grounded in reality! All creature can test comp or simulation if they have enough time and external clues. If we decide to keep comp: it is the emulation part which is testable. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 5/26/2015 1:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 25 May 2015, at 22:49, meekerdb wrote: On 5/25/2015 5:16 AM, Pierz wrote: On Monday, May 25, 2015 at 4:58:53 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/24/2015 4:09 AM, Pierz wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 4:47:12 PM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 12:40 AM, Pierz pie...@gmail.com wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 1:07:15 AM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space%E2%80%93time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Monday, May 25, 2015 at 4:58:53 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/24/2015 4:09 AM, Pierz wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 4:47:12 PM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 12:40 AM, Pierz pie...@gmail.com wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 1:07:15 AM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? I really like this argument, even though I once came up with a (bad) attempt to refute it. I wish it received more attention because it does cast quite a penetrating light on the issue. What you're suggesting is effectively the cache pattern in computer programming, where we trade memory resources for computational resources. Instead of repeating a resource-intensive computation, we store the inputs and outputs for later regurgitation. How is this different from a movie recording of brain activity (which most on the list seem to agree is not conscious)? The lookup table is just a really long recording, only we use the input to determine to which section of the recording to fast-forward/rewind to. It isn't different to a recording. But here's the thing: when we ask if the lookup machine is conscious, we are kind of implicitly asking: is it having an experience *now*, while I ask the question and see a response. But what does such a question actually even mean? If a computation is underway in time when the machine responds, then I assume it is having a co-temporal experience. But the lookup machine idea forces us to the realization that different observers' subjective experiences (the pure qualia) can't be mapped to one another in objective time.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Monday, May 25, 2015, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 4:27 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 25 May 2015 at 07:51, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 11:28 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: In a virtual environment, destroying the body destroys the consciousness, but both are actually due to the underlying computations. How can those thumped know it's virtual. A virtual environment with virtual people doing virtual actions seems to make virtual virtually meaningless. The people won't necessarily know, but they could know, as it could be revealed by the programmers or deduced from some programming glitch (as in the film The Thirteenth Floor). But I don't think it makes a difference if they know or not. The answer to the obvious objection that if you destroy the brain you destroy consciousness, so consciousness can't reside in Platonia, is that both the brain and consciousness could reside in Platonia. Where ever they reside though you have to explain how damaging the brain changes consciousness. And if you can explain this relation in Platonia why won't the same relation exist in Physicalia. It could happen in both, but it is not evidence against a simulated reality to say that consciousness seems to be dependent on the apparently physical brain. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 25 May 2015, at 02:06, Jason Resch wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 3:52 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 23 May 2015, at 17:07, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space– time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico- chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? A lookup table might have some primitive conscious, but I think any consciousness it has would be more or less the same regardless of the number of entries within that lookup table. With more entries, its information content grows, but it's capacity to process, interpret, or understand that information remains constant. You can emulate the brain of Einstein with a (ridiculously large) look-up table, assuming you are ridiculously patient---or we slow down your own brain so that you are as slow as einstein. Is that incarnation a zombie? Again, with comp, all incarnations are zombie, because bodies do not think. It is the abstract person which thinks, and in this case Einstein will still be defined by the simplest normal computations, which here, and only here, have taken the form of that unplausible giant Einstein look-up table emulation at the right level. That last bit is the part I have difficulty with. How can a a single call to a lookup table ever be at the right level. Actually, the Turing machine formalism is a type of look-up table: if you are scanning input i (big numbers describing all your current sensitive entries, while you are in state q_169757243685173427379910054234647572376400064994542424646334345787910190034 676754100687. (big number describing one of your many possible mental state, then change the state into q_888..99 and look what next. By construction that system behaves self-referentially correctly, so it
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia errata
Brent: would you include in your 'nomologics' all that stuff beyond our present knowledge as well? Same with causal, but in reverse. Probabilities depend on the borders we observe: change them and the results change as well. The same as statistical, with added functionality. Sorry for my haphazardous formulation - I could have done better. John Mikes On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 3:07 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: OOPS. I meant ...randomly means NOT in accordance... On 5/22/2015 11:15 PM, meekerdb wrote: And note that in this context randomly means in accordance with nomologically determined causal probabilities. It doesn't necessarily mean deterministically. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 24 May 2015, at 23:51, meekerdb wrote: On 5/24/2015 11:28 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Monday, May 25, 2015, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 1:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Again, with comp, all incarnations are zombie, because bodies do not think. It is the abstract person which thinks But a few thumps on the body and the abstract person won't think either. So far as we have observered *only* bodies think. If comp implies the contrary isn't that so much the worse for comp. In a virtual environment, destroying the body destroys the consciousness, but both are actually due to the underlying computations. How can those thumped know it's virtual. A virtual environment with virtual people doing virtual actions seems to make virtual virtually meaningless. It is the difference between life and second life. Reality, and relative dreams. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 5/25/2015 5:16 AM, Pierz wrote: On Monday, May 25, 2015 at 4:58:53 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/24/2015 4:09 AM, Pierz wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 4:47:12 PM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 12:40 AM, Pierz pie...@gmail.com wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 1:07:15 AM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space%E2%80%93time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 5/25/2015 10:48 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Monday, May 25, 2015, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 4:27 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 25 May 2015 at 07:51, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 11:28 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: In a virtual environment, destroying the body destroys the consciousness, but both are actually due to the underlying computations. How can those thumped know it's virtual. A virtual environment with virtual people doing virtual actions seems to make virtual virtually meaningless. The people won't necessarily know, but they could know, as it could be revealed by the programmers or deduced from some programming glitch (as in the film The Thirteenth Floor). But I don't think it makes a difference if they know or not. The answer to the obvious objection that if you destroy the brain you destroy consciousness, so consciousness can't reside in Platonia, is that both the brain and consciousness could reside in Platonia. Where ever they reside though you have to explain how damaging the brain changes consciousness. And if you can explain this relation in Platonia why won't the same relation exist in Physicalia. It could happen in both, but it is not evidence against a simulated reality to say that consciousness seems to be dependent on the apparently physical brain. A reality is only simulated relative to some more real reality - so I'm not sure what the point of referring to a simulated reality is. The question is whether the move to Platonia really solves the mind-body problem or just rephrases it as the body-mind problem. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 5/25/2015 11:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 May 2015, at 23:51, meekerdb wrote: On 5/24/2015 11:28 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Monday, May 25, 2015, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 1:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Again, with comp, all incarnations are zombie, because bodies do not think. It is the abstract person which thinks But a few thumps on the body and the abstract person won't think either. So far as we have observered *only* bodies think. If comp implies the contrary isn't that so much the worse for comp. In a virtual environment, destroying the body destroys the consciousness, but both are actually due to the underlying computations. How can those thumped know it's virtual. A virtual environment with virtual people doing virtual actions seems to make virtual virtually meaningless. It is the difference between life and second life. Reality, and relative dreams. That's the question, can such a difference be meaningful if the world is defined by conscious experience. In the examples you give, the virtual is distinguished because it is not a rich and complete and consistent as real life. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Tuesday, May 26, 2015 at 6:49:51 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/25/2015 5:16 AM, Pierz wrote: On Monday, May 25, 2015 at 4:58:53 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 5/24/2015 4:09 AM, Pierz wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 4:47:12 PM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 12:40 AM, Pierz pie...@gmail.com wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 1:07:15 AM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? I really like this argument, even though I once came up with a (bad) attempt to refute it. I wish it received more attention because it does cast quite a penetrating light on the issue. What you're suggesting is effectively the cache pattern in computer programming, where we trade memory resources for computational resources. Instead of repeating a resource-intensive computation, we store the inputs and outputs for later regurgitation. How is this different from a movie recording of brain activity (which most on the list seem to agree is not conscious)? The lookup table is just a really long recording, only we use the input to determine to which section of the recording to fast-forward/rewind to. It isn't different to a recording. But here's the thing: when we ask if the lookup machine is conscious, we are kind of implicitly asking: is it having an experience *now*, while I ask the question and see a response. But what does such a question actually even mean? If a computation is underway in time when the machine responds, then I assume it is having a co-temporal experience. But the lookup machine idea forces us to the realization that
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 4:47:12 PM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 12:40 AM, Pierz pie...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 1:07:15 AM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? I really like this argument, even though I once came up with a (bad) attempt to refute it. I wish it received more attention because it does cast quite a penetrating light on the issue. What you're suggesting is effectively the cache pattern in computer programming, where we trade memory resources for computational resources. Instead of repeating a resource-intensive computation, we store the inputs and outputs for later regurgitation. How is this different from a movie recording of brain activity (which most on the list seem to agree is not conscious)? The lookup table is just a really long recording, only we use the input to determine to which section of the recording to fast-forward/rewind to. It isn't different to a recording. But here's the thing: when we ask if the lookup machine is conscious, we are kind of implicitly asking: is it having an experience *now*, while I ask the question and see a response. But what does such a question actually even mean? If a computation is underway in time when the machine responds, then I assume it is having a co-temporal experience. But the lookup machine idea forces us to the realization that different observers' subjective experiences (the pure qualia) can't be mapped to one another in objective time. The experiences themselves are pure abstractions and don't occur in time and space. How could we ever measure the time at which a quale occurs? Sure we
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 24 May 2015 at 17:40, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: I really like this argument, even though I once came up with a (bad) attempt to refute it. I wish it received more attention because it does cast quite a penetrating light on the issue. What you're suggesting is effectively the cache pattern in computer programming, where we trade memory resources for computational resources. Instead of repeating a resource-intensive computation, we store the inputs and outputs for later regurgitation. The cached results 'store' intelligence in an analogous way to the storage of energy as potential energy. Another valid comparison, in my opinion, is the storage of intelligence in DNA. Instinctive behaviour coded in DNA is effectively substituting a lookup table for work-it-out-on-the-fly type intelligence. We effectively flatten out time (the computational process) into the spatial dimension (memory). The cache pattern does not allow us to cheat the law that intelligent work must be done in order to produce intelligent results, it merely allows us to do that work at a time that suits us. The intelligence has been transferred into the spatial relationships built into the table, intelligent relationships we can only discover by doing the computations. The lookup table is useless without its index. It's also akin to the MGA, where subsequent re-running of the original computation fails to add anything to it (like more consciousness). So what your thought experiment points out is pretty fascinating: that intelligence can be manifested spatially as well as temporally, contrary to our common-sense intuition, and that the intelligence of a machine does not have to be in real time. That actually supports the MGA if anything - because computations are abstractions outside of time and space. We should not forget that the memory resources required to duplicate any kind of intelligent computer would be absolutely enormous, and the lookup table, although structurally simple, would embody just a vast amount of computational intelligence. I think you anticipated my comment above but I'm not 100% sure if we're saying the same thing so I'll let it stand, just in case we aren't :-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 8:18:41 PM UTC+10, Liz R wrote: On 24 May 2015 at 17:40, Pierz pie...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: I really like this argument, even though I once came up with a (bad) attempt to refute it. I wish it received more attention because it does cast quite a penetrating light on the issue. What you're suggesting is effectively the cache pattern in computer programming, where we trade memory resources for computational resources. Instead of repeating a resource-intensive computation, we store the inputs and outputs for later regurgitation. The cached results 'store' intelligence in an analogous way to the storage of energy as potential energy. Another valid comparison, in my opinion, is the storage of intelligence in DNA. Instinctive behaviour coded in DNA is effectively substituting a lookup table for work-it-out-on-the-fly type intelligence. Yes, I nearly said that myself - the intelligence encoded in the organism by evolution. We effectively flatten out time (the computational process) into the spatial dimension (memory). The cache pattern does not allow us to cheat the law that intelligent work must be done in order to produce intelligent results, it merely allows us to do that work at a time that suits us. The intelligence has been transferred into the spatial relationships built into the table, intelligent relationships we can only discover by doing the computations. The lookup table is useless without its index. It's also akin to the MGA, where subsequent re-running of the original computation fails to add anything to it (like more consciousness). So what your thought experiment points out is pretty fascinating: that intelligence can be manifested spatially as well as temporally, contrary to our common-sense intuition, and that the intelligence of a machine does not have to be in real time. That actually supports the MGA if anything - because computations are abstractions outside of time and space. We should not forget that the memory resources required to duplicate any kind of intelligent computer would be absolutely enormous, and the lookup table, although structurally simple, would embody just a vast amount of computational intelligence. I think you anticipated my comment above but I'm not 100% sure if we're saying the same thing so I'll let it stand, just in case we aren't :-) We are :) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 23 May 2015, at 08:06, Pierz wrote: On Saturday, May 23, 2015 at 2:14:07 AM UTC+10, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 22 May 2015, at 10:34, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Friday, May 22, 2015, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 21 May 2015, at 01:53, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Wednesday, May 20, 2015, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: snip Partial zombies are absurd because they make the concept of consciousness meaningless. OK. Random neurons, separated neurons and platonic computations sustaining consciousness are merely weird, not absurd. Not OK. Random neurone, like the movie, simply does not compute. They only mimic the contingent (and logically unrelated) physical activity related to a special implementation of a computation. If you change the initial computer, that physical activity could mimic another computation. Or, like Maudlin showed: you can change the physical activity arbitrarily, and still mimic the initial computation: so the relation between computation, and the physical activity of the computer running that computation is accidental, nor logical. Platonic computation, on the contrary, does compute (in the original sense of computation). You're assuming not only that computationalism is true, but that it's exclusively true. That is part of the definition, and that is why I add often that we have to say yes to the doctor, in virtue of surviving qua computatio. I have often try to explain that someone can believe in both Church thesis, and say yes to the doctor, but still believe in this not for the reason that the artficial brain will run the relevant computation, but because he believes in the Virgin Mary, and he believes she is good and compensionate, so that if the artificial brain is good enough she will save your soul, and reinstall it in the digital physical brain. That is *not* computationalism. It is computationalism + magic. Go back several steps and consider why we think computationalism might be true in the first place. The usual start is that computers can behave intelligently and substitute for processes in the brain. OK. So if something else can behave intelligently and substitute for processes in the brain, it's not absurd to consider that it might be conscious. It's begging the question to say that it can't be conscious because it isn't a computation. The movie and the lucky random brain are different in that respect. The movie doesn't behave like if it was conscious. I can tell the movie that mustard is a mineral, or an animal, the movie does not react. it fails at the Turing tests, and the zombie test. There is neither computations, nor intelligent behaviors, relevant with the consciousness associated' to the boolean circuit. The inimagibly lucky random brain, on the contrary, does behave in a way making a person acting like a p-zombie or a conscious individual. We don't see the difference with a conscious being, by definition/construction. Well, if a random event mimics by chance a computation, that means at the least that the computation exists (in arithmetic), and I suggest to associate consciousness to it. I suspect you're wrong. In the case of the recording, the movie might still pass the Turing test if we invert the flukey coincidence and allow the possibility the questioner might ask questions that exactly correspond to the responses that the film happens to output. I remember watching a Blues Brothers midnight screening once, and all the cult fans who'd go every week would yell things out at certain points in the action and the actors would appear to respond to their shouted questions and interjections. In this case the illusion of conversation was constructed, but it could occur by chance. Would the recording then be conscious? In both the random and fixed response cases, there is no actual link other than coincidence between inputs and outputs, and this is the key. The random brain is not responding or processing inputs at all, any more than the film is. So the key to these types of thought experiments is whether intelligence and consciousness are functions of the responsive relationship between inputs and outputs, or merely the appearance of responsiveness. I think we have to say that actual responsiveness is required, and therefore fearless commit to the idea that a zombie is indeed 'possible', if the infinitely unlikely is possible! I think that arguments based on 'infinite improbability' (white rabbits) must surely be the weakest of all possible arguments in philosophy, and should really just be dismissed out of hand. Just as Deutsch argues that there are no worlds in the multiverse where magic works, only some worlds where it has worked and will never work again, we can admit the possibility of being fooled into believing that a randomly jerking zombie is conscious, or a
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 23 May 2015, at 17:07, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space– time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico- chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? A lookup table might have some primitive conscious, but I think any consciousness it has would be more or less the same regardless of the number of entries within that lookup table. With more entries, its information content grows, but it's capacity to process, interpret, or understand that information remains constant. You can emulate the brain of Einstein with a (ridiculously large) look-up table, assuming you are ridiculously patient---or we slow down your own brain so that you are as slow as einstein. Is that incarnation a zombie? Again, with comp, all incarnations are zombie, because bodies do not think. It is the abstract person which thinks, and in this case Einstein will still be defined by the simplest normal computations, which here, and only here, have taken the form of that unplausible giant Einstein look-up table emulation at the right level. Does an ant trained to perform the look table's operation become more aware when placed in a vast library than when placed on a small bookshelf, to perform the identical function? Are you not doing the Searle's level confusion? I see the close parallel, but I hope not. The input to the ant when interpreted as a binary string is a number, that tells the ant how many pages to walk past to get to the page containing the answer, where the ant stops the paper is read. I don't see how this system consisting of the ant, and the library, is conscious. The system is intelligent, in that it provides meaningful answers to queries, but it processes no information besides evaluating the magnitude of an input
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 7:15:41 PM UTC+10, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 May 2015, at 08:06, Pierz wrote: On Saturday, May 23, 2015 at 2:14:07 AM UTC+10, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 22 May 2015, at 10:34, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Friday, May 22, 2015, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 21 May 2015, at 01:53, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Wednesday, May 20, 2015, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: snip Partial zombies are absurd because they make the concept of consciousness meaningless. OK. Random neurons, separated neurons and platonic computations sustaining consciousness are merely weird, not absurd. Not OK. Random neurone, like the movie, simply does not compute. They only mimic the contingent (and logically unrelated) physical activity related to a special implementation of a computation. If you change the initial computer, that physical activity could mimic another computation. Or, like Maudlin showed: you can change the physical activity arbitrarily, and still mimic the initial computation: so the relation between computation, and the physical activity of the computer running that computation is accidental, nor logical. Platonic computation, on the contrary, does compute (in the original sense of computation). You're assuming not only that computationalism is true, but that it's exclusively true. That is part of the definition, and that is why I add often that we have to say yes to the doctor, in virtue of surviving qua computatio. I have often try to explain that someone can believe in both Church thesis, and say yes to the doctor, but still believe in this not for the reason that the artficial brain will run the relevant computation, but because he believes in the Virgin Mary, and he believes she is good and compensionate, so that if the artificial brain is good enough she will save your soul, and reinstall it in the digital physical brain. That is *not* computationalism. It is computationalism + magic. Go back several steps and consider why we think computationalism might be true in the first place. The usual start is that computers can behave intelligently and substitute for processes in the brain. OK. So if something else can behave intelligently and substitute for processes in the brain, it's not absurd to consider that it might be conscious. It's begging the question to say that it can't be conscious because it isn't a computation. The movie and the lucky random brain are different in that respect. The movie doesn't behave like if it was conscious. I can tell the movie that mustard is a mineral, or an animal, the movie does not react. it fails at the Turing tests, and the zombie test. There is neither computations, nor intelligent behaviors, relevant with the consciousness associated' to the boolean circuit. The inimagibly lucky random brain, on the contrary, does behave in a way making a person acting like a p-zombie or a conscious individual. We don't see the difference with a conscious being, by definition/construction. Well, if a random event mimics by chance a computation, that means at the least that the computation exists (in arithmetic), and I suggest to associate consciousness to it. I suspect you're wrong. In the case of the recording, the movie might still pass the Turing test *if we invert the flukey coincidence* and allow the possibility the questioner might ask questions that exactly correspond to the responses that the film happens to output. I remember watching a Blues Brothers midnight screening once, and all the cult fans who'd go every week would yell things out at certain points in the action and the actors would appear to respond to their shouted questions and interjections. In this case the illusion of conversation was constructed, but it could occur by chance. Would the recording then be conscious? In both the random and fixed response cases, there is no actual link other than coincidence between inputs and outputs, and this is the key. The random brain is not responding or processing inputs at all, any more than the film is. So the key to these types of thought experiments is whether intelligence and consciousness are functions of the responsive relationship between inputs and outputs, or merely the appearance of responsiveness. I think we have to say that actual responsiveness is required, and therefore fearless commit to the idea that a zombie is indeed 'possible', if the infinitely unlikely is possible! I think that arguments based on 'infinite improbability' (white rabbits) must surely be the weakest of all possible arguments in philosophy, and should really just be dismissed out of hand. Just as Deutsch argues that there are no worlds in the multiverse where magic works, only some worlds where it has worked and will never work again, we can admit the possibility of being
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Monday, May 25, 2015, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 1:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Again, with comp, all incarnations are zombie, because bodies do not think. It is the abstract person which thinks But a few thumps on the body and the abstract person won't think either. So far as we have observered *only* bodies think. If comp implies the contrary isn't that so much the worse for comp. In a virtual environment, destroying the body destroys the consciousness, but both are actually due to the underlying computations. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 5/24/2015 4:09 AM, Pierz wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 4:47:12 PM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 12:40 AM, Pierz pie...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 1:07:15 AM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space%E2%80%93time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? I really like this
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 24 May 2015, at 10:21, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Saturday, May 23, 2015, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 22 May 2015, at 10:34, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Friday, May 22, 2015, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 21 May 2015, at 01:53, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Wednesday, May 20, 2015, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: snip Partial zombies are absurd because they make the concept of consciousness meaningless. OK. Random neurons, separated neurons and platonic computations sustaining consciousness are merely weird, not absurd. Not OK. Random neurone, like the movie, simply does not compute. They only mimic the contingent (and logically unrelated) physical activity related to a special implementation of a computation. If you change the initial computer, that physical activity could mimic another computation. Or, like Maudlin showed: you can change the physical activity arbitrarily, and still mimic the initial computation: so the relation between computation, and the physical activity of the computer running that computation is accidental, nor logical. Platonic computation, on the contrary, does compute (in the original sense of computation). You're assuming not only that computationalism is true, but that it's exclusively true. That is part of the definition, and that is why I add often that we have to say yes to the doctor, in virtue of surviving qua computatio. I have often try to explain that someone can believe in both Church thesis, and say yes to the doctor, but still believe in this not for the reason that the artficial brain will run the relevant computation, but because he believes in the Virgin Mary, and he believes she is good and compensionate, so that if the artificial brain is good enough she will save your soul, and reinstall it in the digital physical brain. That is *not* computationalism. It is computationalism + magic. But it's not obvious that *only* computations can sustain consciousness. Maybe appropriate random behaviour can do so as well. May be you need to add the Holy Water and the Pope benediction. Alternatively, perhaps appropriate random behaviour would at least not destroy the consciousness that was there to begin with, because the real source of consciousness was neither the brain's normal physical activity nor the random activity. That is like the movie. It keeps the relevant information to reinstal some instantaneous description on the boolean graph which was filmed. Whatever possible makes the counterfactual correct in some sufficiently large spectrum, makes the audittor of the entity connected to the real person, which is an abstraction in Platonia. I can't really see an alternative other than Russel's suggestion that the random activity might perfectly sustain consciousness until a certain point, then all consciousness would abruptly stop. That would lead to the non sensical partial zombie. Those who says I don't feel any difference. I think you illustrate my point. If we want to avoid partial zombie, and keep the invariance of consciousness for the digital substitution, we must recognize and understand that invoking a rome of matter or god as a computation selector, appears as a magical explanation, like if we should not isolate that measure with the means of computer science, and then test it with the empirical physics. Bruno Go back several steps and consider why we think computationalism might be true in the first place. The usual start is that computers can behave intelligently and substitute for processes in the brain. OK. So if something else can behave intelligently and substitute for processes in the brain, it's not absurd to consider that it might be conscious. It's begging the question to say that it can't be conscious because it isn't a computation. The movie and the lucky random brain are different in that respect. The movie doesn't behave like if it was conscious. I can tell the movie that mustard is a mineral, or an animal, the movie does not react. it fails at the Turing tests, and the zombie test. There is neither computations, nor intelligent behaviors, relevant with the consciousness associated' to the boolean circuit. The inimagibly lucky random brain, on the contrary, does behave in a way making a person acting like a p-zombie or a conscious individual. We don't see the difference with a conscious being, by definition/construction. Well, if a random event mimics by chance a computation, that means at the least that the computation exists (in arithmetic), and I suggest to associate consciousness to it. Then if I have the way to learn that from time t1 to time t2 the neuron fired randomly, but correctly, by chance, that would only add to my suspicion that the physical activity has some relationship with consciousness. It is just a relative
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 5/23/2015 11:47 PM, Jason Resch wrote: There is a common programming technique called memoization. Essentially building automatic caches for functions within a program. I wonder: would adding memorization to the functions implementing an AI eventually result in it becoming a zombie recording rather than a program, if it were fed all the same inputs a second time? Isn't that exactly what happens when you learn to ride a bicycle, hit a tennis ball, touch type,... Stuff you had to think about when you were learning becomes automatic - and subconscious. I suspect a lot of these conundrums arise from taking consciousness to be fundamental, rather than a language related add-on to intelligence. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 5/24/2015 1:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Again, with comp, all incarnations are zombie, because bodies do not think. It is the abstract person which thinks But a few thumps on the body and the abstract person won't think either. So far as we have observered *only* bodies think. If comp implies the contrary isn't that so much the worse for comp. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Monday, May 25, 2015, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 24 May 2015, at 10:21, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Saturday, May 23, 2015, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 22 May 2015, at 10:34, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Friday, May 22, 2015, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 21 May 2015, at 01:53, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Wednesday, May 20, 2015, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: snip Partial zombies are absurd because they make the concept of consciousness meaningless. OK. Random neurons, separated neurons and platonic computations sustaining consciousness are merely weird, not absurd. Not OK. Random neurone, like the movie, simply does not compute. They only mimic the contingent (and logically unrelated) physical activity related to a special implementation of a computation. If you change the initial computer, that physical activity could mimic another computation. Or, like Maudlin showed: you can change the physical activity arbitrarily, and still mimic the initial computation: so the relation between computation, and the physical activity of the computer running that computation is accidental, nor logical. Platonic computation, on the contrary, does compute (in the original sense of computation). You're assuming not only that computationalism is true, but that it's exclusively true. That is part of the definition, and that is why I add often that we have to say yes to the doctor, in virtue of surviving qua computatio. I have often try to explain that someone can believe in both Church thesis, and say yes to the doctor, but still believe in this not for the reason that the artficial brain will run the relevant computation, but because he believes in the Virgin Mary, and he believes she is good and compensionate, so that if the artificial brain is good enough she will save your soul, and reinstall it in the digital physical brain. That is *not* computationalism. It is computationalism + magic. But it's not obvious that *only* computations can sustain consciousness. Maybe appropriate random behaviour can do so as well. May be you need to add the Holy Water and the Pope benediction. I still don't understand why you think it's absurd that randomness can lead to consciousness; not just wrong, but absurd. Alternatively, perhaps appropriate random behaviour would at least not destroy the consciousness that was there to begin with, because the real source of consciousness was neither the brain's normal physical activity nor the random activity. That is like the movie. It keeps the relevant information to reinstal some instantaneous description on the boolean graph which was filmed. Whatever possible makes the counterfactual correct in some sufficiently large spectrum, makes the audittor of the entity connected to the real person, which is an abstraction in Platonia. I can't really see an alternative other than Russel's suggestion that the random activity might perfectly sustain consciousness until a certain point, then all consciousness would abruptly stop. That would lead to the non sensical partial zombie. Those who says I don't feel any difference. I think you illustrate my point. If we want to avoid partial zombie, and keep the invariance of consciousness for the digital substitution, we must recognize and understand that invoking a rome of matter or god as a computation selector, appears as a magical explanation, like if we should not isolate that measure with the means of computer science, and then test it with the empirical physics. Bruno Go back several steps and consider why we think computationalism might be true in the first place. The usual start is that computers can behave intelligently and substitute for processes in the brain. OK. So if something else can behave intelligently and substitute for processes in the brain, it's not absurd to consider that it might be conscious. It's begging the question to say that it can't be conscious because it isn't a computation. The movie and the lucky random brain are different in that respect. The movie doesn't behave like if it was conscious. I can tell the movie that mustard is a mineral, or an animal, the movie does not react. it fails at the Turing tests, and the zombie test. There is neither computations, nor intelligent behaviors, relevant with the consciousness associated' to the boolean circuit. The inimagibly lucky random brain, on the contrary, does behave in a way making a person acting like a p-zombie or a conscious individual. We don't see the difference with a conscious being, by definition/construction. Well, if a random event mimics by chance a computation, that means at the least that the computation exists (in arithmetic), and I suggest to associate consciousness to it. Then if I have the way to learn that from time t1 to time t2 the neuron fired randomly, but
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 07:19:46PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 May 2015, at 10:21, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: I can't really see an alternative other than Russel's suggestion that the random activity might perfectly sustain consciousness until a certain point, then all consciousness would abruptly stop. That would lead to the non sensical partial zombie. Those who says I don't feel any difference. Not at all. My suggestion is that there wouldn't be any partial zombies, just normally functioning consciousness, and full zombies, with respect to Chalmers fading qualia experiment, due to network effects. Obviously, with functionalism (and computationalism), consciousness is retained throughout, and no zombies appear. Chalmers was trying to show an absurdity with non-functionalism, and I don't think it works, except insofar as full zombies are absurd. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 12:36 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/23/2015 11:47 PM, Jason Resch wrote: There is a common programming technique called memoization. Essentially building automatic caches for functions within a program. I wonder: would adding memorization to the functions implementing an AI eventually result in it becoming a zombie recording rather than a program, if it were fed all the same inputs a second time? Isn't that exactly what happens when you learn to ride a bicycle, hit a tennis ball, touch type,... Stuff you had to think about when you were learning becomes automatic - and subconscious. Interesting. I wonder if there is a connection. Jason I suspect a lot of these conundrums arise from taking consciousness to be fundamental, rather than a language related add-on to intelligence. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Monday, May 25, 2015, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 07:19:46PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 May 2015, at 10:21, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: I can't really see an alternative other than Russel's suggestion that the random activity might perfectly sustain consciousness until a certain point, then all consciousness would abruptly stop. That would lead to the non sensical partial zombie. Those who says I don't feel any difference. Not at all. My suggestion is that there wouldn't be any partial zombies, just normally functioning consciousness, and full zombies, with respect to Chalmers fading qualia experiment, due to network effects. Obviously, with functionalism (and computationalism), consciousness is retained throughout, and no zombies appear. Chalmers was trying to show an absurdity with non-functionalism, and I don't think it works, except insofar as full zombies are absurd. It could work the way you say, but it would mean the replacement neurons would support consciousness, since if the neurons were simply removed and not replaced consciousness would fade. So it would be a partial proof of computationalism, since the electronic neurons would not be inert with respect to consciousness, but could not sustain it in large enough numbers. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 5/24/2015 11:28 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Monday, May 25, 2015, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 1:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Again, with comp, all incarnations are zombie, because bodies do not think. It is the abstract person which thinks But a few thumps on the body and the abstract person won't think either. So far as we have observered *only* bodies think. If comp implies the contrary isn't that so much the worse for comp. In a virtual environment, destroying the body destroys the consciousness, but both are actually due to the underlying computations. How can those thumped know it's virtual. A virtual environment with virtual people doing virtual actions seems to make virtual virtually meaningless. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 3:52 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 23 May 2015, at 17:07, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? A lookup table might have some primitive conscious, but I think any consciousness it has would be more or less the same regardless of the number of entries within that lookup table. With more entries, its information content grows, but it's capacity to process, interpret, or understand that information remains constant. You can emulate the brain of Einstein with a (ridiculously large) look-up table, assuming you are ridiculously patient---or we slow down your own brain so that you are as slow as einstein. Is that incarnation a zombie? Again, with comp, all incarnations are zombie, because bodies do not think. It is the abstract person which thinks, and in this case Einstein will still be defined by the simplest normal computations, which here, and only here, have taken the form of that unplausible giant Einstein look-up table emulation at the right level. That last bit is the part I have difficulty with. How can a a single call to a lookup table ever be at the right level. It seems to be with only one lookup, the table must always operate (by definition) at the highest level, which is probably not low enough to be at the right level. On the other hand, if we are talking about using lookup tables to implement and, or, nand, not, etc. then I can see a CPU based on lookup tables for these low level operations be used to implement a conscious program. The type of lookup table I have a problem ascribing intelligence to is the type Ned Block described as being capable of passing a Turing test, which received text inputs and
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 25 May 2015 at 07:51, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 11:28 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: In a virtual environment, destroying the body destroys the consciousness, but both are actually due to the underlying computations. How can those thumped know it's virtual. A virtual environment with virtual people doing virtual actions seems to make virtual virtually meaningless. The people won't necessarily know, but they could know, as it could be revealed by the programmers or deduced from some programming glitch (as in the film The Thirteenth Floor). But I don't think it makes a difference if they know or not. The answer to the obvious objection that if you destroy the brain you destroy consciousness, so consciousness can't reside in Platonia, is that both the brain and consciousness could reside in Platonia. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 6:09 AM, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 4:47:12 PM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 12:40 AM, Pierz pie...@gmail.com wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 1:07:15 AM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? I really like this argument, even though I once came up with a (bad) attempt to refute it. I wish it received more attention because it does cast quite a penetrating light on the issue. What you're suggesting is effectively the cache pattern in computer programming, where we trade memory resources for computational resources. Instead of repeating a resource-intensive computation, we store the inputs and outputs for later regurgitation. How is this different from a movie recording of brain activity (which most on the list seem to agree is not conscious)? The lookup table is just a really long recording, only we use the input to determine to which section of the recording to fast-forward/rewind to. It isn't different to a recording. But here's the thing: when we ask if the lookup machine is conscious, we are kind of implicitly asking: is it having an experience *now*, while I ask the question and see a response. But what does such a question actually even mean? If a computation is underway in time when the machine responds, then I assume it is having a co-temporal experience. But the lookup machine idea forces us to the realization that different observers' subjective experiences (the pure qualia) can't be mapped to one another in objective time. Interesting observation. Kind of like how time is completely incomparable between two universes, consciousness (existing as a platonic
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 5/24/2015 4:27 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 25 May 2015 at 07:51, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/24/2015 11:28 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: In a virtual environment, destroying the body destroys the consciousness, but both are actually due to the underlying computations. How can those thumped know it's virtual. A virtual environment with virtual people doing virtual actions seems to make virtual virtually meaningless. The people won't necessarily know, but they could know, as it could be revealed by the programmers or deduced from some programming glitch (as in the film The Thirteenth Floor). But I don't think it makes a difference if they know or not. The answer to the obvious objection that if you destroy the brain you destroy consciousness, so consciousness can't reside in Platonia, is that both the brain and consciousness could reside in Platonia. Where ever they reside though you have to explain how damaging the brain changes consciousness. And if you can explain this relation in Platonia why won't the same relation exist in Physicalia. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 12:40 AM, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 1:07:15 AM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? I really like this argument, even though I once came up with a (bad) attempt to refute it. I wish it received more attention because it does cast quite a penetrating light on the issue. What you're suggesting is effectively the cache pattern in computer programming, where we trade memory resources for computational resources. Instead of repeating a resource-intensive computation, we store the inputs and outputs for later regurgitation. How is this different from a movie recording of brain activity (which most on the list seem to agree is not conscious)? The lookup table is just a really long recording, only we use the input to determine to which section of the recording to fast-forward/rewind to. The cached results 'store' intelligence in an analogous way to the storage of energy as potential energy. We effectively flatten out time (the computational process) into the spatial dimension (memory). But what if intelligence were not used to create the lookup table? Does the history/creation event, which may be arbitrarily far in the past, really play any role in a present level of consciousness? Or the reverse: the future creation of a one-time-pad, retroactively restores intelligence (consciousness?) to what was previously always a dumb program. The cache pattern does not allow us to cheat the law that intelligent work must be done in order to produce intelligent results, it merely allows us to do that work at a time that suits us. The intelligence has been transferred into the spatial relationships built into the
Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Saturday, May 23, 2015, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 22 May 2015, at 10:34, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Friday, May 22, 2015, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 21 May 2015, at 01:53, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Wednesday, May 20, 2015, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: snip Partial zombies are absurd because they make the concept of consciousness meaningless. OK. Random neurons, separated neurons and platonic computations sustaining consciousness are merely weird, not absurd. Not OK. Random neurone, like the movie, simply does not compute. They only mimic the contingent (and logically unrelated) physical activity related to a special implementation of a computation. If you change the initial computer, that physical activity could mimic another computation. Or, like Maudlin showed: you can change the physical activity arbitrarily, and still mimic the initial computation: so the relation between computation, and the physical activity of the computer running that computation is accidental, nor logical. Platonic computation, on the contrary, does compute (in the original sense of computation). You're assuming not only that computationalism is true, but that it's exclusively true. That is part of the definition, and that is why I add often that we have to say yes to the doctor, in virtue of surviving qua computatio. I have often try to explain that someone can believe in both Church thesis, and say yes to the doctor, but still believe in this not for the reason that the artficial brain will run the relevant computation, but because he believes in the Virgin Mary, and he believes she is good and compensionate, so that if the artificial brain is good enough she will save your soul, and reinstall it in the digital physical brain. That is *not* computationalism. It is computationalism + magic. But it's not obvious that *only* computations can sustain consciousness. Maybe appropriate random behaviour can do so as well. Alternatively, perhaps appropriate random behaviour would at least not destroy the consciousness that was there to begin with, because the real source of consciousness was neither the brain's normal physical activity nor the random activity. I can't really see an alternative other than Russel's suggestion that the random activity might perfectly sustain consciousness until a certain point, then all consciousness would abruptly stop. Go back several steps and consider why we think computationalism might be true in the first place. The usual start is that computers can behave intelligently and substitute for processes in the brain. OK. So if something else can behave intelligently and substitute for processes in the brain, it's not absurd to consider that it might be conscious. It's begging the question to say that it can't be conscious because it isn't a computation. The movie and the lucky random brain are different in that respect. The movie doesn't behave like if it was conscious. I can tell the movie that mustard is a mineral, or an animal, the movie does not react. it fails at the Turing tests, and the zombie test. There is neither computations, nor intelligent behaviors, relevant with the consciousness associated' to the boolean circuit. The inimagibly lucky random brain, on the contrary, does behave in a way making a person acting like a p-zombie or a conscious individual. We don't see the difference with a conscious being, by definition/construction. Well, if a random event mimics by chance a computation, that means at the least that the computation exists (in arithmetic), and I suggest to associate consciousness to it. Then if I have the way to learn that from time t1 to time t2 the neuron fired randomly, but correctly, by chance, that would only add to my suspicion that the physical activity has some relationship with consciousness. It is just a relative implementation of the abstract computation. That one should have its normal measure guarantied by the statistical sum on all computations below its substitution level. Now, the movie was a constructive object. A brain which is random but lucky is equivalent with a white rabbit event, and using it in a thought experiment might not convey so much. In this case, it seems to make my point that we need very special event, infinite luck or Virgin Mary, to resist the consequence of the idea that our consciousness is invariant for Turing-equivalence. Matter becomes then the symptom that some numbers win some (self) measure theoretical game. Comp suggests we can explain the appearances and relative persistence of physical realities from a statistical bio or psycho or theo -logy. And that is confirmed by the interview of the Löbian machine (by the results of Gödel, Löb, Solovay, Visser, ...). Bruno -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Saturday, May 23, 2015 at 2:14:07 AM UTC+10, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 22 May 2015, at 10:34, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Friday, May 22, 2015, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 21 May 2015, at 01:53, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Wednesday, May 20, 2015, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: snip Partial zombies are absurd because they make the concept of consciousness meaningless. OK. Random neurons, separated neurons and platonic computations sustaining consciousness are merely weird, not absurd. Not OK. Random neurone, like the movie, simply does not compute. They only mimic the contingent (and logically unrelated) physical activity related to a special implementation of a computation. If you change the initial computer, that physical activity could mimic another computation. Or, like Maudlin showed: you can change the physical activity arbitrarily, and still mimic the initial computation: so the relation between computation, and the physical activity of the computer running that computation is accidental, nor logical. Platonic computation, on the contrary, does compute (in the original sense of computation). You're assuming not only that computationalism is true, but that it's exclusively true. That is part of the definition, and that is why I add often that we have to say yes to the doctor, in virtue of surviving qua computatio. I have often try to explain that someone can believe in both Church thesis, and say yes to the doctor, but still believe in this not for the reason that the artficial brain will run the relevant computation, but because he believes in the Virgin Mary, and he believes she is good and compensionate, so that if the artificial brain is good enough she will save your soul, and reinstall it in the digital physical brain. That is *not* computationalism. It is computationalism + magic. Go back several steps and consider why we think computationalism might be true in the first place. The usual start is that computers can behave intelligently and substitute for processes in the brain. OK. So if something else can behave intelligently and substitute for processes in the brain, it's not absurd to consider that it might be conscious. It's begging the question to say that it can't be conscious because it isn't a computation. The movie and the lucky random brain are different in that respect. The movie doesn't behave like if it was conscious. I can tell the movie that mustard is a mineral, or an animal, the movie does not react. it fails at the Turing tests, and the zombie test. There is neither computations, nor intelligent behaviors, relevant with the consciousness associated' to the boolean circuit. The inimagibly lucky random brain, on the contrary, does behave in a way making a person acting like a p-zombie or a conscious individual. We don't see the difference with a conscious being, by definition/construction. Well, if a random event mimics by chance a computation, that means at the least that the computation exists (in arithmetic), and I suggest to associate consciousness to it. I suspect you're wrong. In the case of the recording, the movie might still pass the Turing test *if we invert the flukey coincidence* and allow the possibility the questioner might ask questions that exactly correspond to the responses that the film happens to output. I remember watching a Blues Brothers midnight screening once, and all the cult fans who'd go every week would yell things out at certain points in the action and the actors would appear to respond to their shouted questions and interjections. In this case the illusion of conversation was constructed, but it could occur by chance. Would the recording then be conscious? In both the random and fixed response cases, there is no actual link other than coincidence between inputs and outputs, and this is the key. The random brain is not responding or processing inputs at all, any more than the film is. So the key to these types of thought experiments is whether intelligence and consciousness are functions of the responsive relationship between inputs and outputs, or merely the appearance of responsiveness. I think we have to say that actual responsiveness is required, and therefore fearless commit to the idea that a zombie is indeed 'possible', if the infinitely unlikely is possible! I think that arguments based on 'infinite improbability' (white rabbits) must surely be the weakest of all possible arguments in philosophy, and should really just be dismissed out of hand. Just as Deutsch argues that there are no worlds in the multiverse where magic works, only some worlds where it has worked and will never work again, we can admit the possibility of being fooled into believing that a randomly jerking zombie is conscious, or a typewriter-jabbering monkey is the new Shakespeare, but we only
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia errata
OOPS. I meant ...randomly means NOT in accordance... On 5/22/2015 11:15 PM, meekerdb wrote: And note that in this context randomly means in accordance with nomologically determined causal probabilities. It doesn't necessarily mean deterministically. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 5/22/2015 11:06 PM, Pierz wrote: I suspect you're wrong. In the case of the recording, the movie might still pass the Turing test /if we invert the flukey coincidence/ and allow the possibility the questioner might ask questions that exactly correspond to the responses that the film happens to output. I remember watching a Blues Brothers midnight screening once, and all the cult fans who'd go every week would yell things out at certain points in the action and the actors would appear to respond to their shouted questions and interjections. In this case the illusion of conversation was constructed, but it could occur by chance. Would the recording then be conscious? In both the random and fixed response cases, there is no actual link other than coincidence between inputs and outputs, and this is the key. The random brain is not responding or processing inputs at all, any more than the film is. So the key to these types of thought experiments is whether intelligence and consciousness are functions of the responsive relationship between inputs and outputs, or merely the appearance of responsiveness. I think we have to say that actual responsiveness is required, and therefore fearless commit to the idea that a zombie is indeed 'possible', if the infinitely unlikely is possible! I think that arguments based on 'infinite improbability' (white rabbits) must surely be the weakest of all possible arguments in philosophy, and should really just be dismissed out of hand. I agree. Just as Deutsch argues that there are no worlds in the multiverse where magic works, only some worlds where it has worked and will never work again, we can admit the possibility of being fooled into believing that a randomly jerking zombie is conscious, or a typewriter-jabbering monkey is the new Shakespeare, but we only need to wait another second to see that we were mistaken. An objection I foresee is that the brain's neurons and their firing are its sole activity, and so if they fire randomly in a by-chance correct fashion, then the random brain's activity is indistinguishable from a real conscious brain's activity. This is a red herring. How could a randomly operating brain be identical to a healthy consciously functioning one? For the neurons to be firing randomly, something would need to be physically very different and wrong about that brain. If the brain was truly physically identical, then of course it would no longer be firing randomly And note that in this context randomly means in accordance with nomologically determined causal probabilities. It doesn't necessarily mean deterministically. Brent but would /actually/ be an organised, healthy brain, assembled by chance. Such a brain would pass the wait a second test because it would genuinely be responding in an organised manner. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 1:15 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/22/2015 11:06 PM, Pierz wrote: I suspect you're wrong. In the case of the recording, the movie might still pass the Turing test *if we invert the flukey coincidence* and allow the possibility the questioner might ask questions that exactly correspond to the responses that the film happens to output. I remember watching a Blues Brothers midnight screening once, and all the cult fans who'd go every week would yell things out at certain points in the action and the actors would appear to respond to their shouted questions and interjections. In this case the illusion of conversation was constructed, but it could occur by chance. Would the recording then be conscious? In both the random and fixed response cases, there is no actual link other than coincidence between inputs and outputs, and this is the key. The random brain is not responding or processing inputs at all, any more than the film is. So the key to these types of thought experiments is whether intelligence and consciousness are functions of the responsive relationship between inputs and outputs, or merely the appearance of responsiveness. I think we have to say that actual responsiveness is required, and therefore fearless commit to the idea that a zombie is indeed 'possible', if the infinitely unlikely is possible! I think that arguments based on 'infinite improbability' (white rabbits) must surely be the weakest of all possible arguments in philosophy, and should really just be dismissed out of hand. I agree. I don't look at these rare scenarios as arguments, but as tools to refine our understanding of computationalism. Look at what it has already done. Bruno, Stathis, and myself -- all people who have argued for computationalism, are now finding we disagree on issues raised by these extreme scenarios: infinite luck, infinitely large lookup tables, etc. Whatever else you might say of these extreme cases, I think they are useful. They initiated this debate, which will hopefully lead to increased clarity concerning computationalism. Jason Just as Deutsch argues that there are no worlds in the multiverse where magic works, only some worlds where it has worked and will never work again, we can admit the possibility of being fooled into believing that a randomly jerking zombie is conscious, or a typewriter-jabbering monkey is the new Shakespeare, but we only need to wait another second to see that we were mistaken. An objection I foresee is that the brain's neurons and their firing are its sole activity, and so if they fire randomly in a by-chance correct fashion, then the random brain's activity is indistinguishable from a real conscious brain's activity. This is a red herring. How could a randomly operating brain be identical to a healthy consciously functioning one? For the neurons to be firing randomly, something would need to be physically very different and wrong about that brain. If the brain was truly physically identical, then of course it would no longer be firing randomly And note that in this context randomly means in accordance with nomologically determined causal probabilities. It doesn't necessarily mean deterministically. Brent but would *actually* be an organised, healthy brain, assembled by chance. Such a brain would pass the wait a second test because it would genuinely be responding in an organised manner. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? A lookup table might have some primitive conscious, but I think any consciousness it has would be more or less the same regardless of the number of entries within that lookup table. With more entries, its information content grows, but it's capacity to process, interpret, or understand that information remains constant. Does an ant trained to perform the look table's operation become more aware when placed in a vast library than when placed on a small bookshelf, to perform the identical function? Are you not doing the Searle's level confusion? I see the close parallel, but I hope not. The input to the ant when interpreted as a binary string is a number, that tells the ant how many pages to walk past to get to the page containing the answer, where the ant stops the paper is read. I don't see how this system consisting of the ant, and the library, is conscious. The system is intelligent, in that it provides meaningful answers to queries, but it processes no information besides evaluating the magnitude of an input (represented as a number) and then jumping to that offset to read that memory location. Can there be consciousness in a simple A implies B relation? The consciousness (if there is one) is the consciousness of the person, incarnated in the program. It is not the consciousness of the low level processor, no more than the physicality which supports the ant and the table. Again, with comp there is never any problem with all of this. The consciousness is an immaterial attribute of an immaterial program/machine's soul, which is defined exclusively by a class of true number relations. While I can see certain very complex number relations leading to
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Wed, May 20, 2015 at 4:20 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Tuesday, 19 May 2015, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. Does an ant trained to perform the look table's operation become more aware when placed in a vast library than when placed on a small bookshelf, to perform the identical function? The ant is more aware than a neuron but it is not the ant's awareness that is at issue, it is the system of which the ant is a part. Step back and consider why we speculate that computationalism may be true. It is not because computers are complex like brains, or because brains carry out computations like computers. It is because animals with brains display intelligent behaviour, and computers also display intelligent behaviour, or at least might in the future. If Blockheads roamed the Earth answering all our questions, then surely we would debate whether they were conscious like us, whether they have feelings and whether they should be accorded human rights. I would not torture a blockhead nor refuse to serve one in my restaurant, but I might caution my daughter before marrying one that it might be a zombie. I know I sound like Craig in saying this but I see a difference in kind between the programs, even if they have an equivalence in inputs and outputs at some high layer. There, is, for instance, no society of mind or modularity of mind as Minsky and Fodor spoke of. Here there is only a top level defintion of high level inputs and outputs. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Sunday, May 24, 2015 at 1:07:15 AM UTC+10, Jason wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be javascript: wrote: On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stat...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jason...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. But the structure of the counterfactuals is identical regardless of the inputs and outputs in its lookup table. If you replaced all of its outputs with random strings, would that change its consciousness? What if there existed a special decoding book, which was a one-time-pad that could decode its random answers? Would the existence of this book make it more conscious than if this book did not exist? If there is zero information content in the outputs returned by the lookup table it might as well return all X characters as its response to any query, but then would any program that just returns a string of X's be conscious? I really like this argument, even though I once came up with a (bad) attempt to refute it. I wish it received more attention because it does cast quite a penetrating light on the issue. What you're suggesting is effectively the cache pattern in computer programming, where we trade memory resources for computational resources. Instead of repeating a resource-intensive computation, we store the inputs and outputs for later regurgitation. The cached results 'store' intelligence in an analogous way to the storage of energy as potential energy. We effectively flatten out time (the computational process) into the spatial dimension (memory). The cache pattern does not allow us to cheat the law that intelligent work must be done in order to produce intelligent results, it merely allows us to do that work at a time that suits us. The intelligence has been transferred into the spatial relationships built into the table, intelligent relationships we can only discover by doing the computations. The lookup table is useless without its index. So what your thought experiment points out is pretty fascinating: that intelligence can be manifested spatially as well as temporally, contrary to our common-sense intuition, and that the intelligence of a machine does not have to be in real time. That actually supports the MGA if anything - because computations are abstractions outside of time and space. We should not forget that the memory resources required to duplicate any kind of intelligent computer would be
Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Friday, May 22, 2015, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','marc...@ulb.ac.be'); wrote: On 21 May 2015, at 01:53, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Wednesday, May 20, 2015, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: snip Partial zombies are absurd because they make the concept of consciousness meaningless. OK. Random neurons, separated neurons and platonic computations sustaining consciousness are merely weird, not absurd. Not OK. Random neurone, like the movie, simply does not compute. They only mimic the contingent (and logically unrelated) physical activity related to a special implementation of a computation. If you change the initial computer, that physical activity could mimic another computation. Or, like Maudlin showed: you can change the physical activity arbitrarily, and still mimic the initial computation: so the relation between computation, and the physical activity of the computer running that computation is accidental, nor logical. Platonic computation, on the contrary, does compute (in the original sense of computation). You're assuming not only that computationalism is true, but that it's exclusively true. Go back several steps and consider why we think computationalism might be true in the first place. The usual start is that computers can behave intelligently and substitute for processes in the brain. So if something else can behave intelligently and substitute for processes in the brain, it's not absurd to consider that it might be conscious. It's begging the question to say that it can't be conscious because it isn't a computation. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 22 May 2015, at 10:34, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Friday, May 22, 2015, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 21 May 2015, at 01:53, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Wednesday, May 20, 2015, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: snip Partial zombies are absurd because they make the concept of consciousness meaningless. OK. Random neurons, separated neurons and platonic computations sustaining consciousness are merely weird, not absurd. Not OK. Random neurone, like the movie, simply does not compute. They only mimic the contingent (and logically unrelated) physical activity related to a special implementation of a computation. If you change the initial computer, that physical activity could mimic another computation. Or, like Maudlin showed: you can change the physical activity arbitrarily, and still mimic the initial computation: so the relation between computation, and the physical activity of the computer running that computation is accidental, nor logical. Platonic computation, on the contrary, does compute (in the original sense of computation). You're assuming not only that computationalism is true, but that it's exclusively true. That is part of the definition, and that is why I add often that we have to say yes to the doctor, in virtue of surviving qua computatio. I have often try to explain that someone can believe in both Church thesis, and say yes to the doctor, but still believe in this not for the reason that the artficial brain will run the relevant computation, but because he believes in the Virgin Mary, and he believes she is good and compensionate, so that if the artificial brain is good enough she will save your soul, and reinstall it in the digital physical brain. That is *not* computationalism. It is computationalism + magic. Go back several steps and consider why we think computationalism might be true in the first place. The usual start is that computers can behave intelligently and substitute for processes in the brain. OK. So if something else can behave intelligently and substitute for processes in the brain, it's not absurd to consider that it might be conscious. It's begging the question to say that it can't be conscious because it isn't a computation. The movie and the lucky random brain are different in that respect. The movie doesn't behave like if it was conscious. I can tell the movie that mustard is a mineral, or an animal, the movie does not react. it fails at the Turing tests, and the zombie test. There is neither computations, nor intelligent behaviors, relevant with the consciousness associated' to the boolean circuit. The inimagibly lucky random brain, on the contrary, does behave in a way making a person acting like a p-zombie or a conscious individual. We don't see the difference with a conscious being, by definition/construction. Well, if a random event mimics by chance a computation, that means at the least that the computation exists (in arithmetic), and I suggest to associate consciousness to it. Then if I have the way to learn that from time t1 to time t2 the neuron fired randomly, but correctly, by chance, that would only add to my suspicion that the physical activity has some relationship with consciousness. It is just a relative implementation of the abstract computation. That one should have its normal measure guarantied by the statistical sum on all computations below its substitution level. Now, the movie was a constructive object. A brain which is random but lucky is equivalent with a white rabbit event, and using it in a thought experiment might not convey so much. In this case, it seems to make my point that we need very special event, infinite luck or Virgin Mary, to resist the consequence of the idea that our consciousness is invariant for Turing-equivalence. Matter becomes then the symptom that some numbers win some (self) measure theoretical game. Comp suggests we can explain the appearances and relative persistence of physical realities from a statistical bio or psycho or theo -logy. And that is confirmed by the interview of the Löbian machine (by the results of Gödel, Löb, Solovay, Visser, ...). Bruno -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 21 May 2015 at 14:27, Terren Suydam terren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: That's the point though, I do notice a change, from not being conscious of driving to becoming conscious of it again. And there's no denying the difference between the two. But that's something that normally happens. There are many such examples: a gradual change in your environment that you don't notice, perhaps the fading of qualia over time as brains age and neurons die that you don't notice. If you made a change to the brain and these sorts of examples became more common or more pronounced, that would involve a change in behaviour from the normal brain, as well as a change in qualia. You would be driving with no awareness of driving, and when asked about it you would say you were aware of driving, but you would be either delusional or lying. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
I take your point that the partial zombie in my example is a different scenario from the neuron-replacement one... just trying to make sense of what it could mean to notice being a zombie (after the fact), in a way that's not absurd and doesn't suffer from the problem that the ability to notice it invalidates the scenario. Terren On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 2:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 21 May 2015 at 14:27, Terren Suydam terren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: That's the point though, I do notice a change, from not being conscious of driving to becoming conscious of it again. And there's no denying the difference between the two. But that's something that normally happens. There are many such examples: a gradual change in your environment that you don't notice, perhaps the fading of qualia over time as brains age and neurons die that you don't notice. If you made a change to the brain and these sorts of examples became more common or more pronounced, that would involve a change in behaviour from the normal brain, as well as a change in qualia. You would be driving with no awareness of driving, and when asked about it you would say you were aware of driving, but you would be either delusional or lying. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 21 May 2015, at 00:28, meekerdb wrote: On 5/19/2015 10:44 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico- chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. When programs are written that determine human safety (e.g. aircraft flight controls) they are written languages that can be proven correct - in the sense of correctly implementing a specification and not being able to prove a contradiction. Is there some theorem that proves such provably correct programs cannot be intelligent? They are intelligent, like a pebble, i.e. in the very large sense. You will not hear such a program proving/claiming its own intelligence, of making gossips on the pilot. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 21 May 2015, at 01:53, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Wednesday, May 20, 2015, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: snip Partial zombies are absurd because they make the concept of consciousness meaningless. OK. Random neurons, separated neurons and platonic computations sustaining consciousness are merely weird, not absurd. Not OK. Random neurone, like the movie, simply does not compute. They only mimic the contingent (and logically unrelated) physical activity related to a special implementation of a computation. If you change the initial computer, that physical activity could mimic another computation. Or, like Maudlin showed: you can change the physical activity arbitrarily, and still mimic the initial computation: so the relation between computation, and the physical activity of the computer running that computation is accidental, nor logical. Platonic computation, on the contrary, does compute (in the original sense of computation). Bruno -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 19 May 2015, at 04:21, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. Hmm This is still a misleading way to talk. Only a person can be conscious, and an electric circuit can support the relative manifestation of that person, like a sufficiently big look-up table. Then it is obvious that movies and random neurons can't *support* a person, even if at some stage they can be used to reinstanciate the consciousness ability to manifeste. Nobody will say yes to a doctopr who propose a random brain, nor a movie. Two cats in a room can represent the number two, but the number two does not need the cat to make sense, it needs the two cats only to manifest itself in that room. What lives in our brain is far more complex than the number 2, but the association is similar, and we, from our own perspective are associate to many computations. Bruno -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 19 May 2015, at 15:53, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 14:45, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:02, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: I think you're not taking into account the level of the functional substitution. Of course functionally equivalent silicon and functionally equivalent neurons can (under functionalism) both instantiate the same consciousness. But a calculator computing 2+3 cannot substitute for a human brain computing 2+3 and produce the same consciousness. In a gradual replacement the substitution must obviously be at a level sufficient to maintain the function of the whole brain. Sticking a calculator in it won't work. Do you think a Blockhead that was functionally equivalent to you (it could fool all your friends and family in a Turing test scenario into thinking it was intact you) would be conscious in the same way as you? Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico- chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. Does an ant trained to perform the look table's operation become more aware when placed in a vast library than when placed on a small bookshelf, to perform the identical function? Are you not doing the Searle's level confusion? The consciousness (if there is one) is the consciousness of the person, incarnated in the program. It is not the consciousness of the low level processor, no more than the physicality which supports the ant and the table. Again, with comp there is never any problem with all of this. The consciousness is an immaterial attribute of an immaterial program/ machine's soul, which is defined exclusively by a class of true number relations. The task of a 3p machine consists only in associating that consciousness to your local reality, but the body of the machine, or whatever 3p you can associate to the machine, is not conscious, and, to be sure, does not even exist as such. I am aware it is hard to swallow, but there is no contradiction (so far). And to keep comp, and avoid attributing a mind or worst a partial mind to people without brain, or to movie (which handles only very simple computations (projections)), I don't see any other option (but fake magic). It is perhaps helpful to see that this reversal makes a theory like Robinson arithmetic into a TOE, and to start directly with it. In that case all what we deal with is defined in term of arithmetical formula, that is, in term of 0, s, + and *. The handling of the difference between object and their description is made explicit, through the coding, or Gödel-numbering, or programming, of the object concerned. For example, in the combinators, the number 0 is some times defined by the combinator SKK, the expression SKK can be represented by a Gödel number (in many different way), attributing to 0 a rather big number representing its definition, and this distinguish well 0 and its representation (which will be a rather big number). Proceeding in this way, we avoid the easy confusions between the object level and the metalevel, and we can even mixed them in a clean way, as the metalevel embeds itself at the object level (which is what made Gödel and Löb's arithmetical self-reference possible to start with). I would have believed this almost refute comp, if there were not that quantum-Everett confirmation of that admittedly shocking
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 19 May 2015, at 23:09, meekerdb wrote: On 5/19/2015 11:47 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: While I applaud IIT because it seems to be the first theory of consciousness that takes information architecture seriously (and thus situating theoretical considerations in a holistic rather than reductionist context) and to make predictions based on that, I agree with Aaronson's criticisms of it - namely, that IIT predicts that certain classes of computational systems that we intuitively would fail to see as conscious get measures of consciousness potentially higher than for human brains. One key feature of consciousness as we know it is ongoing subjective experience. So a question I keep coming back to in my own thinking is, what kind of information architecture lends itself to a flow of data, such that if we assume that consciousness is how data feels as it's processed, we might imagine it could correspond to ongoing subjective experience? It seems to me that such an architecture would have, at a bare minimum, its current state recursively fed back into itself to be processed in the next iteration. This happens in a trivial way in any processor chip (or lookup table AI for that matter). As such, there may be a very trivial sort of consciousness associated with a processor or lookup table, but this does not get us anywhere near understanding the richness of human consciousness. I think you need to consider what would be the benefit of this recursion. How could it be naturally selected. Jeff Hawkins idea is that the brain continually tries to anticipate, at the perceptual level and even in lower layers of the cerebral cortex. I think that is the case, and it is the case for the []p t, which is a form of bet/anticipation. That idea is the base of Helmholtz theory of perception, and many experience in psychology confirms this idea. Then signals that don't match the prediction get broadcast more widely at the next higher level where they may have been anticipated by other neurons. At the highest level (he says there are six in the cortext as I recall) signals spread to language and visual modules and one becomes aware of them or they spring to mind. This would have the advantage of directing computational resources to that which is novel, while leaving familiar things to learned responses. To this I would add that the novel/conscious experience is given some value, e.g. emotional weight, which makes it more or less strongly remembered. And of course it isn't remembered like recording; it's synopsized in terms of it's connection to other remembered events. This memory is needed for learning from experience. OK. Of course the loop Terren alluded too is built in in the [], and the usual self-reference brought bu the use of the second recursion theorem, or the Dx = xx trick. Such loop are the technical base of all the modal logics of self-reference. The second recursion theorem is hidden in the proof of Solovay's theorem. Bruno Brent An architecture that supports that richness - the subjective experience, IOW, of an embodied sensing agent - would involve that recursion but at a holistic level. The entire system, potentially, including the system's informational representations of sensory data (whatever form that took) would be involved in that feedback loop. So the phi of IIT has a role here, as the processor/lookup table architecture has a low phi. What is missing from phi is a measure of recursion - how the modules of a system feedback in such a way as to create a systemic, recursive processing loop. My hunch is that this would address Aaronson's objections, as brains would score high on this measure but the systems that Aaronson complains about, such as systems that do nothing but apply a low-density parity-check code, or other simple transformations of their input data would score low due to lack of recursion. Terren On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:23 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/19/2015 6:47 AM, Jason Resch wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 11:54 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/18/2015 9:45 PM, Jason Resch wrote: Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? What is there is there in a neural network? A computational state containing significant information
Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Tuesday, 19 May 2015, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: Not necessarily, just as an actor may not be conscious in the same way as me. But I suspect the Blockhead would be conscious; the intuition that a lookup table can't be conscious is like the intuition that an electric circuit can't be conscious. I don't see an equivalency between those intuitions. A lookup table has a bounded and very low degree of computational complexity: all answers to all queries are answered in constant time. While the table itself may have an arbitrarily high information content, what in the software of the lookup table program is there to appreciate/understand/know that information? Understanding emerges from the fact that the lookup table is immensely large. It could be wrong, but I don't think it is obviously less plausible than understanding emerging from a Turing machine made of tin cans. The lookup table is intelligent or at least offers the appearance of intelligence, but it makes the maximum possible advantage of the space-time trade off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space–time_tradeoff The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. Does an ant trained to perform the look table's operation become more aware when placed in a vast library than when placed on a small bookshelf, to perform the identical function? The ant is more aware than a neuron but it is not the ant's awareness that is at issue, it is the system of which the ant is a part. Step back and consider why we speculate that computationalism may be true. It is not because computers are complex like brains, or because brains carry out computations like computers. It is because animals with brains display intelligent behaviour, and computers also display intelligent behaviour, or at least might in the future. If Blockheads roamed the Earth answering all our questions, then surely we would debate whether they were conscious like us, whether they have feelings and whether they should be accorded human rights. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On Wednesday, May 20, 2015, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:54 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','stath...@gmail.com'); wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:05, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','jasonre...@gmail.com'); wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 10:05 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','stath...@gmail.com'); wrote: On Tuesday, May 19, 2015, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','marc...@ulb.ac.be'); wrote: On 16 May 2015, at 07:10, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 13 May 2015, at 11:59 am, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','jasonre...@gmail.com'); wrote: Chalmer's fading quailia argument shows that if replacing a biological neuron with a functionally equivalent silicon neuron changed conscious perception, then it would lead to an absurdity, either: 1. quaila fade/change as silicon neurons gradually replace the biological ones, leading to a case where the quaila are being completely out of touch with the functional state of the brain. or 2. the replacement eventually leads to a sudden and complete loss of all quaila, but this suggests a single neuron, or even a few molecules of that neuron, when substituted, somehow completely determine the presence of quaila His argument is convincing, but what happens when we replace neurons not with functionally identical ones, but with neurons that fire according to a RNG. In all but 1 case, the random firings of the neurons will result in completely different behaviors, but what about that 1 (immensely rare) case where the random neuron firings (by chance) equal the firing patterns of the substituted neurons. In this case, behavior as observed from the outside is identical. Brain patterns and activity are similar, but according to computationalism the consciousness is different, or perhaps a zombie (if all neurons are replaced with random firing neurons). Presume that the activity of neurons in the visual cortex is required for visual quaila, and that all neurons in the visual cortex are replaced with random firing neurons, which by chance, mimic the behavior of neurons when viewing an apple. Is this not an example of fading quaila, or quaila desynchronized from the brain state? Would this person feel that they are blind, or lack visual quaila, all the while not being able to express their deficiency? I used to think when Searle argued this exact same thing would occur when substituted functionally identical biological neurons with artificial neurons that it was completely ridiculous, for there would be no room in the functionally equivalent brain to support thoughts such as help! I can't see, I am blind! for the information content in the brain is identical when the neurons are functionally identical. But then how does this reconcile with fading quaila as the result of substituting randomly firing neurons? The computations are not the same, so presumably the consciousness is not the same. But also, the information content does not support knowing/believing/expressing/thinking something is wrong. If anything, the information content of this random brain is much less, but it seems the result is something where the quaila is out of sync with the global state of the brain. Can anyone else where shed some clarity on what they think happens, and how to explain it in the rare case of luckily working randomly firing neurons, when only partial substitutions of the neurons in a brain is performed? So Jason, are you still convinced that the random neurons would not be conscious? If you are, you are putting the cart before the horse. The fading qualia argument makes the case that any process preserving function also preserves consciousness. Any process; that computations are one such process is fortuitous. But the random neurons does not preserve function, nor do the movie. OK? I don't see why you're so sure about this. Function is preserved while the randomness corresponds to normal activity, then it all falls apart. If by some miracle it continued then the random brain is as good as a normal brain, and I'd say yes to the doctor offering me such a brain. If you don't think that counts as computation, OK - but it would still be conscious. My third-person function would indeed be preserved by such a Miracle Brain, but I would strongly doubt it would preserve my first-person. Why do you think that the random firing neurons preserve consciousness? Do you think they would still preserve consciousness if they became physically separated from each other yet maintained the same firing patterns? I think the random neurons would preserve consciousness because otherwise you could make a
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
On 5/19/2015 10:44 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: The tin-can Turing machine is unbounded in its potential computational complexity, there's no reason to be a bio- or silico-chauvinist against it. However, by definition, a lookup table has near zero computational complexity, no retained state. But it is counterfactually correct on a large range spectrum. Of course, it has to be infinite to be genuinely counterfactual-correct. When programs are written that determine human safety (e.g. aircraft flight controls) they are written languages that can be proven correct - in the sense of correctly implementing a specification and not being able to prove a contradiction. Is there some theorem that proves such provably correct programs cannot be intelligent? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
Mostly I agree with the absurdity of partial zombies... but couldn't you say I'm a partial zombie when I'm driving, get lost in thought, and realize minutes later that I had no awareness or memory of anything I drive past, yet somehow navigated curves and other cars? Terren On May 20, 2015 7:53 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Wednesday, May 20, 2015, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:54 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 19 May 2015 at 11:05, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 10:05 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Tuesday, May 19, 2015, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 16 May 2015, at 07:10, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 13 May 2015, at 11:59 am, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: Chalmer's fading quailia argument shows that if replacing a biological neuron with a functionally equivalent silicon neuron changed conscious perception, then it would lead to an absurdity, either: 1. quaila fade/change as silicon neurons gradually replace the biological ones, leading to a case where the quaila are being completely out of touch with the functional state of the brain. or 2. the replacement eventually leads to a sudden and complete loss of all quaila, but this suggests a single neuron, or even a few molecules of that neuron, when substituted, somehow completely determine the presence of quaila His argument is convincing, but what happens when we replace neurons not with functionally identical ones, but with neurons that fire according to a RNG. In all but 1 case, the random firings of the neurons will result in completely different behaviors, but what about that 1 (immensely rare) case where the random neuron firings (by chance) equal the firing patterns of the substituted neurons. In this case, behavior as observed from the outside is identical. Brain patterns and activity are similar, but according to computationalism the consciousness is different, or perhaps a zombie (if all neurons are replaced with random firing neurons). Presume that the activity of neurons in the visual cortex is required for visual quaila, and that all neurons in the visual cortex are replaced with random firing neurons, which by chance, mimic the behavior of neurons when viewing an apple. Is this not an example of fading quaila, or quaila desynchronized from the brain state? Would this person feel that they are blind, or lack visual quaila, all the while not being able to express their deficiency? I used to think when Searle argued this exact same thing would occur when substituted functionally identical biological neurons with artificial neurons that it was completely ridiculous, for there would be no room in the functionally equivalent brain to support thoughts such as help! I can't see, I am blind! for the information content in the brain is identical when the neurons are functionally identical. But then how does this reconcile with fading quaila as the result of substituting randomly firing neurons? The computations are not the same, so presumably the consciousness is not the same. But also, the information content does not support knowing/believing/expressing/thinking something is wrong. If anything, the information content of this random brain is much less, but it seems the result is something where the quaila is out of sync with the global state of the brain. Can anyone else where shed some clarity on what they think happens, and how to explain it in the rare case of luckily working randomly firing neurons, when only partial substitutions of the neurons in a brain is performed? So Jason, are you still convinced that the random neurons would not be conscious? If you are, you are putting the cart before the horse. The fading qualia argument makes the case that any process preserving function also preserves consciousness. Any process; that computations are one such process is fortuitous. But the random neurons does not preserve function, nor do the movie. OK? I don't see why you're so sure about this. Function is preserved while the randomness corresponds to normal activity, then it all falls apart. If by some miracle it continued then the random brain is as good as a normal brain, and I'd say yes to the doctor offering me such a brain. If you don't think that counts as computation, OK - but it would still be conscious. My third-person function would indeed be preserved by such a Miracle Brain, but I would strongly doubt it would preserve my first-person. Why do you think that the random firing neurons preserve consciousness? Do you think they would still preserve consciousness if they became physically separated from each other yet maintained the same firing
Re: Reconciling Random Neuron Firings and Fading Qualia
That's the point though, I do notice a change, from not being conscious of driving to becoming conscious of it again. And there's no denying the difference between the two. Terren On May 20, 2015 11:26 PM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday, May 21, 2015, Terren Suydam terren.suy...@gmail.com wrote: Mostly I agree with the absurdity of partial zombies... but couldn't you say I'm a partial zombie when I'm driving, get lost in thought, and realize minutes later that I had no awareness or memory of anything I drive past, yet somehow navigated curves and other cars? There are cases like the one you describe and others, such as cortical blindness where the patient believes he can see, but the situation to consider is one where the subject is lucid and would normally notice a change in his experiences, in order to show that there is a difference between the two. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
