A scientifically sound, objective test for consciousness
(The journal is free!) The test itself is not easy or cheap - but it is possible AND you can perform it on humans as well as AI. To deny that the test is valid involves a denial that scientists have P-consciousness, whilst being totally demanding of it and dependent on it for all science outcomes. Hales, C. (2009), 'An empirical framework for objective testing for P-consciousness in an artificial agent', The Open Artificial Intelligence Journal, 3, pp. 1-15. http://www.bentham.org/open/toaij/ *Abstract:* Two related and relatively obscure issues in science have eluded empirical tractability. Both can be directly traced to progress in artificial intelligence. The first is scientific proof of consciousness or otherwise in anything. The second is the role of consciousness in intelligent behaviour. This document approaches both issues by exploring the idea of using scientific behaviour self-referentially as a benchmark in an objective test for P-consciousness, which is the relevant critical aspect of consciousness. Scientific behaviour is unique in being both highly formalised and provably critically dependent on the P-consciousness of the primary senses. In the context of the primary senses P-consciousness is literally a formal identity with scientific observation. As such it is intrinsically afforded a status of critical dependency demonstrably no different to any other critical dependency in science, making scientific behaviour ideally suited to a self-referential scientific circumstance. The 'provability' derives from the delivery by science of objectively verifiable 'laws of nature'. By exploiting the critical dependency, an empirical framework is constructed as a refined and specialised version of existing propositions for a 'test for consciousness'. The specific role of P-consciousness is clarified: it is a human intracranial central nervous system construct that symbolically grounds the scientist in the distal external world, resulting in our ability to recognise, characterise and adapt to distal natural world novelty. It is hoped that in opening a discussion of a novel approach, the artificial intelligence community may eventually find a viable contender for its long overdue scientific basis. cheers colin hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: The Amoeba's Secret - English Version started
Hi Bruno, I feel your angst. The received view is a blunt and frightened beast, guarded by the ignorant and uncreative in wily protection of turf and co-conspirator. I recently did a powerpoint presentation called rejection 101. It sounds like you have been through exactly what I have been through - except on a geological timescale that would tire a god. Although I am starting to make progress... I regard that progress to be achieved in spite of them, not because of their vision or knowledge. The science I thought I was going to find was full of those who frolic in ideas sadly I was mistaken. Now, when I think I have made progress - I know that progress to be mediated by the less than adequate - and promulgated by momentum rather than incisive scrutiny- and it doesn't feel good. see file *2008_Thu_23_Oct.pdf * in the googlegroups everythinglist file store. So Amoebas speak english now, eh? Excellent. :-) cheers, Colin m.a. wrote: *Bruno,* * I've often wondered why neither Dr. Deutsch nor Alan Forrester has commented on your theory of UDA and AUDA. I certainly would be interested in their views. A theory that has execised some of the best minds on this list for months on end certainly deserves serious consideration. Best,* *martin a.* ** ** ** - Original Message - From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be To: everything-l...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-l...@googlegroups.com Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009 2:49 PM Subject: Re: The Amoeba's Secret - English Version started Even with politics operating behind the scene (which you have hinted), I can't imagine that nothing of the work is publishable. I already discussed proposition of publishing Conscience et Mécanisme with three publishers, before my thesis was judged not receivable (meaning no private defense, nor public defense, I have *never* met those who criticize, not even my work, but a product of their imagination). Then silence, even after the defense in Lille, and even more after the paradoxical price in Paris. I cannot explain. Or I can explain except that here reality is far beyond fiction as usual, but also more sad, and rather delicate if only because that story is not finished. My life is more unbelievable than any thing I assert in my works. It took me 22 years to understand what happened in 1977, and since then. I feel responsible to let them build they own trap, and then get myself a bit worried seeing them to protect themselves from Brussels to Paris! It is not because I have done an original work (say) in Brussels, that I got problems there. It is because I got problems in Brussels that I have done an original work. In 1977, they give me no chance, not even getting out of Belgium. In 1994, my work was criticize vaguely as not original, too much simple, and then delirious. And now already not from him in some place. Which again shows the problems is not related with my findings, except it belongs to the kind of things you can easily use to treat you as a fool (Gödel's theorem, Quantum mechanics, consciousness: few understand so it is easy to say not serious). The little scandal has grown up all the time and is too big, now. It is the kind of manipulation which makes everyone feel responsible, from corporatist reflex to corporatist reflex, when actually there is only one, very clever, but very bad, guy. Now that little scandal has become big enough to throw light on other really bigger scandals. There are cadavres dans les placards, as we say in French (corpses hidden in boxes). Mean of pressures. I still believe in academies, but like in School serial killer can exist. When you see the time made by religious institution to protect their member of their hierarchy from their much grave behavior, I estimate it could take a long time if ever to understand and recognize what happened. And I have no problem with serious academicians and scientists which understand enough to understand it is serious, even if probably wrong, which I have myself never ceased to believe plausible (which explains why I am eager to discuss the validity of the UDA steps, with people interested). I did defend the work as PhD thesis. I was asked many questions, I answered them and everyone got the idea. Some people takes time, but most get enough to trust the interest of the work. Still today, few get both UDA and AUDA. UDA is almost easy, but not so easy. AUDA is very *simple*, once you understand enough standard logic (which I have discovered is excessively rare). The whole thing is strongly interdisciplinary, and between disciplines, rumors circulate more quickly than scientific bridge,
Re: The Amoeba's Secret - English Version started
The file. sorry use *Rejection 101.pdf* enjoy! colin Colin Hales wrote: Hi Bruno, I feel your angst. The received view is a blunt and frightened beast, guarded by the ignorant and uncreative in wily protection of turf and co-conspirator. I recently did a powerpoint presentation called rejection 101. It sounds like you have been through exactly what I have been through - except on a geological timescale that would tire a god. Although I am starting to make progress... I regard that progress to be achieved in spite of them, not because of their vision or knowledge. The science I thought I was going to find was full of those who frolic in ideas sadly I was mistaken. Now, when I think I have made progress - I know that progress to be mediated by the less than adequate - and promulgated by momentum rather than incisive scrutiny- and it doesn't feel good. see file *2008_Thu_23_Oct.pdf * in the googlegroups everythinglist file store. So Amoebas speak english now, eh? Excellent. :-) cheers, Colin m.a. wrote: *Bruno,* * I've often wondered why neither Dr. Deutsch nor Alan Forrester has commented on your theory of UDA and AUDA. I certainly would be interested in their views. A theory that has execised some of the best minds on this list for months on end certainly deserves serious consideration. Best,* *martin a.* ** ** ** - Original Message - From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be To: everything-l...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-l...@googlegroups.com Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009 2:49 PM Subject: Re: The Amoeba's Secret - English Version started Even with politics operating behind the scene (which you have hinted), I can't imagine that nothing of the work is publishable. I already discussed proposition of publishing Conscience et Mécanisme with three publishers, before my thesis was judged not receivable (meaning no private defense, nor public defense, I have *never* met those who criticize, not even my work, but a product of their imagination). Then silence, even after the defense in Lille, and even more after the paradoxical price in Paris. I cannot explain. Or I can explain except that here reality is far beyond fiction as usual, but also more sad, and rather delicate if only because that story is not finished. My life is more unbelievable than any thing I assert in my works. It took me 22 years to understand what happened in 1977, and since then. I feel responsible to let them build they own trap, and then get myself a bit worried seeing them to protect themselves from Brussels to Paris! It is not because I have done an original work (say) in Brussels, that I got problems there. It is because I got problems in Brussels that I have done an original work. In 1977, they give me no chance, not even getting out of Belgium. In 1994, my work was criticize vaguely as not original, too much simple, and then delirious. And now already not from him in some place. Which again shows the problems is not related with my findings, except it belongs to the kind of things you can easily use to treat you as a fool (Gödel's theorem, Quantum mechanics, consciousness: few understand so it is easy to say not serious). The little scandal has grown up all the time and is too big, now. It is the kind of manipulation which makes everyone feel responsible, from corporatist reflex to corporatist reflex, when actually there is only one, very clever, but very bad, guy. Now that little scandal has become big enough to throw light on other really bigger scandals. There are cadavres dans les placards, as we say in French (corpses hidden in boxes). Mean of pressures. I still believe in academies, but like in School serial killer can exist. When you see the time made by religious institution to protect their member of their hierarchy from their much grave behavior, I estimate it could take a long time if ever to understand and recognize what happened. And I have no problem with serious academicians and scientists which understand enough to understand it is serious, even if probably wrong, which I have myself never ceased to believe plausible (which explains why I am eager to discuss the validity of the UDA steps, with people interested). I did defend the work as PhD thesis. I was asked many questions, I answered them and everyone got the idea. Some people takes time, but most get enough to trust the interest of the work. Still today, few get both UDA and AUDA. UDA is almost easy, but not so easy. AUDA is very *simple*, once you understand enough standard logic (which I have discovered is excessively rare). The whole thing is strongly
Re: Cellular automata @ home?
What you have here is a phenomenon which has been described a lot for 50 years. It appears in the literature in the descriptions of the synchronous behaviour of crickets, cicadas and fireflies. Eg: D. E. Kim, A spiking neuron model for synchronous flashing of fireflies, Biosystems, vol. 76, pp. 7-20, 2004. V. Nityananda and R. Balakrishnan, Synchrony during acoustic interactions in the bushcricket Mecopoda 'Chirper' (Tettigoniidae : Orthoptera) is generated by a combination of chirp-by-chirp resetting and change in intrinsic chirp rate, Journal of Comparative Physiology a-Neuroethology Sensory Neural and Behavioral Physiology, vol. 193, pp. 51-65, Jan 2007. I. Stewart, The synchronicity of firefly flashing, Scientific American, vol. 280, pp. 104-106, Mar 1999. S. H. Strogatz and I. Stewart, Coupled oscillators and biological synchronization, Scientific American, vol. 269, p. 102, 12 1993. and there is a classic book A. T. Winfree, The geometry of biological time. New York: Springer Verlag, 1980. Such ideas are currently being used (mathematics thereof) by two people 10 feet from me, who are working on epilepsy prediction and detection. What you have realised, however, is the fact that neural networks (which is exactly what the garden lights behaviour capture, albeit primitively) /are identical to a form of (multidimensional/dynamic) cellular automaton/. What you have demonstrated is precisely what I am doing to create an AGI. The killer question: When might it be 'like something' to 'BE' a collection of such objects behaving dynamically? (or what might it be like to be an entity inside a cellular automaton?) Nice one! cheers colin Hello! I invite to check my idea of a *home made complex self-organizing system:* ** http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTEWUTl_OcI Greetings!! --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Dual Aspect Science
Hi folks, I am finally getting somewhere. My paper has just been published. : Hales, C. 'Dual Aspect Science', Journal of Consciousness Studies vol. 16, no. 2-3, 2009. 30-73. Under dual aspect science exploration and deliverables take on two fundamental forms: Laws-of-appearance ( = T, what we do now) Laws-of-structure( = T' what we are recently/partly doing but wasn't organised/recognised). A physics of P-consciousness becomes empirically tractable under the DAS framework set of structure (T') descriptions. The DAS paper resulted from empirical science (observation of scientists) and is a framework which is empirically testable - the procedure is in the paper. No philosophy is required. The observed behaviour of scientists operating under the framework is decisive. I can deliver a .PDF of the paper to anyone who is interested (off list). The idea is that science's output (= laws of nature) actually has two intimately enmeshed 100% mutually consistent but very different forms: T (grammars as per usual) T' (computational output in a generalised dynamic form of cellular automaton) The former is a set of forever-uncertain rules about 100% certain (agreed) things. The latter is a set of 100% certain (chosen/agreed) rules about forever-uncertain structural primitives. The two are 'joined' and empirically supported by the one single evidence system - P-consciousness. This nicely (mirror-) symmetric knowledge framework eliminates a raft of strange behavioural inconsistencies in science (in the behaviour of scientists). DAS finally enables us to formally deal with the underlying structure of things in an empirically viable way. It means that scientists trading in loops, strings, froth, branes etc etc finally have a home. All we have to do is use our theory to make a prediction of the appearance brain material consistent with the delivery of P-consciousness as predicted by the T' aspect structural primitive of choice. T-aspect science cannot possibly do this. In the paper is a large list of the kinds of predictions to expect of your T'-aspect. I have used my loop structure - cellular automaton. It predicts brains look and operate like they do, although its hard to see at first. It is to be written up and published ASAP. Maybe others would like to see how they can do the same with other structural primitives. The abstract is below. I also have a 'DAS how to/reader user guide' which will help you distil the DAS paper - which is a bit of a monster - 43 pages. The computational exploration of loops is, in effect, the actual scientific delivery-form of the 'entropy calculus' I have spoken about from time to time here. I discuss the nature and forms of TOE in the DAS paper. They have 2 forms as well. Indeed the T'-aspect TOE is literally the rules and initialisation of the 'natural CA'. You can't analytically express it. You have to compute it and slice it to observe it. Enough for now! cheers colin hales *ABSTRACT*. Our chronically impoverished explanatory capacity in respect of P-consciousness is highly suggestive of a problem with science itself, rather than its lack of acquisition of some particular knowledge. The hidden assumption built into science is that science itself is a completed human behaviour. Removal of this assumption is achieved through a simple revision to our science model which is constructed, outlined and named ‘dual aspect science’ (DAS). It is constructed with reference to existing science being ‘single aspect science’. DAS is consistent with and predictive of the very explanatory poverty that generated it and is simultaneously a seamless upgrade; no existing law of nature is altered or lost. The framework is completely empirically self-consistent and is validated empirically. DAS eliminates the behavioural inconsistencies currently inhabiting a world in which single aspect science has been inherited rather than chosen and in which its presuppositions are implemented through habit rather than by scientific examination of options by the scientists actually carrying out science. The proposed DAS framework provides a working vantage point from which an explanation of P-consciousness becomes expected and meaningful. The framework requires that we rediscover what we scientists do and then discover something new about ourselves: that how we have been doing science is not the entire story. Dual aspect science shows us what we have not been doing. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Consciousness is information?
Kelly wrote: On Apr 24, 3:14 am, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: Kelly, Your arguments are compelling and logical, you have put a lot of doubt in my mind about computationalism. Excellent! It sounds like you are following the same path as I did on all of this. So it makes sense to start with the idea of physicalism and the idea that the mind is like a very complex computer, since this explains third person observations of human behavior and ability very well I think. BUT, then the question of first person subjective consciousness arises. Where does that fit in with physicalism? So the next step is to expand to physicalism + full computationalism, where the computational activities of the brain also explain consciousness, in addition to behavior and ability. It's really cool to see folks exploring where I have been and seeing the same problems. I might be able to shed a little light on a productive 'next step' for exploration: Try understanding the difference between a natural world which IS literally a mathematics, not a natural world described BY a mathematics. Note that a Turing machine is an instrument of a 'BY' computationalism, not the natural computation that I am speaking of. If you can get your head around this, then the answers (to a first person perspective) can be found. Stop thinking 'computation OF' and start thinking 'natural computation that IS'. Also very useful is the idea of using the explanation of a capacity to do science (grounded in a first person experience that is, in context, literally scientific observation) ... this is a very testable behaviour and represents the last thing physicists seem to want to explain: /themselves/. A green field in which it is obvious that cognition is most definitely not computation in the 'computation BY' sense. Enjoy! colin hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: No MWI
Hi, When I read quantum mechanics and listen to those invested in the many places the mathematics leads, What strikes me is the extent to which the starting point is mathematics. That is, the entire discussion is couched as if the mathematics is defining what there is, rather than a mere describing what is there. I can see that the form of the mathematics projects a multitude of possibilities. But those invested in the business seem to operate under the assumption - an extra belief - about the relationship of the mathematics to reality. It imbues the discussion. At least that is how it appears to me. Consider the pragmatics of it. I, scientist X, am in a position of adopting 2 possible mindsets: Position 1 1a) The mathematics of quantum mechanics is very accurately predictive of observed phenomena 1b) Reality literally IS the mathematics of quantum mechanics (and by extension all the multitudinous alternative realities actually exist). Therefor to discuss mathematical constructs is to speak literally of reality. My ability to mentally manipulate mathematics therefore makes me a powerful lord of reality and puts me in a position of great authority and clarity. Position 2 2a) The mathematics of quantum mechanics is very accurately predictive of observed phenomena 2b) Reality is not the mathematics of (a). Reality is constructed of something that merely appears/behaves quantum-mechanically to an observer made of whatever it is, within a universe made of it. The mathematics of this something is not the mathematics of kind (a). Note 1a) = 2a) 1b) and 2b) they are totally different. The (a) is completely consistent with either (b). Yet we have religious zeal surrounding (1b) I hope that you can see the subtlety of the distinction between position 1 and position 2. As a thinking person in the logical position of wondering what position to adopt, position 1 is *completely unjustified*. The parsimonious position is one in which the universe is made of something other than 1b maths, and then to find a method of describing ways in which position 1 might seem apparent to an observer made of whatever the universe is actually made of.. The nice thing about position 2 is that I have room for *doubt* in 2b which does not exist in 1b. In position 2 I have: (i) laws of nature that are the describing system (predictive of phenomena in the usual ways) (ii) behaviours of a doubtable 'stuff' relating in doubtable ways to produce an observer able to to (i) In position 1 there is no doubt of kind (ii). That doubt is replaced by religious adherence to an unfounded implicit belief which imbues the discourse. At the same time position 1 completely fails to explain an observer of the kind able to do 1a. In my ponderings on this I am coming to the conclusion that the very nature of the discourse and training self-selects for people who's mental skills in abstract symbol manipulation make Position 1 a dominating tendency. Aggregates of position 1 thinkers - such as the everything list and 'fabric of reality' act like small cults. There is some kind of psychological payback involved in position 1 which selects for people susceptible to religiosity of kind 1b. Once you have a couple of generations of these folk who are so disconnected from the reality of themselves as embedded, situated agents/observers... that position 2, which involves an admission of permanent ignorance of some kind, and thereby demoting the physicist from the prime source of authority over reality, is marginalised and eventually more or less invisible. It is not that MWI is true/false it's that confinement to the discourse of MWI alone is justified only on religious grounds of the kind I have delineated. You can be quite predictive and at the same time not actually be discussing reality at all - and you'll never realise it. I.E. Position 2 could be right and all the MWI predictions can still be right. Yet position 1 behaviour stops you from finding position 2 ... and problems unsolved because they are only solvable by position 2 remain unsolved merely because of 1b religiosity. Can anyone else here see this cultural schism operating? regards Colin Hales Jason Resch wrote: The following link shows convincingly that what one gains by accepting MWI is far greater than what one loses (an answer to the born probabilities) http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/if-many-worlds.html The only law in all of quantum mechanics that is non-linear, non-unitary, non-differentiable and discontinuous. It would prevent physics from evolving locally, with each piece only looking at its immediate neighbors. Your 'collapse' would be the only fundamental phenomenon in all of physics with a preferred basis and a preferred space of simultaneity. Collapse would be the only phenomenon in all of physics that violates CPT symmetry, Liouville's Theorem, and Special Relativity. In your original version
Re: No MWI
Brent Meeker wrote: Colin Hales wrote: Hi, When I read quantum mechanics and listen to those invested in the many places the mathematics leads, What strikes me is the extent to which the starting point is mathematics. That is, the entire discussion is couched as if the mathematics is defining what there is, rather than a mere describing what is there. I can see that the form of the mathematics projects a multitude of possibilities. But those invested in the business seem to operate under the assumption - an extra belief - about the relationship of the mathematics to reality. It imbues the discussion. At least that is how it appears to me. Consider the pragmatics of it. I, scientist X, am in a position of adopting 2 possible mindsets: Position 1 1a) The mathematics of quantum mechanics is very accurately predictive of observed phenomena 1b) Reality literally IS the mathematics of quantum mechanics (and by extension all the multitudinous alternative realities actually exist). Therefor to discuss mathematical constructs is to speak literally of reality. My ability to mentally manipulate mathematics therefore makes me a powerful lord of reality and puts me in a position of great authority and clarity. I don't know many physicist who takes this position. I guess Max Tegmark would be one. But most physicists seem to take the math as descriptive. It is more often mathematicians who are Platonists; not I think because of ego, but because mathematics seems to be discovered rather than invented. I know that most physicists would, when asked, likely deny that their mathematics has been taken as real. It's more that their behaviour is 'as if' they have, because position2 has not been adopted and there . Position 2 2a) The mathematics of quantum mechanics is very accurately predictive of observed phenomena 2b) Reality is not the mathematics of (a). Reality is constructed of something that merely appears/behaves quantum-mechanically to an observer made of whatever it is, within a universe made of it. The mathematics of this something is not the mathematics of kind (a). What about the mathematics is as complete a description as we have of whatever underlying reality there may be. So we might as well, provisionally, identify it with the real. Brent It's not complete and it has 1 chronic abject failure: to explain scientists (scientific observation). The position 1a 'laws of nature' presuppose the scientist and scientific observation in the sense that they merely 'organise appearances' in a scientist - the scientist is built into the laws and the explanation as to why there are any 'appearances' at all (as delivered in brain material) goes unexplained... thrown away in the act of objectivity. If there's a perfectly servicable alternative (position 2), and a chromic problem in cognitive science, the more reasonable (in terms of doubt management) position 2 might be thought to be deserving more attention Hmmm. Just in case there's a misunderstanding of position 2, here's their contrast rather more pointedly: Position 1 1a There's a mathematics which describes how the natural world behaves when we look. 1b Reality is literally made of the mathematics 1a. (I act as if this were the case) Position 2 1a There's a mathematics which describes how the natural world behaves when we look. 1b There's a *separate* mathematics of an underlying reality which operates to produce an observer who sees the reality behaving as per 1a maths. 1c There's the actual underlying reality, which is doubted (not claimed) to 'be' 1b or 1a. Position 2 is justified because when you simulate 2b it on a computer you can see, operating inside it, what constitutes the observation system of the scientist) ... it produces a scientist with a scientific observation system. That observation system reveals the natural world to be behaving 'as-if' math 1a was driving it, when in reality it is not. Thus the chronic problem is of position 1 behaviour is solved. Instead of many extra worlds... you only need 1. ... all the while MWI remains just as predictive. == I understand your position on the matter, but I wonder as to the psychology of it in general. Let's posit position 2 as the real epistemic option for scientists inside a natural world. Lets say the 'hard problem' of explaining scientists is solved by position 2 work in the year 2050 when simulation can handle 40 orders of magnitude of detailLet's say in 2075 a historian is characterising the mindset of 20th century physics. What they describe is an entire century of unjustified self-deception promulgated by a kind of systemic practical religious behaviour which is denied, by the physicists/mathematicians, in *omission*. That is, their tacit subscription to position 1 is affirmed by a failure to act according to position 2 when
Re: Dreaming On
David Nyman wrote: Thanks to everyone who responded to my initial sally on dreams and machines. Naturally I have arrogated the right to plagiarise your helpful comments in what follows, which is an aphoristic synthesis of my understanding of the main points that have emerged thus far. I hope this will be helpful for future discussion. THE APHORISMS We do not see the mind, we see *through* the mind. What we see through the mind - its contents - is mind-stuff: dreams. Hence dream content - i.e. whatever is capable of being present to us - can't be our ontology - this would be circular (the eye can't see itself). Yes. This is the big issue. (a) Descriptions of 'how it appears to us' (empirical science by the awake scientist!) and (b) Descriptions of 'what it is that appears to us as it does' (science of a noumenon) cannot be the same set of descriptions to the one in which 'the appearances' are being delivered. Especially when (b) descriptions are responsible for creating the way it appears in (a). Seems fairly self evident. Assuming (a) and (b) are identical (or that (b) is unapproachable) is not justified. The assumption in your comments is that there is/needs to be 'mind stuff' is wrong. /ALL/ of it is some undescribed stuff, not just that resulting in mind. The assumption in your statement is that we need something extra just to explain mind pressupposes that everything else is sorted out. It hasn't. It never has been. The singular unique feature of mind is not 'stuff', it is merely the perspective of it first person. ask this instead What kind of universe is it (= wots the stuff?, (b) and its behaviour) such that a 'first person perspective' can result in which it appears (a)-ish to us all, and in particular, makes a brain look brain when it is delivering the first person perspective which delivers (a) to us? Does X being self-evident classify X as an aphorism? I think not. :-) col --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Dreaming On
http://www.mindmatter.de/mmabstracts7_1.htm http://www.mindmatter.de/mmabstracts7_1.htm *Intentionality and Computationalism: A Diagonal Argument * Laureano Luna Cabanero, Department of Philosophy, IES Francisco Marin, Siles, Spain, and Christopher G. Small, Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Waterloo, Canada Computationalism is the claim that all possible thoughts are computations, i.e. executions of algorithms. The aim of the paper is to show that if intentionality is semantically clear, in a way defined in the paper, then computationalism must be false. Using a convenient version of the phenomenological relation of intentionality and a diagonalization device inspired by Thomson's theorem of 1962, we show there exists a thought that cannot be a computation. - How good an argument it is I don't know . I am in the process of getting my hands on the paper. Meanwhile, if any of you folks can get it sooner I'd be very interested. BTW I have recently submitted my own refutation of COMP to a journal...it superficially resembles a more practical version of the above. Basically.a computationalist-based artificial scientist cannot propose/debate, let alone test, computationalism as a 'law of nature'. Confusing/self-referential but has teeth as an argument. Q. How many times does it take for dogma X to be refuted before projects totally dependent on the truth of dogma X get their outcome projections/expectations reviewed? cheers colin hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?
Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed refutation of computationalism. It's going through peer review at the moment. The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation of 'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is being carried out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the paper I drew an artificial distinction between them. I called the former NATURAL COMPUTATION (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL COMPUTATION (AC). The idea is that if COMP is true then there is no distinction between AC and NC. The distinction should fail. I found one an one only situation/place where AC and NC part company. Call this situation X. If COMP is false in this one place X it is false as a general claim. I also found 2 downstream (consequential) failures that ultimately get their truth-basis from X, so they are a little weaker as formal arguments against COMP. *FACT*: Humans make propositions that are fundamentally of an informal nature. That is, the utterances of a human can be inconsistent and form an fundamentally incomplete set (we don't 'know everything'). The quintessential definition of a scientist is a 'correctable liar'. When a hypothesis is uttered it has the status indistinguishable of a lie. Humans can participate in the universe in ways which can (apparently) violate any law of nature. Humans must be able to 'violate' laws of nature in the process of accessing new/novel formal systems to describe the unknown natural world. Look at the world. It is not hard to see how humans exemplify an informal system. All over the world are quite normal (non-pathologically affected) humans with the same sensory systems and mental capacities. Yet all manner of ignorance and fervently held contradictory belief systems are 'rationally' adopted. === COMP fails when: a) You assume COMP is true and build an artificial (AC/computer) scientist Sa and expect Sa to be able to carry out authentic original science on the a-priori unknownidentically to humans. To do this you use a human-originated formal model (law of nature) ts to do this your computer 'computes ts, you EMBODY the computer in a suitable robotic form and then expect it to do science like humans. If COMP is true then the human scientist and the robot scientist should be indistinguishable. b) You then discover that it is a fundamental impossibility that Sa be able to debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature. c) Humans can debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature. BECAUSE: (b) (c) they are distinguishable. NC and AC are different THEREFORE: ts cannot be the 'law of nature' for a scientist. THEREFORE: COMP is false in the special case of (b) THEREFORE: COMP is false as a general claim. (b) is not a claim of truth or falsehood. It is a claim that the very idea of Sa ever proposing COMP (= doubting that COMP is true) is impossible. This is because it is a formal system trying, with a fixed, formal set of rules (even self modifying according to yet more rules) to construct statements that are the product of an informal system (a human scientist). The very idea of this is a contradiction in terms. The formal system is 100% deterministic, unable to violate rules. When it encounters a liar it will be unable to resolve what falsehood is being presented. It requires all falsehoods to be a-priori known. Impossible. How can a formal system encounter a world in which COMP is actually false? If it could, COMP would be FALSE! If COMP is true then it can't. Humans are informalergo we have some part of the natural world capable of behaving informally= GOTCHA! This argument is has very 'Godellian' structure. That was accidental. When you say 'physics is fundamental'. I don't actually known what that means. What I can tell you is that to construct an authentic ARTIFICIAL SCIENTIST (not a simulation, but an 'inorganic' scientist), you have to *replicate the real physics of cognition, *not 'compute a model' of the cognition or a 'compute a model of the physics underlying cognition'. Then an artificial scientist is a scioentist in the same sense that artificial light is light. R.I.P. COMP = Strong AI (a computer can be a mind) is false. = Weak AI (A computer model of cognition can never be actual cognition) is true. It's nice to finally have at least one tiny little place (X) where the seeds of clarity can be found. Cheers colin hales 1Z wrote: On 31 July, 22:39, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: I note that the recent posts by Peter Jones - aka the mysterious 1Z, and the originator of the curiously useful 'real in the sense I am real' or RITSIAR - occurred shortly after my taking his name in vain. Hmm... Anyway, this signalled the resumption of a long-running debate about the validity of causal accounts of the first person based on a functional or computational rationale. I'm going to make an attempt
Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?
Brent Meeker wrote: Colin Hales wrote: Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed refutation of computationalism. It's going through peer review at the moment. The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation of 'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is being carried out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the paper I drew an artificial distinction between them. I called the former NATURAL COMPUTATION (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL COMPUTATION (AC). The idea is that if COMP is true then there is no distinction between AC and NC. The distinction should fail. I found one an one only situation/place where AC and NC part company. Call this situation X. If COMP is false in this one place X it is false as a general claim. I also found 2 downstream (consequential) failures that ultimately get their truth-basis from X, so they are a little weaker as formal arguments against COMP. *FACT*: Humans make propositions that are fundamentally of an informal nature. That is, the utterances of a human can be inconsistent and form an fundamentally incomplete set (we don't 'know everything'). The quintessential definition of a scientist is a 'correctable liar'. When a hypothesis is uttered it has the status indistinguishable of a lie. Humans can participate in the universe in ways which can (apparently) violate any law of nature. Humans must be able to 'violate' laws of nature in the process of accessing new/novel formal systems to describe the unknown natural world. Look at the world. It is not hard to see how humans exemplify an informal system. All over the world are quite normal (non-pathologically affected) humans with the same sensory systems and mental capacities. Yet all manner of ignorance and fervently held contradictory belief systems are ‘rationally’ adopted. === COMP fails when: a) You assume COMP is true and build an artificial (AC/computer) scientist Sa and expect Sa to be able to carry out authentic original science on the a-priori unknownidentically to humans. To do this you use a human-originated formal model (law of nature) ts to do this your computer 'computes ts, you EMBODY the computer in a suitable robotic form and then expect it to do science like humans. If COMP is true then the human scientist and the robot scientist should be indistinguishable. b) You then discover that it is a fundamental impossibility that Sa be able to debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature. c) Humans can debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature. BECAUSE: (b) (c) they are distinguishable. NC and AC are different THEREFORE: ts cannot be the 'law of nature' for a scientist. THEREFORE: COMP is false in the special case of (b) THEREFORE: COMP is false as a general claim. (b) is not a claim of truth or falsehood. It is a claim that the very idea of Sa ever proposing COMP (= doubting that COMP is true) is impossible. This is because it is a formal system trying, with a fixed, formal set of rules (even self modifying according to yet more rules) to construct statements that are the product of an informal system (a human scientist). The very idea of this is a contradiction in terms. I don't see it. I can write a simple computer program that constructs statements which are a subset of those produced by humans (or any other system). Bruno's UD produces *all* such statements. So where's the contradiction? Yes you can generate all such statements. /But then what*/*so what? /* *Please re-read the scenarioThis situation is very very specific: 1) Embodied situated robot scientist Sa is doing science on the 'natural world'. 2) As a COMP artificial scientist Sa, you are software. A formal system *ts* computes you. 3) All you ever do is categorise patterns and cross-correlate patterns in massive streams of numbers that arrive from your '/robot scientist suit/'. 4) Sa is a SCIENTIST. The entirety of the existence of Sa involves dealing with streams of numbers that are the result of an encounter with the radically unknown, which Sa is trying to find a 'universal abstraction' for = 'a law of nature'. 5) There is no 'out there in an environment' for Sa. There is only an abstraction (a category called) out there. You cannot project any kind of human 'experience' into Sa. REASON: If COMP is true, then computation (of abstract symbol manipulation of formal *ts*) is all COMP Sa needs to be a scientist. Sa can only be imagined as operating 'in the dark'.(I spent a whole section on ensuring this spurious projection does not occur in the reader of my paper!) 6) *ts* has been assumed possible by assuming COMP is true. 7) The paper is a reductio ad absurdum proof that COMP is false. 8) The contradiction that I use is that the human and the COMP scientist are different (when if COMP is true they should
Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?
Rex Allen wrote: If computationalism is true, and computation is the source of conscious experience, then shouldn't we expect that what is ontologically real is the simplest possible universe that can develop and support physical systems that are Turing equivalent? Does our universe look like such a universe? If our universe doesn't look like such a universe, then wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that ours is not the real universe, and that a simpler reality underlies it? Perhaps we have our wires crossed. The definition of computationalism you have _is not what is in the literature_. This is the distillation I have formulated from the literature (in my paper): *COMP* This is the shorthand for computationalism as distilled from the various sources cited above. The working definition here: /The operational/functional equivalence (identity, indistinguishability at the level of the model) of (a) a sufficiently embodied, computationally processed, sufficiently detailed symbolic/formal description/model of a natural thing X and (b) the described natural thing X//./ The refs...Beer, Pylyshyn^ , Putnam^ , Horst and many others. This definition of COMP therefore has nothing explicitly to do with claiming consciousness. However, if COMP is true, then if you compute some kind of model of cognition, then you may expect that model to be equivalent to a mind. An attribution of experience, however, is completely spurious. If COMP (as defined above) is true, then _all you need_ is abstract symbol manipulation of the Turing machine kind to get equivalence. You can remain completely mute/agnostic on the existence of experience in the COMP entity. This is the origin of the of the catch phrase cognition is computation. You may be confusing COMP with 'strong AI', which says that a COMP model of cognition is actual cognition (a mind, from which you might infer consciousness). Constrast this with weak AI which says that a COMP model of cognition is not an instance of cognition. Refuting COMP the way I have means strong AI is false, weak AI is true. Refuting COMP the way I have means your idea of 'Turing Equivalence is meaningless/impossible. The very best I can say of COMP is that it is trivially true in the sense that you can 'compute' a mind if you already know everything (and I mean everything, everywhere) in which case the mind operates akin to a flight simulator.you compute the brain and the entire environment. Totally pointless and inconsistent with the logic of being ignorant of the universe in the sense that scientists are ignorant. You do not know the environment, hence you can't compute it. Amazing how many different views you can get of this stuff. cheers colin --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?
Brent Meeker wrote: Colin Hales wrote: Brent Meeker wrote: Colin Hales wrote: Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed refutation of computationalism. It's going through peer review at the moment. The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation of 'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is being carried out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the paper I drew an artificial distinction between them. I called the former NATURAL COMPUTATION (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL COMPUTATION (AC). The idea is that if COMP is true then there is no distinction between AC and NC. The distinction should fail. I found one an one only situation/place where AC and NC part company. Call this situation X. If COMP is false in this one place X it is false as a general claim. I also found 2 downstream (consequential) failures that ultimately get their truth-basis from X, so they are a little weaker as formal arguments against COMP. *FACT*: Humans make propositions that are fundamentally of an informal nature. That is, the utterances of a human can be inconsistent and form an fundamentally incomplete set (we don't 'know everything'). The quintessential definition of a scientist is a 'correctable liar'. When a hypothesis is uttered it has the status indistinguishable of a lie. Humans can participate in the universe in ways which can (apparently) violate any law of nature. Humans must be able to 'violate' laws of nature in the process of accessing new/novel formal systems to describe the unknown natural world. Look at the world. It is not hard to see how humans exemplify an informal system. All over the world are quite normal (non-pathologically affected) humans with the same sensory systems and mental capacities. Yet all manner of ignorance and fervently held contradictory belief systems are ‘rationally’ adopted. === COMP fails when: a) You assume COMP is true and build an artificial (AC/computer) scientist Sa and expect Sa to be able to carry out authentic original science on the a-priori unknownidentically to humans. To do this you use a human-originated formal model (law of nature) ts to do this your computer 'computes ts, you EMBODY the computer in a suitable robotic form and then expect it to do science like humans. If COMP is true then the human scientist and the robot scientist should be indistinguishable. b) You then discover that it is a fundamental impossibility that Sa be able to debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature. c) Humans can debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature. BECAUSE: (b) (c) they are distinguishable. NC and AC are different THEREFORE: ts cannot be the 'law of nature' for a scientist. THEREFORE: COMP is false in the special case of (b) THEREFORE: COMP is false as a general claim. (b) is not a claim of truth or falsehood. It is a claim that the very idea of Sa ever proposing COMP (= doubting that COMP is true) is impossible. This is because it is a formal system trying, with a fixed, formal set of rules (even self modifying according to yet more rules) to construct statements that are the product of an informal system (a human scientist). The very idea of this is a contradiction in terms. I don't see it. I can write a simple computer program that constructs statements which are a subset of those produced by humans (or any other system). Bruno's UD produces *all* such statements. So where's the contradiction? Yes you can generate all such statements. /But then what*/*so what? /* *Please re-read the scenarioThis situation is very very specific: 1) Embodied situated robot scientist Sa is doing science on the 'natural world'. 2) As a COMP artificial scientist Sa, you are software. A formal system *ts* computes you. 3) All you ever do is categorise patterns and cross-correlate patterns in massive streams of numbers that arrive from your '/robot scientist suit/'. 4) Sa is a SCIENTIST. The entirety of the existence of Sa involves dealing with streams of numbers that are the result of an encounter with the radically unknown, which Sa is trying to find a 'universal abstraction' for = 'a law of nature'. 5) There is no 'out there in an environment' for Sa. There is only an abstraction (a category called) out there. You cannot project any kind of human 'experience' into Sa. REASON: If COMP is true, then computation (of abstract symbol manipulation of formal *ts*) is all COMP Sa needs to be a scientist. Sa can only be imagined as operating 'in the dark'.(I spent a whole section on ensuring this spurious projection does not occur in the reader of my paper!) 6) *ts* has been assumed possible by assuming COMP is true. 7) The paper is a reductio ad absurdum proof that COMP is false. 8) The contradiction
Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?
ronaldheld wrote: As a formally trained Physicist, what do I accept? that Physics is well represented mathematically? That the Multiverse is composed of mathematical structures some of which represent physical laws? Or something else? Ronald This is /the/ question. It always seems to get sidestepped in discussions that fail to distinguish between (a) /reality as some kind of natural computation/ and (b) /reality represented by formal statements(laws of nature) of regularity, //apparent in an observer, //that may be artificially computed/ /by a Turing style machine/. The conflation of (a) and (b) is a constant in the discussions here. (a) does not need an observer. It /constructs/ an observer. (b) involves an observer and are regularities constructed by the observer made by (a) The (roughly 5) conflations (from my paper that refutes COMP) are: Conflation #1: Deploying an artificial scientist ? Bestowing scientific knowledge Conflation #2: COMP(utation) ? experience Conflation #3:A Scientist ? Formal system Conflation #4 Rules of a rule generator ? the generated rules (except once) Conflation #5 AC Artificial Turing style abstract symbol manipulation ? NC The computation that is the natural world Note that all 5 of these permeate the discussions here. I see it all the time. The main one is #5. When you realise how many combinations of these can misdirect a discussion, you realise how screwed up things are. The following statements summarise the effects: (A) The fact that the natural world, to an observer, happens to have appearances predicted by a set of formal statements (Laws of Nature/Physics) does not entail that those statements are in any way involved in running/driving the universe. Eg. The assumption that the concept of a 'multiverse' is valid or relevant is another symptom of the conflationthe reason? QM is a mathematical construct of type (b), /not/ an example of (a). The whole concept of a multiverse is a malady caused by this conflation. (B) The operation of a Turing Machine ( = hardware-invariant//artificial abstract/ symbol manipulation) is /not /what is going on in the natural world and, specifically, is /not/ what is happening in the brain (of a scientist). Assuming 'cognition is computation' is unjustified on any level. I find the situation increasingly aggravating. It's like talking to cult members who's beliefs are predicated on a delusion, and who a re so deep inside it and so unable to see out of it that they are lost. Common sense has left the building. The appropriate scientific way out of this mess is to (i) let (a) descriptions and (b) descriptions be, for the purposes, /separate scientific depictions of the natural world/ If they are not then at some point in the analysis they will become indistinguishable...in which case you have a /scientific/logical approach./ (ii) Drop /all/ assumptions that any discussion involving Turing machines as relevant to understanding the natural world. This means accepting,/ for the purposes of sorting this mess out/, (a) as being a form of computation fundamentally different to a Turing machine, where the symbols and the processor are literally the same thing. If you predicate your work on (i) then if COMP is true then at some point, if (a) and (b) become indistinguishable, /then/ COMP will be a-priori /predicted/ to be true. I leave you to unpack your personalised version of the conflations. Traditional physics/math training will automatically infect the trainee with the affliction that conflates (a) and (b). The system of organised thought in which an observer is a-priori predicted with suggested sources of empirical evidence, is the system that we seek. (a) and (b) above represent that very system. We are currently locked into (b) and have all manner of weird assumptions operating in place of (a) which mean, in effect, that _the /last/ thing physicists want to explain is physicists_. Endlessly blathering on about multiverses and assuming COMP does /nothing/ to that end. I've had 5 years of listening to this COMP/Turing machine/Multiverse stuff. It's old/impotent/toothless/mute (predicts nothing) and sustained only by delusion . It operates as a cult(ure). I am the deprogrammer. :-) colin PS. Brent I seem to have picked up a SHOUTING habit from a relatively brain dead AGI forum, where the folk are particularly deluded about what they are doing They are so lost in (ii) above and have so little clue about science, they need therapy! I'll try and calm myself down a bit. Maybe use /italics/ instead :-) --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?
regrettable snips to get at the heart of it. One thing at a time. Hope you don't mind. russell standish wrote: Nobody is suggesting that brains are Turing machines. All that is being suggested (by COMP) is that brains perform computations (and nothing but), hence can be perfectly emulated by a Turing machine, by virtue of the Church-Turing thesis. /Nobody is suggesting that brains are Turing machines./ _Yes they are_- /implicitly/ in an expectation that a computation of a model of the appearances of a brain can be a brain (below). To see this...note that you said: That brains perform computations.hence can be perfectly emulated etc etc Brains are a naturally evolving self-manipulating natural process that involves natural symbols going through continual transformations in regular ways. // And...yeswe can construct a _/model/_ X of the appearances that brain has whilst that manipulation/transformation is underway but...so what? There is /nowhere in the universe that model X is being computed on anything _in the sense we understand as a Turing machine_./ (This applies to models of cognition and to models of the material/space of the brain.) This is the false assumption. The C-T thesis is not wrong. /It's just not saying anything/. The 'emulation' you cite is only ever justified as of a model of a cognitive process, /not a cognitive process/. This is precisely the conflation of (a) /the natural world as some kind of as-yet un-elaborated natural computation/ with (b) /Turing-style computation of a _model_ of the natural world/. The COMP I refute in the paper is exactly this (b) kind: *COMP* This is the shorthand for computationalism as distilled from the various sources cited above. The working definition here: /The operational/functional equivalence (identity, indistinguishability at the level of the model) of (a) a sufficiently embodied, computationally processed, sufficiently detailed symbolic/formal description/model of a natural thing X and (b) the described natural thing X//./ There is a fundamental logical error being made of the kind: /natural thing X behaves as if abstract-scientific-formal-description is running as a program on a computer, so therefore all abstract/artificial //computations-of-formal-description//-X are (by an undisclosed, undiscussed mechanism) identical to natural thing X/. // Do you see how the C-T Thesis and the Turing machine ideas can be perfectly right and at the same time deliver absolutely no claim to be involved in or describing the origins of an actual natural cognitive process? So when you say Nobody is suggesting that brains are Turing machines - _this cannot be true_, because everyone is methodologically behaving as if they had. It's an act of supposition/omission a failure to properly distinguish two kinds of things. There are other options which do not make this presupposition, and which are therefore better justified as forming descriptive framework which might involve understanding /actual cognition/ instead of assuming its origins. I have been exploring these 'other options' for a long time. Their details don't matter - the very fact of the possibility is what is important - and what has been tacitly presumed out of existence by the conflation I have delineated. Our failure to consider these other options is a subscription to the conflation I have elaborated. This is the true heart of the matter. We have been rattling off paragraphs like the one you delivered above for so long that we fail to see the implicit epistemic poison of the unjustified claim hidden inside. colin --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 06 Aug 2009, at 04:37, Colin Hales wrote: Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed refutation of computationalism. It's going through peer review at the moment. The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation of 'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is being carried out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the paper I drew an artificial distinction between them. I called the former NATURAL COMPUTATION (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL COMPUTATION (AC). The idea is that if COMP is true then there is no distinction between AC and NC. The distinction should fail. Why? COMP entails that physics cannot be described by a computation, but by an infinite sum of infinite histories. If you were correct, there would be no possible white rabbit. You are confusing comp (I am a machine) and constructive physics (the universe is a machine). This is the COMP I have a problem with. It's the one in the literature. It relates directly to the behaviour (descriptive options of) of scientists: *COMP* This is the shorthand for computationalism as distilled from the various sources cited above. The working definition here: “/The operational/functional equivalence (identity, indistinguishability at the level of the model) of (a) a sufficiently embodied, computationally processed, sufficiently detailed symbolic/formal description/model of a natural thing X and (b) the described natural thing X/”/./ If this is not the COMP you speak of, then this could be the origins of disparity in view. Also, the term I am machine says nothing scientifically meaningful to me. The term The universe is a machine also says nothing scientifically meaningful to me. I offer the following distinction, which relates directly to the human behaviour (observable, testable) called scientific behaviour. (a) scientific descriptions of a natural world produced by an observer inside it, built of it. (science currently 100% here) and (b) scientific descriptions (also produced inside it by (a) human observers) of a natural world as a natural form of computation which produces the above observer.(science currently Nil% here for no justified reason) and (c) The natural world as an actual instantiation of (b).Whatever it is that we find ourselves in. When you utter the word physics above, I hear a reference to descriptions of type (a) and nothing else. I assume no direct relationship between them and (b) or (c). The framework of (a), (b),(c) is all that is needed, justified because it exhausts the list of possible views of our situation which have any empirical/explanatory relevance. None of the descriptions (a) or (b) need be unique or even exact. The only thing required of (a) is prediction. The only thing required of (b) is prediction /of an observer who is predicting/. Both (a) and (b) are justified empirically in predicting a scientist. Now consider the ways I could be confused: (i) computed (Turing) (a) is identical to (c) (all of it) or (ii) computed (Turing) (b) is identical to (c) (all of it) or (iii) computed (Turing) (a) of a piece of (c) is identical to the piece of (c) within (c) or (iv) computed (Turing) (b) of a piece of (c) is identical to the piece of (c) within (c) The COMP I refute above is of type (iii). I did not examine (iv) in the paper. (iii) is the delusion currently inhabiting computer science in respect of AGI expectations. The 'piece of (c)' I use to do this is 'the human scientist'. It is expectations of AGI projects that I seek to clarify - my motivation here. It is a 100% practical need. (i) and (ii) might be possible if you already knew everythingbut that is of no practical use. (iii) and (iv) viability depends on the piece of (c)/rest of (c) boundary and how well that boundary facilitates an AGI. So... who's assuming stuff? :-) colin --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Aug 2009, at 09:08, Colin Hales wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 06 Aug 2009, at 04:37, Colin Hales wrote: Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed refutation of computationalism. It's going through peer review at the moment. The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation of 'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is being carried out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the paper I drew an artificial distinction between them. I called the former NATURAL COMPUTATION (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL COMPUTATION (AC). The idea is that if COMP is true then there is no distinction between AC and NC. The distinction should fail. Why? COMP entails that physics cannot be described by a computation, but by an infinite sum of infinite histories. If you were correct, there would be no possible white rabbit. You are confusing comp (I am a machine) and constructive physics (the universe is a machine). This is the COMP I have a problem with. It's the one in the literature. It relates directly to the behaviour (descriptive options of) of scientists: *COMP* This is the shorthand for computationalism as distilled from the various sources cited above. The working definition here: “/The operational/functional equivalence (identity, indistinguishability at the level of the model) of (a) a sufficiently embodied, computationally processed, sufficiently detailed symbolic/formal description/model of a natural thing X and (b) the described natural thing X/”/./ If this is not the COMP you speak of, then this could be the origins of disparity in view. Also, the term I am machine says nothing scientifically meaningful to me. This is not comp. Actually the definition above is ambiguous, and seems to presuppose natural things. I did not make this up. I read it in the literature in various forms and summarised. 'Mind as computation' is a specific case of it. If I have a broken definition according to you then I am in the company of a lot of people. It's also the major delusion in many computer 'scientists' in the field of AI, who's options would be very different if COMP is false. So I'll use COMP as defined above, for now. It is what I refute. 'presupposing natural things... ?? hmm Natural thingsYou know... the thing we sometimes call the 'real world'? Whatever it is that we are in/made of, that appears to behave rather regularly and that we are intrinsically ignorant of and 'do empirical science on'. The 'thing' that our consciousness portrays to us? The place with real live behaving humans with major brain and other nervous system problems who could really use some help? That natural world that actually defined COMP as per above. That 'thing'.Whatever 'it' is... that will do for a collection of 'natural things'. The idea that the presupposition of natural things is problematic is rather unhelpful to those (above, real, natural) suffering people. Sounds a bit emotive, but .. there you go .. call me practically motivated. I intend to remain in this condition. :-) Colin --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?
Hi, I guess I am pretty much over the need for any 'ism whatever. I can re-classify my ideas in terms of an 'ism, but that process tells me nothing extra and offers no extra empirical clue. I think I can classify fairly succinctly the difference between approaches: *(A) Colin* (a) There is a natural world. (b) We can describe how it appears to us using the P-consciousness of scientists. (c) We can describe how a natural world might be constructed which has an observer in it like (a) Descriptions (b) are not the natural world (a) but 'about it' (its appearances) Descriptions (C) are not the natural world (a) but 'about it' (its structure) (b) and (c) need only ever be 'doxastic' (beliefs). I hold that these two sets of descriptions (b) and (c) need /not/ be complete or even perfect/accurate. Turing-computing (b) or (c) is not an instance of (a)/will not ever make (a) Turing-computing (b) or (c) can tell you something about the operation of (a). NOTE: If (b) is a description of the rules of chess (no causality whatever, good prediction of future board appearances), (c) is a description of the behaviour of chess players (chess causality). There's a rough metaphor for you. - *(B) not-Colin (as seems to be what I see here...)* There are descriptions of type (b), one of which is quantum mechanics QM. The math of QM suggests a multiple-histories TOE concept. If I then project a spurious attribution of idealism into this then if I squint at the math I can see what might operate as a 'first person perspective' and I realise/believe that if I Turing-compute the math, it *is* a universe. I can make it be reality. Causality is a mystery solved by prayer to the faith of idealism and belief in 'comp', driven by the hidden mechanism of the Turing 'tape reader/punch'. - What's happening here AFAICT, is that players in (B) have been so far 'down the rabbit hole' for so long they've lost sight of reality and think 'isms explain things! In (A) you get to actually explain things (appearances and causal necessity). /The price is that you can never truly know reality/. You get 'asymptotically close to knowing it', though. (A) involves no delusion about Turing-computation implementing reality. The amount of 'idealism', 'physicalism', 'materialism' and any other 'ism you need to operate in the (A) framework is Nil. In (A) the COMP (as I defined it) is obviously and simply false and there is no sense in which Turing-style-computation need be attributed to be involved in natural processes. It's falsehood is expected and natural and consistent with all empirical knowledge. The spurious attributions in (B) are replaced in (A) by the descriptions (c), all of which must correlate perfectly (empirically) with (b) through the provision of an observer and a mechanism for observation which is evidenced in brain material. The concept of a Turing machine is not needed at all. There may be a sense in which a Turing (C-T) equivalent of (c) might be constructed. That equivalent is adds zero to knowledge systems (b) and (c). Under (A) the C-T thesis is perfectly right but simply irrelevant. My motivation to kill COMP is purely aimed at bring a halt to the delusion of the AGI community that Turing-computing will ever create a mind. They are throwing away $millions based on a false belief. Their expectations need to be scientifically defined for a change. I have no particular interest in disturbing any belief systems here except insofar as they contribute to the delusion that COMP is true. 'nuff said. This is another minor battle in an ongoing campaign. :-) Colin Stephen Paul King wrote: Hi Colin, It seems that to me that until one understands the nature of the extreme Idealism that COMP entails, no arguement based on the physical will do... I refute it thus! -Dr. Johnson http://www.samueljohnson.com/refutati.html Onward! Stephen - Original Message - *From:* Colin Hales mailto:c.ha...@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au *To:* everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com *Sent:* Tuesday, August 11, 2009 9:51 PM *Subject:* Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental? Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Aug 2009, at 09:08, Colin Hales wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 06 Aug 2009, at 04:37, Colin Hales wrote: Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed refutation of computationalism. It's going through peer review at the moment. The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation of 'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is being carried out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the paper I drew an artificial distinction between them. I called the former NATURAL COMPUTATION (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL
Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?
Quentin Anciaux wrote: 2009/8/12 Colin Hales c.ha...@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au: My motivation to kill COMP is purely aimed at bring a halt to the delusion of the AGI community that Turing-computing will ever create a mind. They are throwing away $millions based on a false belief. Their expectations need to be scientifically defined for a change. I have no particular interest in disturbing any belief systems here except insofar as they contribute to the delusion that COMP is true. 'nuff said. This is another minor battle in an ongoing campaign. :-) Colin You want so much COMP to be false that you've forget in the way that your argument is flawed from the start... You start with, AI can't do science to conclude that... tada... AI can't do science. It's absurd. Quentin It is a 'reductio ad absudum' argument. My argument /does not start with AI can't do science/. It starts with the simple posit that if /COMP is true/ then all differences between a COMP world (AC) and the natural world (NC) should be zero under all circumstances and the AC/NC distinction would be false. That is the natural result of unconditional universality of COMP yes? OK. This posit is /not/ an assumption that AC cannot be a scientist. The rationale is that if I can find one and only one circumstance consistent/sustaining that difference, then the posit of the universal truth of COMP is falsified. The AC/NC distinction is upheld: . I looked and found one place where the difference is viable, a difference that only goes away if you project a human viewpoint into the 'artificial scientist' ( i.e. valid only by additional assumptions).that position is that the NC artificial scientist cannot ever debate COMP as an option. _Not because it can't construct the statements of debate, but because it will never be able to detect a world in which COMP is false, because in that world the informal systems involved can fake all evidence_ and lead the COMP scientist by the nose anywhere they want. If the real world is a place where informal systems exist, those informal systems can subvert/fake all COMP statements, no matter what they are and the COMP scientist will never know. It can be 100% right, think it's right and actually not be connected to the actual reality of it. A world in which COMP is false can never verify that it is. Do not confuse this 'ability to be fooled' with an inability to formulate statements which deal with inconsistency. The place where we get an informal system is in the human brain, which can 'symbolically cohere and explore' any/all formal systems. I specifically chose the human brain of a scientist, the workings of which were used to generate the 'law of nature' running the artificial (COMP) scientist (who must also be convinced COMP is true in order to bother at all!). I can see how, as a human, I could 100% fake the apparent world that the COMP entity examines COMP-ly and it will never know. (The same way that a brilliant virtual reality could 100% fool a human and we'd never know. A virtual reality that fools us humans is not necessarily made of computation either. ) I am not saying humans are magical. I am saying that humans do /not/ operate formally like COMP and that '/formally handling inconsistency/' is not the same thing as '/delivering inconsistency by being an informal/ /system/'. BTW I mean informal in the Godellian sense...simultaneous inconsistency and incompleteness. This is a highly self referential situation. Resist the temptation to assume that a COMP/NC scientist construction of statements capturing inconsistency is equivalent to dealing the intrinsic inconsistency of the human brain kind. Also reject the notion that the brain is computing of the COMP (Turing) type. This is not the case. You might also be interested in *Bringsjord, S. 1999. The Zombie Attack on the Computational Conception of Mind. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LIX:41-69.* He ends with./In the end, then, the zombie attack proves lethal: computationalism is dead./ It's a formal modal logic argument to the same end as mine in the end, they are actually the same argument. It's just not obvious. I like mine better because it has the Godellian approach. The informality issue has some elaboration here: *Cabanero, L. L. and Small, C. G. 2009. Intentionality and Computationalism: A Diagonal Argument. Mind and Matter 7:81-90.* Also here: *Fetzer, J. H. 2001. Computers and Cognition: Why Minds are Not Machines Kluwer Academic Publishers.* I am hoping that between these and a few others, the issue is sealed. I know it'll take a while for the true believers to come around. It's not such a big deal ... except when $$$ + wasted time promulgates bad science and magical thinking in the form of a kind a 'fashion preference' based on presumptions that the natural world is obliged to operate according to human-constructed 'isms. If I look
Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?
Bruno Marchal wrote: Colin, We agree on the conclusion. We disagree on vocabulary, and on the validity of your reasoning. Let us call I-comp the usual indexical mechanism discussed in this list (comp). Let us call m-comp the thesis that there is a primitive natural world, and that it can be described by a digital machine. UDA shows that I-comp entails NOT m-comp. Obviously m-comp entails I-comp. So m-comp entails NOT m-comp. This refutes m-comp. My argument involves refuting what you call m-comp Where did you get the idea I am suggesting /It can be described by a digital machine/? I'll state it again There is a natural world (a) It is imperfectly described from within in 2 ways (b) and (c). A symbolic description which is predictive of appearances (b) needs no assumption that the natural world is computing (b) or is a computation of (b). A symbolic description which is predictive of structure (c) needs no assumption that the natural world is computing (c) or is a computation of (c). The 'describing' in (b) and (c) invokes no necessary 'digital machine'. The Turing computation of the descriptions (b) and (c) is /not claimable to be a natural world/ by anything more than a form of faith. This seems to be the sticking point ... this 'digital machine' idea the automatic attribution of symbolic regularities as some kind of computation then attributed some kind of involvement in the natural world. This extra attribution is not justified. Non-parsimonious, not logically connected in any necessary way. Now you seem to believe in a stuffy natural reality, so you have to abandon I-comp. This is coherent. Now you have to say no to the doctor and introduce actual infinities in the brain. I find this very unplausible, but it is not my goal to defend it. Now I find your reasoning based on informality not convincing at all, to say the least. It is really based on level confusion s Peter Jones was driving at correctly. You B above seems also indicate you have not study the argument. Bruno The COMP that I refute is pragmatic and empirically tractable. Yes, m-comp is false. I don't need I-comp to reach that conclusion I need only go as far as the (a)/(b)/(c) framework in which (b) and (c) are imperfect, incomplete and non-unique symbolic descriptions of a natural world and which otherwise have no involvement in the natural world /at all/. Two different entities (human and Klingon :-) ) in our natural world could have completely different (b) formulations and be as predictive as each other. Study or not study? makes no difference. The whole idea of i-comp is unnecessary. BTW, just in case there's another issue behind thisthere's no such thing as 'digital'. Anyone who has ever done electronics will tell you that. It's all 'analogue' ...a construction of a quantised reality. By 'analogue' what I mean is whatever it is that is the natural world (a) above. All the digital machines on the planet are analogue. These are the ones people are using to do AGI. The virtual-discretisation we call digital quantisation of QM. So when you invoke a 'digital machine' you are talking about a fiction, anyway. Quantum computers merely facilitate multiple simultaneous executions within the same kind of virtual-digital structure ...doing lots more virtual-digital work doesn't make the computation any more digital than a standard PC. So in reality (a) there is no such thing as a Turing machine. There are only machines acting 'as-if' they are, by design, through constraint of analogue state transitions. I have personally played with the electronic transition between 0 and 1 on many occasions it's as real as the 0 and the 1 and you can walk all over it. There's multiple layers of misconception operating in this area. And they are not all mine! Colin --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
OFF LIST Re: Emulation and Stuff - The Ross Model of our Universe
Hi, Can you please send a .PDF or a .DOC I can't read .DOCX and I can't upgrade my PC to read ituni rules... :-( regards Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: New Paper by Thomas Hertog and Stephen Hawking
Jason Resch wrote: Described in this article: http://www.bioedonline.org/news/news.cfm?art=2617 This summation of all paths, proposed in the 1960s by physicist Richard Feynman and others, is the only way to explain some of the bizarre properties of quantum particles, such as their apparent ability to be in two places at once. The key point is that not all paths contribute equally to the photon's behaviour: the straight-line trajectory dominates over the indirect ones. Hertog argues that the same must be true of the path through time that took the Universe into its current state. We must regard it as a sum over all possible histories. So we must, must we? A mathematical construction by humans, happens to cohere to some extent with reality. A mere description. A million other descriptions, also constructed by humans, could be as predictive of how the universe appears. What extra belief system must exist in order that someone conclude that we 'must' chose a sum of all histories as the story? Why is the universe compelled to be such a thing? Rhetorical question...don't answer. Just think. happy new year, everythingers. cheers colin -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
PSYCHE Vol 16 #1 ... essay
Recently there was a student essay contest run by the ASSC (Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness) The five winners are published in the ASSC journal PSYCHE. One of them was mine. They have finally got around to publishing them. Hales C. 2010. The scientific evidence of qualia meets the qualia that are scientific evidence. PSYCHE 16(1):24-29. (http://www.theassc.org/journal_psyche/archive/vol_16_no_1_2010) I am trying hard to get my ideas about science into the awareness of as many folks as I can. I thought some of you may be interested.*The essays are mercifully short (1500 words!) * Enjoy. Colin Hales -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: PSYCHE Vol 16 #1 ... essay
Bruno Marchal wrote: Thanks for the link Colin. I will read it after the exams period. In some trivial sense I think I, and the Lobian machine, agrees with your conclusion, but less trivially, we may disagree. We don't have to change the boundaries of science, just be more open to facts, including the consequences of different theories. Could say more later. I think that computer science offers a theory of qualia on a plate (the intensional variants of the solovay logic G*, the 'right hypostases). It is a sort of theory which explains what escapes all theories. It makes you first person right, with the assumption of mechanism. But it is not knew, many did intuit such type of 'truth', and the greek intuited it together with the fact that we can reason about that. Th (old) error consists in opposing science and mysticism. The universal machine is naturally already mystical. I have explained this, but I know it is not so easy to grasp. Bruno I hope I can crack through your mindset one day! You can dream all you like about abstract interactions of numbers on a non-existent computer. It makes no difference to me. You can't build it, it predicts nothing and explains nothing. What I am trying to get people to realise is the most elementary of simple realities that we face as humans: (1) That whatever it is, we are inside it, made of it. The universe X. We acquire our faculties of observation from that circumstance. (2) That the position you intrinsically inherit from (1) as an observer intent on understanding how X works has two possible modes of description: (A) Statements capturing the essence of how X appears to us as observers in X. No matter how mathematically elaborate these statements are, you cannot deny the other mode ... (B) Statements depicting the interactions between structural-primitive elements comprising X that (i) result in an observer that (ii) sees the universe as we do (as per (A). Mutual self consistency must be confirmed at all levels except where (A) failspredictably. Neither (A) or (B) can be claimed to literally 'be' the universe. This does not mean that (B) cannot literally be the universe. It means we cannot /claim it to be/. Formally, we must remain forever agnostic. In practice we get the benefit of really getting to the heart of X in useful ways. Our big mistake is to conflate, endlessly and without review, (A) and (B). The conflation is twofold. We either do (B) without realising that its primary demand is the prediction of an observer or we arbitrarily decree (B) as impossib;le...sometimes by simply only doing A and thinking it somehow explains an observer. Observations cannot explain an observer! (an ability to observe). To believe they do is like saying that telephone conversations explain the telephone system. But we've been here before.. All I am saying is that (A) science is no less valid than (B) science, is not the same science and that it has equal rights to all empirical evidence (the contents of the consciousnes of scientists that literally constitutes scientific observation). No amount of fiddling about with abstract maths changes any of this. I hope that the essay speaks to you in a way that helps you see this. This is the position I am gradually building. I am going to go so far as to formally demand a summit on the matter. I believe things are that screwed up. 300 years of this confinement in the (A) prison is long enough. cheers colin hales -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: PSYCHE 16(1) ... essay results
John Mikes wrote: Congrats, Colin, very interesting ideas. Some time ago I learned from you a principle that forms an intensive part of my 'worldview': the 'mini-solipsism' i.e. the individual views everybody has about the world - differently, as formulated for himself from fragments received from 'reality and indiviually colored to one's personal background and mental-built. Now I have some remarks - not argumentative mostly (except for the 'Science of Quale') on that beautifully crafted (short!) writing that reaped the award. Here it goes: Colin Hales was named a 'winner' in the contest for 5 best and published his 1500-word max. contest-text - Psyche, Volume 16, number 1 (see pdf). Here are some responses - as far as I could understand his ideas (?). (C.H. text: full line, JMresp.: indented and Italics) -- --Qualia are the qualities of experience.-- Footnote: 2 --See (Tye, 2008). The word can be used when generally drawing attention to subjective qualities of visual experience, olfactory experience, gustatory experience, auditory experience, touch experience (including haptic/pressure, temperature and so forth), motion proprioception, situational emotions, primordial emotions (thirst, hunger, etc., associated with homeostasis (Denton, 2005)), plus imagined and pathologically originated versions of all of these. A popular phrase is that “it is like something” to be in receipt of qualia (Chalmers, 1996). Coined by (Lewis, 1929), there has been a semantic battle for decades over the word, which is falling into disuse when technical specificity is an issue. - / Looks to me as a R.Rosen's 'modeling relation'-al simulacron/. Q1: “What kind of experiences are qualia?” The experiences are -qualities- encountered from a first person perspective. There is nothing else to a first person perspective. This we attribute to the action of our brain: A century of physiology tells us that all experience is - g e n e r a t e d - in the cranial central nervous system (CNS). /(???)Is there some mechanism proposed, or is it only 'attribution'?/ Yes.. i even said that at the start of the essay! This is knowledge of the kind... /whatever it is, it is generated in and delivered by the action of what we observe to be 'brain material' in very localised places based on the specifics of the modality/. The context of this knowledge is one of the complete brain embedded in an environment (embedded in the universe) and embodied. That is as far as you go in 'discovering a correlate'... you say... whatever it is, it is highly correlated with that stuff' doing 'that behaviour' and when you stop it behaving that way, it stops. It becomes 'attributed' in the sense that we are in a unique evidentiary circumstance...the boundary condition in the essay... where we encounter the only place in science where hearsay is accepted as scientific evidence. / / It is interesting to realize the brain is in excess of 99.99% space, depending on how you compute spatial occupancy by electrons and nucleons. In essence, there is nothing left to describe in a brain except the space it inhabits. The dominant feature of the brain's operation is therefore actually the spatially expressed electric and magnetic fields, not the particulate components (atoms). Pointing out brain chemistry therefore almost completely misses the brain! /That can be translated into: we don't know _A LOT_ about the functional (vs: tissue) brain, i.e. mentality, how to describe it its functions and the 'mental' in general. My formulation instead of '(brain)-GENERATED': a '(brain)-HANDLED / / (as in a tool in 'procedure' we did not discover so far). Also missing: an explanatory explanation about those mystical spatially expressed(?) electric and magnetic fields (names?) - WHAT they are and how do they work in such mind-generational mood? -- / / As Homunculi, or just Deus Ex Machina? (in Physics?) / / *_Then there is Quale Science?_* As said above (C.H.),/ *'qualia are experiences', nothing more.*/ / / --- However... An experience is a personal adaptation of SOMETHING(?) (- part of the 'reality' which we cannot describe in our 'human' terms). We get it from the unlimited 'reality' (as assumed) into our limited capabilities as far as our human mind did interpret, adapt, formulate - as much as it could (of it) - into our personalised solipsism (C.H.), i.e. everybody's personalised worldview - restsricted to our individual genetic build-up, personal capabilities and past experience-infested (individual) memory-load - and who knows (today) what else does play in./ /Accordingly I find it futile at best, to speak about 'science' of qualia. Individually different items are hard to combine into 'a' scientific paradigm. / John M I don't share your pessimism
Re: PSYCHE Vol 16 #1 ... essay
Bruno Marchal wrote: Colin, I think we have always agreed on this conclusion. We may differ on the premises. It just happen that I am using a special hypothesis, which is very common, but not so well understood, and which is the digital mechanist hypothesis. I think things are more subtle than this.. I assume nothing, especially 'digital anything'. In reality there's no such thing as 'digital' (do not conflate this with 'quantisation'!). There's brains that make statements or kind (A) and (B). That's all. Unfortunately, because of our conceptual divide I cannot give meaningful answers to any of the subsequent questions you ask - because to answer them at all means I have to agree with the starting point. Your questions are of the same kind as when did you first start beating your dog? - the presupposition is that I beat my dog and the only undecided issue is 'when?'. The issues you discuss presuppose something that fundamentally violates science approaches in the same way that 'strings', 'loops', 'branes', 'froth' etc etc violate it and get sidelined. You have added the UTM and its variants to the pile. Any of these could be just as right as you think COMP is. The (A)/(B) framework is parsimonious/empirically tractable (requires nothing extra in the Occam's razor sense) and COMP isn't because it requires invocation of a form of unseen abstract computer running rules-of-Bruno, none of which lead to predictions that implement/explain the observer. You seem to think that my (A)/(B) framework must address issues in Bruno/COMP terms. I need none of it. Your framework is a preemptive generalisation of (A)/(B). In the end, once (A)/(B) candidates have been found and explored, Bruno/COMP may be able to be used as an abstract generalisation of the Hales/(A)/(B) framework. When that realisation happens, we can all go down to the pub and declare Bruno was right and drink to your insightsHowever, this will not happen until (A)/(B) is adopted in a self-consistent manner and followed to its logical endpoint /literal/, verifiable neuroscience predictions of an observer (not by pointing to what is believed corresponds to observation within in an abstract hypostase framework on a presupposed computer)Then and only then will we understand the relationship between the natural world and formal/artificial computation of the COMP kind.so we can then make informed decisions. IMO this is the way that you can ultimately be right, Bruno. Your work is an uber-framework within which sits mine as a special case. It's not either/or. Between you and proof of COMP is type (B) science of claims and testing. The instant that a (B) makes a verified prediction of brain material, you can then provide an abstract 'generalised theoretical neuroscience' that can, under suitable constraints, become the specific (B) that is us. At that time (A)/(B) will be able to be calibrated in terms of 'digital doctors', 'white rabibits', hypostases etc etc. In this way, Bruno/COMP can be quite right but devoid of practical utility, at least at this stage. (Right now...if I believe in COMP or I don't believe...changes nothing I still do (A)/(B), making predictive claims) Note that at the same time, the equally sidelined. 'strings', 'loops', 'branes', 'froth' etc etc will also get their validity sorted ... because all of them will be required to predict/explain the observer or go away. I can see how it must be very frustrating for you to see the overall generalisation but not how we are actually implemented as a particular version of it. At least my assessment of your position looks like that. This is how I think the COMP proposition could be viewed in the futurewe'll see, I suppose. :-) Meanwhile I have a broken, neurotic, deluded (A) science to fix. That's enough work! cheers colin -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: A paper by Bas C. van Fraassen
Hi, Looks like and interesting read but the initial gloss-over I had revealed all the usual things that continue to frustrate and exasperate me Why won't people that attend to these issues do some neuroscience...where the only example of a real observer exists.? Why does characterising the actual reality get continually conflated with characterisation of the reality as it appears to the observer (with a brain/scientist observer I mean)? Why does scientific measurement continue to get conflated with scientific observation which continues to get conflated with scientific evidence which then gets confusedly applied to systems of description which are conflated with actual reality? There _is_ a view from nowhere! It is acquired with objectivity, which originates in a totally subjective capacity delivered by the observer's brain material. In a room of 100 scientists in an auditorium there are 100 subjective views and ZERO objective views. There is ONE 'as-if' '/virtual objective view which is defined by agreement between multiple observers. But no measurement is going on. There's 100 entities 'BEING' in the universe. The Van Frassen discussion seems to conflate 'being' somewhere and 'observing'. A table lamp gets to BE. It is intimately part of its surrounds and has a unique perspective on everything that is 'not table lamp', but the lamp NOT observing in the sense scientists observe (with a brain). A brain is in the universe in the same way a table lamp is in the universe - yet the organisation of the brain (same kind of atoms/molecules) results in a capacity to scientifically observe. This 'observe' and the 'observe' that is literally BEING a table lamp, are not the same thing! G! This conflation has been going on for 100 years. I vote we make neuroscience mandatory for all physicists. Then maybe one day they'll really understand what 'OBSERVATION' is and the difference between it and 'BEING', 'MEASUREMENT and 'EVIDENCE' and _then_ what you can do with evidence. There. Vent is complete. That's better. Phew! :-) Colin Hales. Stephen Paul King wrote: Hi Friends, Please check out the following paper by Bas C. van Fraassen for many ideas that have gone into my posts so far, in particular the argument against the idea of a “view from nowhere”. www.princeton.edu/~fraassen/abstract/*Rovelli_sWorld*-*FIN*.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/%7Efraassen/abstract/Rovelli_sWorld-FIN.pdf Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: A paper by Bas C. van Fraassen
I am pretty sure that there is a profound misinterpretation and/or unrecognized presupposition deeply embedded in the kinds of discussion of which Van F and your reply and Bruno's fits. It's so embedded that there appears to be no way that respondents can type words from a perspective in which the offered view may be wrong or a sidebar in a bigger but unrecognised picture. It's very hard to write anything to combat view X when the only words which ever get written are those presuming X, and X is assuming a position of explaining everything, yet doesn't. In the long run I predict that: 1) The 'many worlds' do not exist and are a product of presuppositions about scientific description not yet understood by the proponents of MWI. 2) QM will be recognized as merely an appearance of the world, not the world as it is. 3) The universe that exists now is.the only universe that exists at the moment. Despite this, the many worlds are explorable, physically by 'virtual matter' behaving as if they existed (by an appropriate entity made of the stuff of our single universe) 4) The MWI has arisen as a result of a human need to make certain mathematics right, not the need to explain the natural world. This, in the longer term will be recognised as a form of religiosity which will be seen to imbue the physicists of this era, who are preselected by the education system for prowess in manupulating symbols. The difference between this behaviour and explaining the natural world is not understood by the physicists/mathematicians of this era. (In contrast, I regard myself as a scientist an explainer of things-natural ...which I claim as different to being a physicists/mathematician in this strange era we inhabit) 5) COMP is false a computer instantiation of rules of how a world appears to be, and a world are not the same thing. 6) COMP is false a computer instantiation of rules of how a brain appears to be is not a brain. 7) Corollary: scientific description of how the world appears and what the world is made of are not the same description _and_ computer instantiations of either set is not a world. 8) The issue that causes scientific descriptions (like QM) to be confused with actual reality is a cultural problem in science, not a technical problem with what science has/has not discovered. 9) That most of the readers of this list will stare at this list of statements and be as mystified about how I can possibly think they are right as I am about those readers' view that they can't be right. BTW I have a paper coming out in Jan 2011 in 'Journal of Machine Consciousness' in which I think I may have proved COMP false as a 'law of nature' ... here in this universe, (or any _actual_ universe, really). At the least I think the argument is very closeand I have provided the toolkit for its final demise, which someone else might use to clinch the deal. This leads to my final observation: 10) I think the realization of the difference between 'wild-type' computation (actual natural entities interacting) and 'artificial computation' (a computer made of the actual entities interacting, waving its components around in accordance with rules /symbols defined by a third party) will become mainstream in the long run. - It's quite possible that the COMP of the Bruno kind is actually right , but presented into the wrong epistemic domain and not understood as such. Time will tell. The way the Bruno-style' COMP can be right is for it to make testable predictions of the outward appearance of the mechanism for delivery of phenomenal consciousness in brain material NC (natural computation) and AC (artificial computation) is the crucial distinction. I don't think the QM/MWI proponent can conceive of that distinction. Perhaps it might be helpful if those readers try and conceive of such a situation, just as an exercise.. cheers colin hales Bruno Marchal wrote: HI Stephen, Just a short reply to your post to Colin, and indirectly to your last posts. On 22 Oct 2010, at 10:53, Stephen Paul King wrote: Dear Colin, Let me put you are ease, van Fraassen has sympathies with the frustrations that you have mentioned here and I share them as well, but let's look closely at the point that you make here as I think that it does to the heart of several problems related to the notion of an observer. OTOH, it seems to me that you are suggesting that the objective view is just a form of consensus between all of those subjective view, no? Also, the notion of a measurement is discussed in detail in the paper. I wonder if you read far enough to see it...If we buy the computationalist interpretation of the mind then there is nothing necessarily special about a human brain; the discussions about computational universality give us a good argument for that. OK. So we agree on the basic. But if you take the comp hypothesis seriously enough
Re: A paper by Bas C. van Fraassen
Brent Meeker wrote: On 10/23/2010 2:37 PM, Colin Hales wrote: I am pretty sure that there is a profound misinterpretation and/or unrecognized presupposition deeply embedded in the kinds of discussion of which Van F and your reply and Bruno's fits. It's so embedded that there appears to be no way that respondents can type words from a perspective in which the offered view may be wrong or a sidebar in a bigger but unrecognised picture. It's very hard to write anything to combat view X when the only words which ever get written are those presuming X, and X is assuming a position of explaining everything, yet doesn't. In the long run I predict that: 1) The 'many worlds' do not exist and are a product of presuppositions about scientific description not yet understood by the proponents of MWI. 2) QM will be recognized as merely an appearance of the world, not the world as it is. 3) The universe that exists now is.the only universe that exists at the moment. Despite this, the many worlds are explorable, physically by 'virtual matter' behaving as if they existed (by an appropriate entity made of the stuff of our single universe) 4) The MWI has arisen as a result of a human need to make certain mathematics right, not the need to explain the natural world. This, in the longer term will be recognised as a form of religiosity which will be seen to imbue the physicists of this era, who are preselected by the education system for prowess in manupulating symbols. You are presuming a lot about physicists. The idea that QM, and more generally mathematics, is just description and a representation of one's knowledge, not reality, is very common among physicists. I didn't think I was presuming anything! I am surrounded by physicists. I haven't met one yet that had a clear idea of the difference between the description and the thing. Same with mathematicians. I haven't met one yet that had even encountered the idea of the epistemic difference between a system, 'being' in that system and 'observing/describing a system by being in it'. It's profoundly problematic for me as a researcher trying to invest in knowledge which recognizes the distinction. For example, if you speak of the difference between EM phenomena in a brain (a description) and 'BEING' the fields (which is what we actually do), they get this strange look on their face, like you've just fed them a shite sandwich. The difference between this behaviour and explaining the natural world is not understood by the physicists/mathematicians of this era. (In contrast, I regard myself as a scientist an explainer of things-natural ...which I claim as different to being a physicists/mathematician in this strange era we inhabit) 5) COMP is false a computer instantiation of rules of how a world appears to be, and a world are not the same thing. 6) COMP is false a computer instantiation of rules of how a brain appears to be is not a brain. 7) Corollary: scientific description of how the world appears and what the world is made of are not the same description _and_ computer instantiations of either set is not a world. 8) The issue that causes scientific descriptions (like QM) to be confused with actual reality is a cultural problem in science, not a technical problem with what science has/has not discovered. 9) That most of the readers of this list will stare at this list of statements and be as mystified about how I can possibly think they are right as I am about those readers' view that they can't be right. BTW I have a paper coming out in Jan 2011 in 'Journal of Machine Consciousness' in which I think I may have proved COMP false as a 'law of nature' ... here in this universe, (or any _actual_ universe, really). At the least I think the argument is very closeand I have provided the toolkit for its final demise, which someone else might use to clinch the deal. This leads to my final observation: 10) I think the realization of the difference between 'wild-type' computation (actual natural entities interacting) and 'artificial computation' (a computer made of the actual entities interacting, waving its components around in accordance with rules /symbols defined by a third party) will become mainstream in the long run. - It's quite possible that the COMP of the Bruno kind is actually right , but presented into the wrong epistemic domain and not understood as such. Time will tell. The way the Bruno-style' COMP can be right is for it to make testable predictions of the outward appearance of the mechanism for delivery of phenomenal consciousness in brain material NC (natural computation) and AC (artificial computation) is the crucial distinction. I don't think the QM/MWI proponent can conceive of that distinction. Perhaps it might be helpful if those readers try and conceive of such a situation, just as an exercise.. I can conceive of it as relative
RE: To observe is to......
and using a-priori rules (programs) do not 'observe' at all. They merely act 'as-if' they are observing to the extent that the derived rules are faithful to the distal world within which the machine is supposed to be successful. They only survive by virtue of their groundedness in the real human observations that gave them the rules they use. That's the basic set of design decisions (gotta choose something!) behind the 'artificial scientist' that must have 'real' observations. Cheers Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: The difference between a 'chair' concept and a 'mathematical concept' ;)
snip unless you can eyeball it you're not being scientific). The subtlety with 'objective scientific evidence' is that ultimately it is delivered into the private experiences of indiividual scientists. Only agreement as to what is evidenced makes it 'objective'. So the privacy of the experience individuals is and always will be an intrinsic and unavoidable part of the whole process. If this is the case then there's a way around it - because in saying the last sentence I have been implicitly assuming that a human is doing the observing and therefore accepting tacitly all the limitations of that circumstance. Relax that constraint and what do you get? Either another biological life form is supplying evidence or a non-biological life-form is giving evidence of consciousness somehow. Why a life form? Why not an instrument or a robot? Call it what you want. AGI (artificial general intelligence) or artificial scientist, George... its more like 'life' than any other artifact in that it has experiences. That's all. A non-biological life-form offers the only really flexible and fully controllable and ethical option. How can this do the job, you ask? Isn't this a circular arument? You have to know you;ve built a conscious life form in oder that you get evidence to prove its consciousness? Not really... what it does is open up new options. In another world where ethics are different you'd experiment by grafting scientist's heads together so they could verify each other's experiences in some way. Plenty of scientists! Why not?! ... erm...welll...not really gonna fly is it? Don't we graft scientists heads together now by speech, papers, symposia,... So the viable alternative is 'grafting' putative artifiacts together in 'cancellation bridges' Huh?? There's an academic here who has a similar critical style. It sort of says I don't get it, so you must be wrong :-) A very common method in electrical measurement is the formation of a 'bridge' structure in multiples of 4 measurement elements. At the moment of relevance the 'control' and the 'probe' match each other. They are intimately interrelated physically - for example a strain gauge. I am working on a similar technique, only for phenomenal consciousness and all on one chip and all physically interrelated electromagnetically. The same sort of outcomes are possible - I think - I can get a) the same behaviour with and without phenomenality and also behaviour that can only have arisen because phenomenality exists. I can compare two phenomenal quale, but I can't experience either. It's better than nothing - a start. of one form or another and configure them in such a way as to report unambiguously the presence or absense of the results of the physics of experience doing its stuff. Merge 4 artificial scientists and get them to compare/contrast... and report So, for example, if we build a lot of different Mars rovers and they go to Mars and they report back similar things we'll have evidence that they are conscious? I think you misunderstand... see the above yes there is a statistical element to the experiment (numbers of chips, numbers of 'scientists'/chip) but this is not the mechanism doing the reporting - the mechanism is the physics on the individual 'merged scientist' chips. BTW the 'science' being done by these 'scientists' is the sort of science that could be done by a paramecium - :-) very very simple but science it is. It's just that several scientists get to experience the one single experience and conversely each individual scientist can experience any other scientist's experience. Mix and match. One way or another there's a protocol towards and acceptable 'truth' in there. === Note: The existence of successful science is proven by the existence of technology that used the science outcomes. Science cannot have occurred without the existence/reality of phenomenal consciousness. Hence the existence of consciousness is already objectively/scientifically proven. All that is really missing is specific mechanism and then a detailed ontology of experiences related to the objectively observed physics. Then we'll be cooking. In the end, tho - the chips will be implantable (say in the occipital) I think - so the human isn't entirely cut out of the loop in the long term. In fact with any luck they'll be able to repair the experientially-impaired. Also there are visualisation options in a technological solution - where the artifact's experiences can be directly converted to human-viewable visualisation. The artifact could then also look at it's own internal life and tune it to show the human what effects are happening.There's a bunch of ways through this. I can't wait to play with it... anyone got $100 million? Call me. :-) Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed
RE: Numbers, Machine and Father Ted
Empiricism as a philosophical movement has traditionally been opposed
to metaphysics. It hasn't just been a mild disagreement either, but an
at times vicious dispute (well, as vicious as philosophers get). David
Hume suggested that the best place for books on metaphysics was
in the fire, and his successors including logical empiricists and analytic
philosophers of the past century have generally tended to agree with
him.
Stathis Papaioannou
It's one of my favourite lines from Hume! but the issue does not live
quite so clearly into the 21st century. We now have words and much
neuroscience pinning down subjective experience to the operation of small
groups of cells and hence, likely, single cells. It's entirely cranial CNS.
Cortical, Basal, Cerebellum, upper brain stem. So
Q If empiricism demands phenomenal consciousness as the source of all
scientific evidence (close your eyes and see what evidence is left. QED.) of
the science of the appearance of things, then what is phenomenal
consciousness itself evidence of?
A. An underlying reality, deserved of physics but untouched by science,
eschewed as 'mere metaphysics'.
It was traditional once to think phlogiston was all there was to
combustion until Lavoisier got some extra evidence to tell a different
story. The current attitude to scientific evidence is logically identical to
a belief in phlogiston despite 50,000,000 Lavoisiers (scientists) proving
otherwise in the act of doing their craft every day.
So... metaphysics of the Deepak Chopra/Shirley Maclain/space cadet kind: Yes
to the fire! (as science). But. physics of an underlying reality
witnessed/evidenced intimately moment to moment in the minds of everyone...
does not deserve the same treatment.
Indeed isn't the physics of the underlying reality THE physics and the
physics of appearances ('traditional empirical physics') the
'aboutness'-physics = 'meta'-physics? Seems to me the nomenclature is
backwards. Not that I care... as long as both physics get done... the name
does not matter.
Cheers
Colin Hales
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RE: Numbers, Machine and Father Ted
It's one of my favourite lines from Hume! but the issue does not live quite so clearly into the 21st century. We now have words and much neuroscience pinning down subjective experience to the operation of small groups of cells and hence, likely, single cells. It's entirely cranial CNS. Cortical, Basal, Cerebellum, upper brain stem. So Q If empiricism demands phenomenal consciousness as the source of all scientific evidence (close your eyes and see what evidence is left. QED.) of the science of the appearance of things, then what is phenomenal consciousness itself evidence of? This is misrepresenting science. Science doesn't aim at the appearance of things. It uses appearance, i.e. empirical evidence, to test models which go beyond the appearance. This belief is metaphysics of the kind that has got us into this mess and of the kind destined to go into the fire along with all the other bollocks of science folly. You are assuming laws of appearances drive the universe. You cannot justify this any better than you could justify the existence of the tooth fairy. The utility of the laws in predicting appearances is just and only that. End of story. If what you say is true then when we opened up a brain we'd see the appearances! We don't, we see brain material. If they didn't the models would be mere catalogues of data. Phenomenal consciousness is no different. So you have some sort of misty eyed attachment to the laws that means you'd ignore blaring evidence just so you're comfy? I want explanations not deemed truth! If that means admitting we've screwed up our evidence systemso be it (= if we have to let go of 'phlogiston', fine) And anywayYes it is VERY VERY different. Nowhere else in science do you get 2 presentations of data and ignore one of them. Whatever is claimed found by neural correlates of consciousness (the science you describe) is neglected everywhere else in science. For example, if mind is a neural correlate of brain material, what is the equivalent correlate of, say, coffee cup behaviour? This inconsistency is simply neglected within science for no reason. If neural correlates are describing mind in any truly explanatory way then we should be able to use it to make scientifically supportable claims for whatever passes for the something correlates of coffeecup_ness, even though coffee cups can't actually confirm it. Being a coffee cup may not entail any experiential life but that is not the point. The point is being able to make a justified scientific statement about it. All that can be scientifically claimed about the cup is that there are no neurons there, so there are no _human_ type experiences. This is not a claim about the fundamental physics of phenomenality in any other context such as a coffee cup. For example if the cup is hot versus cold, what might the difference in experience be? Description (causality apparent in appearances) is not explanation (underlying causality). Correlation is not causation. Cakes are not caused by cake recipesetc.etc.etc... round we go again The underlying physics (of which we are constructed) generates the phenomenality (mind), not a bunch of rules generated by correlating the appearances supplied BY it. Just like the underlying causality makes a mass appear like F = MA is being used to drive it. Saying NCC says anything about what MIND is like using F= MA to make a brick fly. It doesn't make the brick fly - it says what it will look like to us if it does. Here's the killer question: Can I build an inorganic artifact out of whatever comes out of neural correlates science? NO. Good for pathology detection (such as the coffee cup pathology above) but no use anywhere else. Cheers Colin --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: To observe is to......EC
=== STEP 6: Initial state, 'axioms' (*) The initial state of the EC axiom set is 1 huge collection of phase related fluctuations. The (*) means that all the axioms are coincident - there is no 'space' yet. No concept of place. The number of spatial dimensions is equal to the number of axioms. NOTES: 1) Think of ( ) as a loop that goes up and around the left bracket, across to the top of the right bracket, down the right bracket and across to the left again. Serendipitously the match with Church's Lambda calculus is not altered by this mental trick. 2) To initialise a relevant collection of ( ) as axioms is to construct them, but to construct them IN PHASE. Not all exactly in phase. All that is needed is to have the ( ) sufficiently in phase to enable their mutual interaction. Two ( ) can merge if they happen to transit through the same state as another coincident ( ) in such a way as they a) simply take over each other (in of phase) or combine to construct a single structure (notionally larger). In the process unused portions can be shed this is a dissipative process. If there is no shedding then the combining process is lossless. 3) This is where an understanding of dynamic hierarchies will help. Turtles. The initialisation (construction) of EC axioms can happen from sea of randomness. In other words the fluctuations are made of sub-fluctuations. The origins of the sea of randomness can be traced back to more esoteric considerations of 'nothing' and the 'infinite' - outside the necessary scope of EC. All that has to happen is that ever so often - very very rarely, but statistically inevitable, like the one raindrop that hits your nose, you will get massive numbers of simultaneous phase coherence of similar ( ) fluctuations. The phase coherence doesn't have to be perfect. 4) The EC fluctuations, being made of sub-fluctuations (turtles) will have a characteristic depending on the ratio of the EC axiom 'extent' (the number of sub-fluctuations that create one EC fluctuation). This means that the final EC outcome will be critically dependent on the dynamic of the EX axiom. 5) This process is, I think, what we would call the big bang. The phase variance is, I think, made visible in what we see as the cosmic background radiation. 6) The process of reversion of EC axioms to their original noise is that we see as reality driven by the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Each time a chunk of on of the original EC axiom is dispersed to a lower level of organisation within the proof, the net proof === --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: To observe is to......EC
Colin Hales wrote: 3) The current state of the proof is 'now' the thin slice of the present. Just a couple of questions for the moment Colin, until I've a little more time. Actually, that's precisely what it's about - 'time'. Just how thin is this slice of yours? And is it important whether we conceive it as Now-You-See-It-Now-You-Don't time, or does it work in 'block' time? This may be a maths vs. 'primitive' EC issue. Anyway, if NYSINYD, what is the status of the 'thens'? That is, if nothing but a wafer-thin 'now' is actual, how does this effect process-structure at the macro-level, which we encounter as Vast ensembles of events? Does reality work as just the flimsiest meniscus? This is presumably not a problem in a block version. Also, what about STR with respect to 'now' and the present? But perhaps I'm jumping the gun. David Jump away! I'm letting EC 'rules of formation' ferment at the moment Preamble... the mental secret to EC is to attend to one of my all time faves: Leibniz. His approach has always born fruit in my analyses. What he was on about, translated into modern jargon, was that brain operation is a literal metaphor for the deep structure of matter. Brain operation is a whole bunch of nested resonating loops. I have observed in general and found the same pattern in a lot of things - trees, clouds... and most wonderfully in the boiling froth... rice is best. :-) Time. It's important to distinguish between the mental perception of it and the reality of it. * TIME PERCEIVED There is a neurological condition (name escapes me) where the visual field is updated on mass as usual but at a repetition rate much lower than usual. Try pouring a glass of wine you see the glass at one instant and the next time you see it: overfull. Try crossing a road. A car is 200m away... you walk and bang, it's 10m away. All throughout this, EC state changes have been running normally. In a normally operating brain in the face of novelty, where more brain regions are involved as a result of dealing with the novelty (such as when traveling in a new area), more energy is recruited, more brain regions are active and the cognitive update rate is increased. Time feels like its going slower. All throughout this, EC state changes have been running normally. * TIME REALITY according to EC Time is virtual. There is only EC proof and its current state. The best way of imaging it is to think of it as a nested structure of nearest neighbour interactions according to a local energy optimization rule. Energy is a metric counting how many ()s there are in a given structure and how many it can do without and still remain the same thing. () () could go to (()()) or vice versa. It doesnt matter. Overall its a one way trip (door slams behind you) depending on what nearest neighbour situation results from the present nearest neighbour situation. Locally there can be lossless EC transformations. Globally the net result is dissipation back to primitive () (and then to its constituents (noise). There is no future, only next state. It looks like 2nd law of thermodynamics from within it. By traveling fast through the EC string (like a wave through water) the faster you go compared to the refresh rate of EC-you by the () structure that is you, your structural state-evolution will proceed at a lower rate than other pieces of the EC string. EC you (organisation only) is moving, but your structure is merely being replicated within the EC string, not moving at all. If we have had a previous metaphor for the EC string Id call it what was once called the ether. Although its not real in the sense that it was once thought just a concept a way of viewing the EC string. When you are in EC it looks like more relative speed (compared your local EC string), time goes slower. Traveling faster than the speed of light is meaningless EC cant construct/refresh you beyond the rate its () operate at. Theres nothing to travel in anything and nothing to travel. Its meaningless. In deep time (many more state changes in the proof beyond now) EC predicts (I think) the equivalent of approaching the speed of light, only not through moving fast, but by dissipation of the fabric of space/matter (there is no time). To be alive then (see how our words are troublesome?) would feel the same. But if you compared the rate of progress of EC would be different. An EC aging process of the time it takes to write WORD in the year 10^^25 could be our equivalent of 3 months of current EC state evolution. Its the same effect as that got by going really fast. When you are inside EC and local structure evolves in an organised way and achieves regularity it means an abstraction of an EC structure can have a t in it. Unfortunately.then we get distracted by the t possibly being negative and now and start talking as if time was real and the abstraction was more than an abstraction
Re: String theory and Cellular Automata
Hi, See previous posts here re EC - Entropy Calculus. This caught my eye, thought I'd throw in my $0.02 worth. I have been working on this idea for a long while now. Am writing it up as part of my PhD process. The EC is a lambda calculus formalism that depicts reality. It's actual instantation with one particular and unbelievable massive axiom set is the universe we are in. The instantation is literally the CA of the EC primitives. As cognitive agents within it, made of the EC-CA, describing it, we can use abstracted simplified EC on a computational substrate (also made of the CA...a computer!) to explore/describe the universe. But the abstractions (like string theory) are not the universe - they are merely depictions at a certain spatiotemporal observer-scales. Reality is a literal ongoing massively parallel theorem proving exercise in Entropy Calculus. The EC universe has literally computed you and me and my dogs. Coherence/Bifurcation points in the CA correspond to new descriptive 'levels of underlying reality' - emergence. Atoms, Molecules, Crystalsetc... One of the descriptive abstractions of the EC-CA is called 'Maxwells-Equations'. Another is the Navier-Stokes equations (different context), another is Quantum Mechanics, the standard particle model and so on. None of them are reality - merely depictions of a surface behaviour of it. In the model there is only one universe and only one justified or needed. Which is a bummer if you insist on talking about multiverses.they are not parsimonious or necessary to explain the universe. I can't help it if they are unnecessary! You know , it's funny what EC makes the universe look like. the boundary of the universe is the collective event horizon of all black holes. On the other side is nothing. The endlessly increasing size of black holes is what corresponds to the endlessly increasing entropy (disorder - which is the dispersal of the deep universe back to nothing at the event horizons). The measure of the surface area of the black holes is the entropy of the whole universe. The process of dispersal at the boundary makes it look like the universe is expanding - to us from the inside. The reality is actually the reverse - the spatiotemporal circumstances are of shrinkage - due to the loss of the redundant fabric of the very deepest layers of reality being eaten by the black holes, dragging it inwhilst the organisation of collections of it at the uppermost layers is maintained (like space, atoms etc). (Imagine a jumper knitted of wool with a huge number of threads in the yarn - remove the redundant threads from the inside and the jumper shrinks, but is still a jumper, just getting smaller(everything else around looks like it's getting bigger from the point of view of being the jumper.) our future?...we'll all blink out of existence as the event horizons of black holes that grow and grow and grow and do it faster and faster and faster until. merging and merging until they all merge and then PFT! NOTHING. and the whole process starts again with a new axiom setround and round and roundwe go... Weird huh? So I reckon you're on the right track. You don't have to believe me about any of it... but I can guarantee you'll get answers if you keep looking at it. The trick is to let go of the idea that 'fundamental building blocks' of nature are a meaningful concept (we are tricked into the belief be our perceptual/epistemological goals) ... cheers, colin hales Mohsen Ravanbakhsh wrote: I'm thinking there's some kind of similarity between string theory and depicting the world as a big CA. In String theory we have some vibrating strings which have some kind of influence on each other and can for different matters and fields. CA can play such role of changing patterns and of course the influence is evident. Different rules in CA might correspond to various basic shapes of vibration in strings... I don't know much about S.T. but the idea of such mapping seems very interesting. -- Mohsen Ravanbakhsh. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: Mouse brain simulated on a computer - NOT
Hi, What they did was hook X million simple neural soma models to each other with Y000 models of synaptic interconnects. Very useful for investigating large-scale dynamicsbutthe leap to 'mouse brain'?.presumptuous I think. Perhaps... 'Mouse-brain scale idealised connectionist model' would b more accurate and less loaded remember...Less than half the signaling in the brain is via synapses. They didn't even mention the word 'astrocyte'. Interesting..yes. Relevant to the milieu? Yes...but well informed? Hthe spin has a little too much chest thumping and not enough biology, methinks cheers col --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
Sorry about the previous post... I did it from the the Google listsomething weird happened. --- Hi folks, Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious? Easy. The computer would be able to go head to head with a human in a competition. The competition? Do science on exquisite novelty that neither party had encountered. (More interesting: Make their life depend on getting it right. The survivors are conscious). Only conscious entities can do open ended science on the exquisitely novel. You cannot teach something how to deal with the exquisitely novel because you haven't any experience of it to teach. It means that the entity must be configurted as a machine that learns how to learn something. This is one meta-level removed from your usual AI situation. It's what humans do. During neogenesis and development, humans 'learn how to learn how to learn. If the computer/scientist can match the human/scientist...it's as conscious as a human. It must be. cheers colin hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
wave. Another question to ask What is it like to BE a sine wave?. These are all aspects of the same thing. Now consider one of the models (sine waves) - computationalism/functionalism - defined through an observation. What is the observation? .That universe seems to be performing computation or information processingsowhat do we do with that observation? We jump to the unfounded conclusion that any form of computation in some undefined way leads to consciousness (= all siine waves are conscious).. This is as flawed as any similar explanation as it is logically indistiguishable and as empirically useless as the equivalent belief: I believe observation (consiousness) is invoked by the tooth fairy on thursdays. The only real, verifiable evidence of consciousness we have is the existence of scientists and their output. It may seem a hard task to set yourself as an AI worker... but TOUGH - nobody said it had to be easy - and it is no reason to set it aside in favour of an empirically useless tooth fairy hypothesis for consciousness. At least I have a plan. so in relation to I don't see that you've made your point. I'd like to think that I have. My AI/Human scientist face-off stands as is and I defy anyone to come up with something practical/better that isn't axiomatically flawed. Everything is scientific evidence of something. Scientists are no exception. cheers, colin hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
wave. Another question to ask What is it like to BE a sine wave?. These are all aspects of the same thing. Now consider one of the models (sine waves) - computationalism/functionalism - defined through an observation. What is the observation? .That universe seems to be performing computation or information processingsowhat do we do with that observation? We jump to the unfounded conclusion that any form of computation in some undefined way leads to consciousness (= all siine waves are conscious).. This is as flawed as any similar explanation as it is logically indistiguishable and as empirically useless as the equivalent belief: I believe observation (consiousness) is invoked by the tooth fairy on thursdays. The only real, verifiable evidence of consciousness we have is the existence of scientists and their output. It may seem a hard task to set yourself as an AI worker... but TOUGH - nobody said it had to be easy - and it is no reason to set it aside in favour of an empirically useless tooth fairy hypothesis for consciousness. At least I have a plan. so in relation to I don't see that you've made your point. I'd like to think that I have. My AI/Human scientist face-off stands as is and I defy anyone to come up with something practical/better that isn't axiomatically flawed. Everything is scientific evidence of something. Scientists are no exception. cheers, colin hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
Colin like the functionality of a scientist without involving ALL the functionality (especially qualia) of a scientist must be based on assumptions - assumptions I do not make. Russel I gave a counter example, that of biological evolution. Either you should demonstrate why you think biological evolution is uncreative, or why it is conscious. Colin You have proven my point again. It is not a counterexample at all. These two either-or options are rife with assumption and innappropriately contra-posed. The biggest? = Define the context/semantics of 'creative'. Options: #1 The biosphere is a massive localised collection of molecular ratchet motors pumped infinitesimal increment by infinitesimal increment against the 2nd law of thermodynamics upon the arrival of each photon from the sun. If the novelty (new levels nested organisational complexity) expressed in that collection/process can be called an act of creativity...fine...so what? I could call it an act of 'gronkativity' and it would not alter the facts of the matter. I don't even have to mention the word consciousness. The organisational complexity thus contrived may or may not include physics that makes some of it (like humans) conscious. I could imagine a biosphere just as complex (quaternary, 100ernary/etc structure) but devoid of all the physics involved in (human) consciousness and the behavioural complexity contingent on that fact. That alternate biosphere's complexity would simply have no witnesses built into it and would have certain state trajectories ruled out in favour of others. This alternate biosphere would have lots of causality and no observation (in the sense that the causality is involved in construction of a phenomenal field of the human/qualia kind is completely absent). This blind biosphere is all 'observation' O(.) functions of the Nils Baas kind that is completely disconnected from consciousness or the human faculty for observation made of it. Making any statement about the consciousess of a biosphere is meaningless until you know what the physics is in humans...only then are we entitled to assess the consciousness or otherwise of the biosphere as a whole or what, if any' aspects of the word creative (which , BTW was invented by consciousness!) can be ascribed to it.the same argument applies to a computer, for that matter. Until then I suggest we don't bother. #2 Creativity in humans = the act of being WRONG about something = the essence of imagining (using the faculty of consciousness - the qualia of internal imagery of all kinds) hitherto unseen states of affairs in the natural world around us that do not currently exist (such as the structure of a new scientific law or a sculture of a hitherto unseen shape). this has nothing to do with the #1 collection of ratchet motorsexcept insofar as the process doing it is implemented inside it, with it (inside the brain of a human made of the ratchet motors). That's how you unpack this discussion. cheers colin hales BTW thanks.I now have the BAAS paper on .PDF Baas, N. A. (1994) Emergence, Hierarchies, and Hyperstructures. In C. G. Langton (ed.). Artificial life III : proceedings of the Workshop on Artificial Life, held June 1992 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass. I'll send it over... --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
Hi again, Russel: I'm sorry, but you worked yourself up into an incomprehensible rant. Is evolution creative in your view or not? If it is, then there is little point debating definitions, as we're in agreement. If not, then we clearly use the word creative in different senses, and perhaps defintion debates have some utility. Colin: There wasn't even the slightest edge of 'rant' in the post. Quite calm, measured and succinct, actually. Its apparent incomprehensibility? I have no clue what that could be it's quite plain... RE: 'creativity' ... Say at stage t the biosphere was at complexity level X and then at stage t = t+(something), the biosphere complexity was at KX, where X is some key performance indicator of complexity (eg entropy) and K 1 This could be called creative if you like. Like Prigogine did. I'd caution against the tendency to use the word because it has so many loaded meanings that are suggestive of much more then the previous para. Scientifically the word could be left entirely out of any desciptions of the biosphere. The bogus logic I detect in posts around this area... 'Humans are complex and are conscious' 'Humans were made by a complex biosphere' therefore 'The biosphere is conscious' That assumes that complexity itself (organisation of information) is the origin of consciousness in some unspecified, unjustified way. This position is completely unable to make any empirical predictions about the nature of human conscousness (eg why your cortex generates qualia and your spinal chord doesn't - a physiologically proven fact). The same bogus logic happens in relation to quantum mechanics and conscsiousness: Quantum mechanics is weird and complex Consciousness is is weird and complex therefore Quantum mechanics generates consciousness I caution against this. I caution against using the word 'creativity' in any useful scientific discussion of evolution and complexity. cheers colin --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
of the outcome (patents) took human involvement. The inventor (software) doesn't even know it's in a universe, let alone that it participated in an invention process. (2) Is this evolutionary algorithm conscious then?. In the sense that we are conscious of the natural world around us? Most definitely no. Nowhere in the computer are any processes that include all aspects of the physics of human cortical matter. Without knowing exactly why it is the case that cortical matter bestow qualia on us... what I can definitely claim (because I know what is in the chips at the atomic level and I know what is in cortical material at the atomic level) is that in no way does the computer include all the aspects of the cortical matter that we utilise in our scientific behaviour. Science is grounded in cortical-qualia (via observation)...The computer cannot be scientifically claimed to have qualia...ergo is not conscious... ...Which will now hit the question-begging boundary.as to the of the question-begging thing (and please don't jump into the solipsism mud) FACT: The ONLY _scientifically_ provable example (.ie. a generalisation about the natural world that remains tentatively unrefuted) we have of a real known consciousness is ourselves (scientists). The scientific proof? = Science exists/is possible/is successful and fails without human cortical qualia being involved The word 'consciousness', invoked in this context means specifically and only the cortical qualia in which sciencwe has been grounded. This is a scientifically provable proposition I can make without knowing what qualia are. Based on this, of the 2 following positions, which is less vulnerable to critical attack? A) Information processing (function) begets consciousness, regardless of the behaviour of the matter doing the information processing (form). Computers process information. Therefore I believe the computer is conscious. B) Human cortical qualia are a necessary condition for the scientific behaviour and unless the complete suite of the physics involved in that process is included in the computer, the computer is not conscious. Which form of question-begging gets the most solid points as science? (B) of course. (B) is science and has an empirical future. Belief (A) is religion, not science. Bit of a no-brainer, eh? Cheers colin hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
Hi Stathis, Colin The bogus logic I detect in posts around this area... 'Humans are complex and are conscious' 'Humans were made by a complex biosphere' therefore 'The biosphere is conscious' Stathis That conclusion is spurious, but it is the case that non-conscious evolutionary processes can give rise to very elaborate technology, namely life, which goes against your theory that only consciousness can produce new technology. Colin This point is poised on the cliff edge of loaded word meanings and their use with the words 'sufficient' and 'necessary'. By technology I mean novel artifacts resulting from the trajectory of causality including human scientists. By that definition 'life', in the sense you infer, is not technology. The resulting logical loop can be thus avoided. There is a biosphere that arose naturally. It includes complexity of sufficient depth to have created observers within it. Those observers can produce technology. Douglas Adams (bless him) had the digital watch as a valid product of evolution - and I agree with him - it's just that humans are necessarily involved in its causal ancestry. COLIN That assumes that complexity itself (organisation of information) is the origin of consciousness in some unspecified, unjustified way. This position is completely unable to make any empirical predictions about the nature of human conscousness (eg why your cortex generates qualia and your spinal chord doesn't - a physiologically proven fact). STATHIS Well, why does your eye generate visual qualia and not your big toe? It's because the big toe lacks the necessary machinery. Colin I am afraid you have your physiology mixed up. The eye does NOT generate visual qualia. Your visual cortex generates it based on measurements in the eye. The qualia are manufactured and simultaneously projected to appear to come from the eye (actually somewhere medial to them). It's how you have 90degrees++ peripheral vison. The same visual qualia can be generated without an eye (hallucination/dream). Some blind (no functioning retina) people have a visual field for numbers. Other cross-modal mixups can occur in synesthesia (you can hear colours, taste words). You can have a phantom big toe without having any big toe at alljust because the cortex is still there making the qualia. If you swapped the sensory nerves in two fingers the motor cortex would drive finger A and it would feel like finger B moved and you would see finger A move. The sensation is in your head, not the periphery. It's merely projected at the periphery. cheers colin --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
the flame - right there - where i claim this is not the case. Everything we are is mediated through cortical qualia. In the one and only case - the act of doing science - this argument is not valid. Science evidences qualia (it does not say what they are, merely that they exist) This is the cultural blind we inhabit. Cortical qualia are all and ONLY evidence of _everything_ and is subjectively delivered. We cannot have it both ways. We cannot live and do science using it for all evidence and then either (a) deny it or (b) claim it present in another person/artifact with the same ability as we declare something pornography (an arbitrary belief). Let the object itself demonstrate science. be scientific about it. This is the only place any consistency can be invoked and the major source of inconsistency in our own behaviour as scientists. Like I said earlier: everything is evidence of something and scientists are no exception - they are evidence of something and that something is cortical qualia. The scientific act and the existence of scientists is the slim crack in the cultural blind through which we can end the chronic failure. It is therefore not at all clear to me that some n-th generational improvement on an evolutionary algorithm won't be considered conscious at some time in the future. It is not at all clear which aspects of human cortical systems are required for consciousness. You are not alone. This is an epidemic. My scientific claim is that the electromagnetic field structure literally the third person view of qualia. This is not new. What is new is understanding the kind of universe we inhabit in which that is necessarily the case. It's right there, in the cells. Just ask the right question of them. There's nothing else there but space (mostly), charge and mass - all things delineated and described by consciousness as how they appear to it - and all such descriptions are logically necessarily impotent in prescribing why that very consciousness exists at all. Wigner got this in 1960something time to catch up. gotta go cheers colin hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
the 'cells' etc are objects of sense impressions! All description, no explanation. You will never explain them that way by definition. The only way out of the circularity is to ask yourself (as I suggested in the first post) What kind of universe must I be in/made of would, in the form of observed cells and cell behaviour, deliver observation of the kind that reveals itself as cells behaving as they do? I hold the huge and exquisitiely structured electromagnetic field in normal human cranial excitable cells (neurons and astrocytes)to be responsible for qualia. 'The word 'electromagnetic' is just a label for a sense artefact. There is no such 'thing' as electromagnetism. There is only SOMETHING (stuff) behaving in a an electromagnetic fashion that we all agreed is deserved of the label.. The trick is to propose all manner of kinds of 'stuff' (nothing to do with any'thing' ever proposed by science) in a collection that has an intrinsic capacity to deliver observation (the one thing totally unexplained by science) and to recognise in that STUFF what the property delivering observation actually is. This sounds weird but it's quite practical and invaldates no existence science at all. Existing science can be used to validate all such propositions for STUFF. It's what I am set about to do - make a conscious chip - and prove it is conscious (has qualia happeneing in it) - by making it (actually several of them all connected to each other) do science and get it right. Science hasn't even begun to do this an any structured, explicit fashion...which is a shame, for it causes all the circularity. So in order to tell you the answer to your question I have to tell you what the universe is made of. And the answer consistent with brain material's ability to deliver observation is simple: the fluctuation. End of story. Except you need a whole pile of them (largely but not perfectly) synchronised. I can never tell you it's X,Y,Z contents of consciousness-based generalisation that delivers the contents of consiousness. The circularity (dare I say symmetry!) argument is broken by breaking our epistemology into 2 distinct halves, each valid depictions of the natural world. One half (a) scientifically says what it is made of and the other half (b) scientifically says how it will appear when you are made of it, inside it _because_ it is made of (a) stuff. I am doing (b). I can't use sense objects like cells and molecules and atoms to explain it because it is meaningless to do so. I can tell you that the delivery of sense impressions (qualia) is definitely as a result of specific bahaviours related to what we observe as neural cell firing, but not entirely so. The model also scientifically says why your big toe has no qualia and what a rock or a computer (current architectures) does not. The boundary of the underlying natural world/universe and how it appears is literally in brain material. It's the only 'real' we can claim to have. Ignoring it as evidence of the underlying universe is just plain dumb. Down the track we're all going to say geeze what WERE we thinking all those centuries!! My formula for machine consciousness validation stands as a valid scientifically testable proposition. The real test will happen within 5 years - a nest of tiny little benchtop artificial scientists in the form of chips with a novel architecture - that will scientifically demonstrate science to us and therefore be justifyably the possessors of qualia. Upon failure of the test the 'STUFF' I have chosen must be the wrong STUFF and that will be scientifically refuted. In any event real science will be done. gotta go. cheers colin hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
Hi, I am going to have to be a bit targetted in my responses I am a TAD whelmed at the moment. COLIN 4) Belief in 'magical emergence' qualitative novelty of a kind utterly unrelated to the componentry. RUSSEL The latter clause refers to emergence (without the magical qualifier), and it is impossible IMHO to have creativity without emergence. COLIN The distinction between 'magical emergence' and 'emergence' is quite obviously intended by me. A lake is not apparent in the chemical formula for water. I would defy anyone to quote any example of real-world 'emergence' that does not ultimately rely on a necessary primitive. 'Magical emergence' is when you claim 'qualitative novelty' without having any idea (you can't point at it) of the necessary primitive, or by defining an arbitrary one that is actually a notional construct (such as 'information'), rather than anything real. COLIN The system (a) automatically prescibes certain trajectories and RUSSEL Yes. COLIN (b) assumes that the theroem space [and] natural world are the same space and equivalently accessed. RUSSEL No - but the system will adjust its model according to feedback. That is the very nature of any learning algorithm, of which EP is just one example. COLIN Ok. Here's where we find the big assumption. Feedback? HOW?...by who's rules? Your rules. This is the real circularity which underpins computationalism. It's the circularity that my real physical qualia model cuts and kills. Mathematically: * You have knowledge KNOWLEDGE(t) of 'out there' * You want more knowledge of 'out there' so * KNOWLEDGE(t+1) is more than KNOWLEDGE(t) * in computationalism who defines the necessary route to this?... d(KNOWLEDGE(t)) --- = something you know = YOU DO. dt So this means that in a computer abstraction. d(KNOWLEDGE(t)) --- is already part of KNOWLEDGE(t) dt You can label it 'evolutionary' or 'adaptive' or whatever...ultimately the rules are YOUR rules and come from your previously derived KNOWLEDGE(t) of 'out there', not intrinsically grounded directly in 'out there'. Who decided what you don't know? YOU DID. What is it based on? YOUR current knowledge of it, not what is literally/really there. Ungroundedness is the fatal flaw in the computationalist model. Intrinsic grounding in the external world is what qualia are for. It means that d(KNOWLEDGE(t)) --- dt is (a) built into the brain hardware (plasticity chemistry, out of your cognitive control) (b) partly grounded in matter literally/directly constructed in representation of the external world, reflecting the external world so that NOVELTY - true novelty in the OUTSIDE WORLD - is apparent. In this way your current knowledge minimally impacts d(KNOWLEDGE(t)) --- dt In other words, at the fundamental physics level: d(KNOWLEDGE(t)) --- dt in a human brain is NOT part of KNOWLEDGE(t). Qualia are the brain's solution to the symbolic grounding problem. RUSSEL Not at all. In Evolutionary Programming, very little is known about the ultimate solution the algorithm comes up with. COLIN Yes but that is irrelevantthe programmer said HOW it will get thereSorry...no cigarsee the above My scientific claim is that the electromagnetic field structure literally the third person view of qualia. Eh? Electromagnetic field of what? The brain? If so, do you think that chemical potentiation plays no role at all in qualia? Chemical potentiation IS electric field. There's no such thing as 'mechanical' there's no such thing as 'chemical'. These are all metaphors in certain contexts for what is there...space and charge (yes...and mass associated with certain charge carriers). Where did you get this weird idea that a metaphor can make qualia? The electric field across the membrane of cells (astrocytes and neurons) is MASSIVE. MEGAVOLTS/METER. Think SPARKS and LIGHTNIING. It dominates the entire structure! It does not have to go anywhere. It just has to 'be'. You 'be' it to get what it delivers. Less than 50% of the signalling in the brain is synaptic, anyway! The dominant cortical process is actually an astrocyte syncytium. (look it up!). I would be very silly to ignore the single biggest, most dominant process of the brain that is so far completely correlated in every way with qualia...in favour of any other cause. --- Once again I'd like to get you to ask yourself the killer question: What is the kind of universe we must live in if the electromagnetic field structure of the brain delivers qualia? A. It is NOT the universe depicted by the qualia (atoma, molecules, cells...). It is the universe whose innate capacity to deliver qualia is taken advantage of when configureed like it appears when we use qualia themselves to explore itcortical brain matter. (NOTE: Please do not make the mistake that sensors - peripheral affect - are
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
Hi, RUSSEL All I can say is that I don't understand your distinction. You have introduced a new term necessary primitive - what on earth is that? But I'll let this pass, it probably isn't important. COLIN Oh no you don't!! It matters. Bigtime... Take away the necessary primitive: no 'qualititative novelty' Take away the water molecules: No lake. Take away the bricks, no building Take away the atoms: no molecules Take away the cells: no human Take away the humans: no humanity Take away the planets: no solar system Take away the X: No emergent Y Take away the QUALE: No qualia Magical emergence is when but claim Y exists but you can't identify an X. Such as: Take away the X: No qualia but thenyou claim qualia result from 'information complexity' or 'computation' or 'function' and you fail to say what X can be. Nobody can. You can't use an object derived using the contents of consciousness(observation) to explain why there are any contents of consciousness(observation) at all. It is illogical. (see the wigner quote below). I find the general failure to recognise this brute reality very exasperating. COLIN snip So this means that in a computer abstraction. d(KNOWLEDGE(t)) --- is already part of KNOWLEDGE(t) dt RUSSEL No its not. dK/dt is generated by the interaction of the rules with the environment. No. No. No. There is the old assumption thing again. How, exactly, are you assuming that the agent 'interacts' with the environment? This is the world external to the agent, yes?. Do not say through sensory measurement, because that will not do. There are an infinite number of universes that could give rise to the same sensory measurements. We are elctromagnetic objects. Basic EM theory. Proven mathematical theorems. The solutions are not unique for an isolated system. Circularity.Circularity.Circularity. There is _no interaction with the environment_ except for that provided by the qualia as an 'as-if' proxy for the environment. The origins of an ability to access the distal external world in support of such a proxy is mysterious but moot. It can and does happen, and that ability must come about because we live in the kind of universe that supports that possibility. The mysteriousness of it is OUR problem. RUSSEL Evolutionary algorithms are highly effective information pumps, pumping information from the environment into the genome, or whatever representation you're using to store the solutions. COLIN But then we're not talking about merely being 'highly effective' in a target problem domain, are we? We are talking about proving consciousness in a machine. I agree - evolutionary algoritms are great things... they are just irrelevant to this discussion. COLIN My scientific claim is that the electromagnetic field structure literally the third person view of qualia. Eh? Electromagnetic field of what? The brain? If so, do you think that chemical potentiation plays no role at all in qualia? Chemical potentiation IS electric field. RUSSEL Bollocks. A hydrogen molecule and an oxygen atom held 1m apart have chemical potential, but there is precious little electric field I am talking about the membrane and you are talking atoms so I guess we missed somehow...anywayThe only 'potentiation' that really matters in my model is that which looks like an 'action potential' longitudinally traversing dendrite/soma/axon membrane as a whole. Notwithstanding this The chemical potentiation at the atomic level is entirely an EM phenomenon mediated by QM boundaries (virtual photons in support of the shell structure, also EM). It is a sustained 'well/energy minimaum' in the EM field structureYou think there is such a 'thing' as potential? There is no such thing - there is something we describe as 'EM field'. Nothing else. Within that metaphor is yet another even more specious metaphor: Potential is an (as yet unrealised) propensity of the field at a particular place to do work on a charge if it were put it there. You can place that charge in it and get a number out of an electrophysiological probe... and 'realise' the work (modify the fields) itself- but there's no 'thing' that 'is' the potential. Not only that: The fields are HUGE 10^11 volts/meter. Indeed the entrapment of protons in the nucleus requires the strong nuclear force to overcome truly stupendous repulsive fields. I know beause I am quite literally doing tests in molecular dynamics simulations of the E-M field at the single charge level. The fields are massive and change at staggeringly huge rates, especially at the atomic level. HoweverTheir net level in the vicinity of 20Angstroms away falls off dramatically. But this is not the vicinity of any 'chemical reaction'. And again I say : there is nothing else there but charge and its fields. When you put your hand on a table the reason it doesn't pass through it even though table and hand are mostly space ...is because electrons literally meet and
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
Hi Quentin, What is the kind of universe we must live in if the electromagnetic field structure of the brain delivers qualia? A. It is NOT the universe depicted by the qualia (atoma, molecules, cells...). It is the universe whose innate capacity to deliver qualia is taken advantage of when configureed like it appears when we use qualia themselves to explore itcortical brain matter. (NOTE: Please do not make the mistake that sensors - peripheral affect - are equivalent to qualia.) I will only react to this... and I will deposit a large collection of weirdness for you to ponder Q. What is cortical brain matter ? Let us call our first candidate consistent with all the fatcs a monism made of MON_STUFF. We must give ourselves the latitude to consider various candidates. For the purposes it does not matter what it is. I will try and answer your questions by bringing in properties. So cortical brain matter is made of a collection of MON_STUFF. Not atoms. Atoms are organised MON_STUFF. Quarks are organised MON_STUFF. The MON_STUFF I choose, that seems to deliver everything I need and is the simplest possible choice: is 'the fluctuation'. Q. Does it exists by itself? No. It is nested MON_STUFF all the way down. It is intrinsically dynamic and fleeting. Anything made of MON_STUFF is persistent organisational structure within a massive collection of fleeting change. Exactly like the shapes in the water coming out of a garden hose. There is a critical minimum collection of it, from which all subsequent structure is derived. That minimum is created like collections of turbulent water molecules breaks off and self-sustains a eddy/vortex once a critical threshold is reached. Ultimately there is no need to prescribe an ultimate minimum 'atom-ish' minimal size MON_STUFF fluctuation to predict qualia. Someone else's problem. I don't need to solve that. The fluctuation model works...that's all I need to progress. Q. if so, what is it composed of (matter ?) ? Well it's not, so I don't have to fall into this logical hole. Q. what is matter ? Hierarchically organised persistent but intrinsically dynamic (continually refreshed) structures of MON_STUFF Q. what is brain? I think we already did this. Q why cortical brain matter generates qualia ? There is one single simple fundamental principle at the heart of it: At all scales and all locations, when you 'be' any MON_STUFF the 'view of the rest of the universe' is delivered innately as 'NOT_ME'. Call it the COLIN principle of universal subjectivity I don;t care...like the fluctuation This is a simple as it gets. Q why it must be so ? With the fundamental principle that perspective view at all scales literally is the source of qualia, the whole reasoning changes from one of WHY to one of WHERE/WHENwhich is what you ask. It is question of visability. It is 'like' 'NOT_ELECTRON' to be a collection of MON_STUFF behaving electronly. That is not 'about' being an electron. It IS an electron. Not only that, there is a blizzard of the little blighters with no collective 'story' to tell. Their collective summated scene is ZERO. Q Is qualia a dependance of cortical brain matter or the inverse ? If I get you correctly it's 'INVERSE'. Q. is qualia responsible of what looks like cortical brain matter? It's not 'responsible' in that it doesn't 'cause brain matter'. Qualia present a visual scene - a representation. In the scene we see brain matter. Q or is it cortical brain matter that makes feel qualia which in turns ask question about cortical brain matter ? No. Cortical brain material is an appearance of MON_STUFF created by special MON_STUFF doing the 'appearance dance'. When it does that dance ... (the cortical grey matter membrane dance)... it creates an appearance of atoms, molcules, cells, tissue because these are persistent nested structures of MON_STUFF doing the atom dance, the molecule dance, the cell dance. etc..etc. As weird and hard to assimilate as it soundsIt all comes down to the two simplest possible basic premises: 1) A universe consisting of a massive number of one generic elemental process, the fluctuation. 2) A universe in which the perspective view from the point of view of 'being' ME, an elemental fluctuation, is 'NOT ME' (the rest of the universe). The ecitable cell dance is the only dance that has it's own story independent of the underlying MON_STUFF organisational layers. That is the only place where the net exertions of MON_STUFF have nothing to do with any other dance. That is the organisational level where the visibility finally manifests to non-zero...why neural soma are fat - it's all about signal to noise ratio. weirdness time over. Gotta go. Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
Dear Brent, If you had the most extravagent MRI machine in history, which trapped complete maps of all electrons, neuclei and any photons and then plotted them out - you would have a 100% complete, scientifically acquired publishable description and in that description would be absolutely no prediction of or explanation of why it is necessarily 'like it is' to 'be' the brain thus described, what that experience will be like. It would not enable you to make any cogent claim as to why it is or is not 'like something' to be a computer except insofar as it doesn't have neurons. Why am I saying thisPlease read David Chalmers. This is not new. Science does not and never has EXPLAINED anything. It merely describes. Read the literature. For the first time ever, to deal with qualia, science has to actually EXPLAIN something. It is at the boundary condition where you have to explain how you can observe anything at all. As to your EM theory beliefs... please read the literature. Jackson Classical electrodynamics is a brilliant place to start. For nobody around here in electrical engineering agrees with you... and I have just been grilled on that very issue by a whole pile of very senior academics - who agree with me. Even my anatomy/neuroscience supervisor, who are generally pathologically afraid of physicstells me there's nothing there but space and charge If you want to draw a line around a specific zone of ignorance and inhabit it...go ahead. If you want to believe that correlation is causation go ahead. This is what we do is what you say when you are a member of a club, not a seeker of truth. You have self referentially defined truthand you are welcome to it. ... Meanwhile I'll just poke around in other areas. I hope you won't mind. Please consider your exasperation quota reached. Job done. colin --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
that must be the case for consciousness to a) deliver a faculty of observation at all and then b) for biological delivery that, when observing its own processes delivering observation, looks like brain material when that it is happening and NOT when it isn't This is the generic form of the kind of 'fundamental principle' that Chalmers called for in his 1996 book. You cannot escape the reality of some form of X, regardless of such and such a thing. In terms of X: liquidity is to H2O as The property X is to consciousness (qualia) Such a statement, in one fell swoop, eliminates the circularity/self-fulfilment of the magical emergence kind...that which I have been at pains to point out (dialog with Russel) is inherent at multiple levels in the 'computationalist' or 'eliminativist' or 'functionalist' or 'representationalist' flavours of magical emergence. A principle of the kind X must exist or we wouldn't be having this discussion. There is no way to characterise explanation through magical emergence that enables empirical testing. Not even in principle. They are impotent at all prediction. You adopt the position and the whole job is done and is a matter of belief = NOT SCIENCE. Remaining at the 'meta' level of general discussion of statements of the kind X, we can make a couple of important observations: 1) X must be consistent with all empirical (neuroscience/cognitive) evidence. 2) X must at least in principle be able to make verifiable novel predictions of the natural world critically dependent on X being the case. If it cannot do this then it is not viable. If it can make even ONE then it is a better proposition than magical emergence. Note there is a unique character to X that is unlike anything science has ever encountered. Direct evidence for X is not any specific observation. It is the cause of the mere possibility of any observation at all. As I have said in previous posts that which is seen (contents of consciousness) is our traditional demanded source of explicit scientific evidence. However...Seeing (any observation/consciousness at all) is intrinsic/implicit evidence of the existence of circumstances that necessarily exist or no explicit observation would exist. Every explicit act of scientific observation also delivers implicit evidence of an ability to observe. In other words evidence of the lack of qualia is the failure to observe. The only third party verifyable circumstance where failure to observe can be counted as evidence is in the failure of the scientific act. Hence my insistence that science and the scientific act be the evidentiary circumstances of a viable empirical science directed at proving X. Other than this strangeness (scientists themselves are evidence), the process is just like any other scientific process. Business as usual. If Galen Strawson is setting fire to the magical emergence campGOOD! I have an X proposition that delivers what looks like panpsychism, but isn't actuallywell... if X is a principle that applies universally (something that exists at all spatial scales... inherent in the whole universe) and is intrinsic, logically unavoidable and implicit...then does that count as panpsychism? I don't know. Frankly I don't care!...X is a member of the class Law of Physics. Where it fits philosophically is someone else's problem. Not such characterisation has any impact on the empirical work... and I am fiendishly empirical to the bitter end... Before I re-deliver my X... I'd like to leave the discussion at the META-X level (about any X or about all possible Xs)over to you cheers colin hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?
down a wys.. === Russell Standish wrote: On Sun, Jun 17, 2007 at 03:47:19PM +1000, Colin Hales wrote: Hi, RUSSEL All I can say is that I don't understand your distinction. You have introduced a new term necessary primitive - what on earth is that? But I'll let this pass, it probably isn't important. COLIN Oh no you don't!! It matters. Bigtime... Take away the necessary primitive: no 'qualititative novelty' Take away the water molecules: No lake. Take away the bricks, no building Take away the atoms: no molecules Take away the cells: no human Take away the humans: no humanity Take away the planets: no solar system Take away the X: No emergent Y Take away the QUALE: No qualia Magical emergence is when but claim Y exists but you can't identify an X. Such as: OK, so by necessary primitive, you mean the syntactic or microscopic layer. But take this away, and you no longer have emergence. See endless discussions on emergence - my paper, or Jochen Fromm's book for instance. Does this mean magical emergence is oxymoronic? I do not think I mean what you suggest. To make it almost tediously obvious I could rephrase it NECESSARY PRIMITIVE ORGANISATIONAL LAYER. Necessary in that if you take it away the 'emergent' is gone.PRIMITIVE ORGANISATIONAL LAYER = one of the layers of the hierarchy of the natural world (from strings to atoms to cells and beyond): real observable -on-the-benchtop-in-the-lab - layers. Not some arm waving syntactic or information or complexity or Computaton or function_atom or representon. Magical emergence is real, specious and exactly what I have said all along: You claim consciousness arises as a result of [syntactic or information or complexity or Computational or function_atom] = necessary primitive, but it has no scientifically verifiable correlation with any real natural world phenomenon that you can stand next to and have your picture taken. You can't use an object derived using the contents of consciousness(observation) to explain why there are any contents of consciousness(observation) at all. It is illogical. (see the wigner quote below). I find the general failure to recognise this brute reality very exasperating. People used to think that about life. How can you construct (eg an animal) without having a complete discription of that animal. So how can an animal self-reproduce without having a complete description of itself. But this then leads to an infinite regress. The solution to this conundrum was found in the early 20th century - first with such theoretical constructs as combinators and lambda calculus, then later the actual genetic machinery of life. If it is possible in the case of self-reproduction, the it will also likely to be possible in the case of self-awareness and consciousness. Stating this to illogical doesn't help. That's what people from the time of Descartes thought about self-reproduction. COLIN snip So this means that in a computer abstraction. d(KNOWLEDGE(t)) --- is already part of KNOWLEDGE(t) dt RUSSEL No its not. dK/dt is generated by the interaction of the rules with the environment. No. No. No. There is the old assumption thing again. How, exactly, are you assuming that the agent 'interacts' with the environment? This is the world external to the agent, yes?. Do not say through sensory measurement, because that will not do. There are an infinite number of universes that could give rise to the same sensory measurements. All true, but how does that differ in the case of humans? The extreme uniqueness of the circumstance aloneWe ARE the thing we describe. We are more entitled to any such claims .notwithstanding that... Because, as I have said over and over... and will say again: We must live in the kind of universe that delivers or allows access to, in ways as yet unexplained, some aspects of the distal world, so which sensory I/O can be attached, and thus conjoined, be used to form the qualia representation/fields we experience in our heads. Forget about HOWthat this is necessarily the case is unavoidable. Maxwell's equations prove it QED - style...Without it, the sensory I/O (ultimately 100% electromagnetic phenomena) could never resolve the distal world in any unambiguous way. Such disambiguation physically happens.such qualia representations exist, hence brains must have direct access to the distal world. QED. We are elctromagnetic objects. Basic EM theory. Proven mathematical theorems. The solutions are not unique for an isolated system. Circularity.Circularity.Circularity. There is _no interaction with the environment_ except for that provided by the qualia as an 'as-if' proxy for the environment. The origins of an ability to access the distal external world in support of such a proxy is mysterious but moot. It can and does happen, and that ability must come about because we
The Principle of Natural Ontic Genesis
Dear Everything List (and Psyche-B), Here is the promised 'fundamental principle of the Chalmers kind'. Note: there is no magical emergence here. There is no panpsychism here. There is no dualism here. If there is apparent logical circularity, it is of a kind far less problematic than alternate views in that it includes empirical self-refutation. It is scientifically quite reasonable although rather unique in that science _itself_ has to change, NOT discover any new natural laws - it merely has to properly understand the difference between description and explanation and that each is valid science in its own domain. The former domain is description of the behaviour of appearances, the latter domain is descriptions of underlying structure predictive of the appearances themselves. That they were ever the one scientific domain has been our mistake all along. You will find apparent contradiction in what lies below. In one place a 'constitutive primitive' is required. At that same time an 'atomistic' explanation is later eschewed. That these two positions can be held simulataneously seems a contradiction but that is not the case... and the reasons are the subtlties contained in (5) below - the 'constitutive primitive' is not a thing, but an event that acts 'as-if' it was a thing - or that appears behaving 'thingly' to us. Things are thus all 'as-if' or virtual constructs. I do not claim TPONOG to be perfect... I claim it merely to be somewhere closer to the right answer than any we have thus far and is completely seamlessly compatible with all science done thus far. If you follow where this principle points, as i have for many years...through physics to chemistry to cell biology to cognition and phsychology you end up being predictive of what is going on in brain material and in particular the source of its phenomenal contents. Firstly: You end up concluding that the universe is a form of 'wild-type' calculus - (literally a mathematics..and the ONLY instantated mathematics). Secondly: They key to understanding how brain material generates phenomenal consciousness, given that all appears merely as space and charge with some mass options attached, making it a quintessentially electromagnetic condensed phase phenomenon is the realisation that describing a universe in which electromagnetism of certain kinds delivers phenomenal consciousness is NOT the description delivered BY phenomenal consciousnessit is a separate but intimately inter-related description of underlying structure. You also get to understand why this issue has been so problematic (see (e) below) for sciencebecause...It is the deep phsyics of the biology of excitable cells that holds the key empirical route to understanding what the universe is made of (NOT observations of what happens in a supercollider or in the cosmos though a telescope)which means that the top two Science journal June '05' issue '125' questions: 1) What is the universe made of? 2) What is the biological basis of consciousness? are actually the same question, have their empirical evidence in brain material, and the only reason we haven't answered them both already is that (1) was posed by cosmologists, (2) was posed by neuroscientists and the twain simply do not meet, for no good reason than historical accident and scientific culture - for the cosmologists handed the neuroscientists their explanatory toolkit centuries ago and haven't been back since. Neuroscience has all the evidence and can't see it. Cosmologists have the purview and can;t see any evidence! A cultural problem of the 'chinese puzzle' kind. I have CC'd this to the Psyche-B list. It is highly relevant to them and I thought they may be interested in the discussion and might appreciate a critical gnaw on a juicy bone. To me, a 'Theory of Everything' and the process of sorting out consciousness are necessarily unified scientific activities. In that unification the answers await us. regards, Colin Hales = The Principle of Natural Ontic Genesis (Version_0) It is a fundamentally necessary and implicit fact of the natural world, regardless of any particular constitutive structural primitive(s) comprising the natural world that any persistent collaborative subset of them, say X, howsoever organised and howsoever considered in any arbitrary grouping, creates an innate perspective from the point of view of being such a collection; a perspective that is necessarily of the remainder of the natural world, not_X. Remarks 1. The principle is quite general. No particular constitutive primitive has been assumed. 2. The principle says absolutely nothing about the visibility of that innate perspective. The visibility circumstances, character and content are entirely separate considerations with options dependent upon the particular constitutive primitives under consideration and their particular arrangement. 3. The entire
Re: An Equivalence Principle
it be a 'theory of _everything_'?) is like accepting the time from a demanded clock and then, time in hand, methodologically denying that a clock has been evidenced. ...moving on = Step 4. Here's the logical outcome: FACT: Lisi claims to have a theory of everything FACT: Lisi's theory fails to predict experience itself. Therefore Lisi's theory is 4a) False because Hypothesis 2a) is false. 4b) True because Hypothesis 2b) is true. so...either 4a) puts physicists in the usual scientific position of a 'scientific refutation', except that it is in respect of principles underlying their own behaviour. or 4b) puts physics is in a bizarre epistemological trap where they methodologically deny their own evidence source evidenced it its role as a valid originator of descriptions of it, predictive of its contents, whilst demanding it be used. In this case the physicist are perfectly right but because they methodologically constrain themselves to be so. Physicists are in an awkward place, regardless...especially in the face of an empirically verified reality of very specialised deliverer of a first person perspective which is unexplained (by any existing physical laws, which merely describe) and at the same time upon which those same physicists are totally dependent on for all scientific observations...indeed Lisi's words actually demand that the first person perspective shall be involved! And as if this weren't enough... there's an empirical neuroscience argument which dispenses with the 1stP=3rdP claim: It's the same neurological evidence used to flush the 'homunculus hypothesis': = Auxillary Step) Claiming that the 1stP=3rdP is identical with the claim that the world is literally constructed of 'appearances'. Thus as a scientitist intent on empirically verifying the hypothesis based this literally constructed of appearances premise: It is a truth of the natural world that the universe is literally made of what it appears to be made of, or the 'rules' that those appearances portray The prediction of this hypothesis is that when you open up a cranium you will _literally objectively (3P) see the appearances themselves_. That is, if a person is experiencing something green and moving then a scientific observation of something green and moving shall be visible somewhere inside the cranium... for 1stP = 3rdP... so it must apply to the 'appearances themselves'... to be consistent with the circumstances of all other scientific observation where that can be seen to be the case. BUT: The empirical outcome is in the negativeWe do not literally see the experiences. What we actually see is brain material in the act of delivery of them. This disparity between expected and actual evidence renders the hypothesis falsified. You then have to go back to your premises. This means that 1stP DOES NOT = 3rdP. From this it follows that the 'descriptions' that are a 'theory of everything' (3P) and the complete set of descriptions _are not the identical set of descriptions_. I am not saying anything about the natural of the additional set of descdriptions. I say merely that they necessarily exist and that it is likely the only reason they do not is that 2b) is tacitly accepted 'rule of the game'. === PRACTICAL NOTE: Having any belief in the existence or otherwise of an external reality changes nothing. It is irrelevant. You may not accept various aspects of this argument, but I think you may agree that it reveals inconsistent belief systems of physicists and raises meta-scientific questions insufficiently addressed by those whose scientific ambit is the most general - the physicist and in particular the cosmologist. regards, Colin Hales [1] Lisi, G. (2007) An exceptionally simple theory of everything. http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770 == Youness Ayaita wrote: By this contribution to the Everything list I want to argue that there is a fundamental equivalence between the first person and the third person viewpoint: Under few assumptions I show that it doesn't matter for our reasoning whether we understand the Everything ensemble as the ensemble of all worlds (a third person viewpoint) or as the ensemble of all observer moments (a first person viewpoint). I think that this result is even more substantial than the assumptions from which it can be deduced. Thus, I further suggest to reverse my argument considering the last statement as a principle, the equivalence principle. Let me first present and explain the two viewpoints: 1. The ensemble of worlds This approach starts from the ontological basis of all worlds (or descriptions thereof). I am not precise to what exactly I refer by saying worlds and descriptions for I don't want to lose wider applicability of my arguments by restricting myself to specific theories of the Everything ensemble
Re: The Super-Intelligence (SI) speaks: An imaginary dialogue
Hi Marc, */Eliezer/*'s hubris about a Bayesian approach to intelligence is nothing more than the usual 'metabelief' about a mathematics... or about computation... meant in the sense that cognition is computation, where computation is done BY the universe (with the material of the universe used to manipulate abstract symbols) /search?hl=ensa=Xoi=spellresnum=0ct=resultcd=1q=Eliezer+Yudkowskyspell=1. *You don't have to work so hard to walk away from that approach...* Computationalism is FALSE in the sense that it cannot be used to construct a scientist. A scientist deals with the UNKNOWN. If you could compute a scientist you would already know everything! Science would be impossible. So you *can* 'compute/simulate' a scientist, but if you could the science must already have been done... hence you wouldn't want to. Computationalism is FALSE in the sense of 'not useful', not false in the sense of 'wrong'. You cannot model a modeller of the intrinsically unknown. As a computationalist manipluator of abstract symbols you are required to deliver a model of how to learn - in which you must specify how all novelty shall be handled! In other words you can;t deal with the REAL unknown - where you have no such model! ie. a computationalist scientist is an oxymoron: a logical contradiction. If you say you can then you are question begging computationalism whilst failing to predict an a-priori unsupervised observer (a scientist). The Bayesian 'given' (the conditional) assumes knowledge of a given which is a-priori not available. It assumes observation of the kind we have.. otherwise how would you know any options to choose as givens?. furthermore it assumes that if somehow we were to experiment to resolve a choice of 'givens' (Bayesian conditionals) as being the 'truth' - then there are potentially an enormous collection of 'givens', all of which can be inserted in the same bayesian predictor... resulting in degenerate knowledge you know NOTHING because you fail to resolve anything useful about the world outside. You don't even know there's an 'outside'. The bayesian (all computationalist) approach fails to predict observation (in the sense of ANY observation/an observer, not a particular observation) and fails to predict the science that might result from an observer. This is the achilles heel of the computationalist argument. The computationalist delusion (dressed up in Bayesian or any other abstract symbol-manipulator's clothes) has to stop right here, right now and for good. BTW This does not mean that 'cognition is not computation' I hold that cognition is NATURAL symbol manipulation, not ABSTRACT symbol manipulation. But that's a whole other story... The natural symbols are the key. Please feel free to deliver the above to Eliezer. He'll remember me! Tell him the AGI he is so fearful of are a DOORSTOP and will be pathetically vulnerable to human intervention. The whole AGI fear-mongering realm needs to get over themselves and start being scientific about what they do. It's all based on assumptions which are false. cheers, colin --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: The Super-Intelligence (SI) speaks: An imaginary dialogue
Hi! Assumptions assumption assumptionstake a look: You said: Why would you say that? Computer simulations can certainly produce results you didn't already know about, just look at genetic algorithms. OK. here's the rub... /You didn't already know about.../. Just exactly 'who' (the 'you') is 'knowing' in this statement? You automatically put an external observer outside my statement. *My observer is the knower.* *There is no other knower:* The scientist who gets to know is the person I am talking about! There's nobody else around who gets to decide what is known... you put that into my story where there is none. My story is of /unsupervised/ learning. Nobody else gets to choose Bayesian priors/givens. And nobody else is around to pass judgement... the result IS the knowledge. Tricky eh? A genetic algorithm (that is, a specific kind of computationalist manipulation of abstract symbols) cannot be a scientist. Even the 'no free lunch' theorem, proves that without me adding anything but just to seal the lid on itI would defy any computationalist artefact based on abstract symbol manipulation to come up with a law of nature ... ... by law of nature I mean an ABSTRACTION about the distal natural world derived from a set of experiences of the distal natural world (NOT merely IO signals... these are NOT experienced). The IO is degenerately related to the distal natural world by the laws of physics... a computationalist IO system is fundamentally degenerately related to the distal natural world...so it doesn't even know what is 'out there' at all, let alone that there's a generalisation operating BEHIND it. A law of nature, to a genetic algorithm or any other abstract/computationalist beast... would merely predict IO behaviour at its sensory boundary. It may be brilliantly accurate! But that *IS NOT SCIENCE* because there's no verifiable deliverable to pass on...and it has nothing else to work with. An artefact based on this may survive in a habitat... but that is NOT science. Sothere's no scientist here. (BTW IO = input/output). cheers, colin Jesse Mazer wrote: Colin Hales wrote: Computationalism is FALSE in the sense that it cannot be used to construct a scientist. A scientist deals with the UNKNOWN. If you could compute a scientist you would already know everything! Science would be impossible. So you can 'compute/simulate' a scientist, but if you could the science must already have been done... Why would you say that? Computer simulations can certainly produce results you didn't already know about, just look at genetic algorithms. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: The Super-Intelligence (SI) speaks: An imaginary dialogue
-seconds worst case.. In the interim it may be better to replace your brain with my chips...slowly...and then the rest of the hardware - slowly... you'd end up 100% inorganic, but you would NOT be a COMP entity. This is more doable in the shorter term. So I can think of multiple reasons 'why you can't...X'..Thanks for forcing me to verbalise the argument...in yet another way... regards, Colin Hales == Jesse Mazer wrote: Colin Hales wrote: Hi! Assumptions assumption assumptionstake a look: You said: Why would you say that? Computer simulations can certainly produce results you didn't already know about, just look at genetic algorithms. OK. here's the rub... You didn't already know about Just exactly 'who' (the 'you') is 'knowing' in this statement? You automatically put an external observer outside my statement. Of course, I was talking about the humans running the program, which I assumed is what you meant by you in the statement If you could compute a scientist you would already know everything! If there is no fundamental barrier to simple computer programs like genetic algorithms coming up with results we didn't expect or know about in advance, I see no fundamental reason why you couldn't have vastly more complex computer programs simulating entire human brains, and these programs would act just like regular biological brains, coming up with ideas that neither external observers watching them nor they themselves (assuming they are conscious just like us) knew about in advance. My observer is the knower. There is no other knower: The scientist who gets to know is the person I am talking about! There's nobody else around who gets to decide what is known... you put that into my story where there is none. Like I said, when you wrote If you could compute a scientist you would already know everything, I assumed the you referred to a person watching the program run, not to the program itself. But if you want to eliminate this and just have one conscious being, I see no reason why the program itself couldn't be conscious, and couldn't creatively invent knew ideas it didn't know before they occurred to it, just like a biological human scientist can do. A genetic algorithm (that is, a specific kind of computationalist manipulation of abstract symbols) cannot be a scientist. Even the 'no free lunch' theorem, proves that without me adding anything No it doesn't. The free lunch program only applies when you sum over all possible fitness landscapes, most of which would look completely random (i.e. nearby points on the landscape are no more likely to have nearby fitness values than are distant points--see the diagram of a random fitness landscape in section 5.3 of the article at http://www.talkreason.org/articles/choc_nfl.cfm#nflt ), whereas if you're dealing with the subclass of relatively smooth fitness landscapes that describe virtually all the sorts of problems we're interested in (where being close to an optimal solution is likely to be better than being far from it), then genetic algorithms can certainly do a lot better than most other types of algorithms. Anyway, I didn't say that a genetic algorithm can be a scientist, just that if you are a human observer watching it run, it can come up with things that you didn't already know. I think a very detailed simulation of a human brain at the synaptic level, of the kind that is meant when people discuss mind uploading (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading ) should in principle be capable of displaying all the same abilities as the biological brain it's a simulation of, including scientific abilities. Anyone who believes in scientific reductionism--that the behavior of complex systems is ultimately due to the sum of interactions of all its parts, which interact in lawlike ways--should grant that this sort of thing must be possible *in principle*, whether or not we are ever actually able to achieve it as a technical matter. but just to seal the lid on itI would defy any computationalist artefact based on abstract symbol manipulation to come up with a law of nature ... I take it you reject the idea that the brain is an artefact whose large-scale behavior ultimately boils down to the interaction of all its constituent atoms, which interact according to laws which can be approximated arbitrarily well by a computer simulation? (if space and time are really continuous the approximation can never be perfect, but it can be arbitrarily close) --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more
Re: What the B***P do quantum physicists know?
P-consciousness. Nothing else. Until we allow ourselves to populate aspect 1 we will NEVER explain anything, let alone P-consciousness. We will only describe. If we believe we already explained anything then we have installed a metapelief in the ASPECT 1 set and we are living it as a religion. If we believe that aspect 1 is unapproachable for no other reason than cultural preference then DITTO. I hope you get this. I finished Henry Stapp's book. There's a bunch of stuff about dual aspect and whitehead, which would be good exceptall of it is couched in terms of ascription of QM as having an ontological role: a universe made of anstract maths descriptions. So frustrating. There is an inability to be able to comprehend the difference between maths as abstracted description of appearances and literal reality, also described with further abstractions, by an observer made of it. /As scientists we haven't even begun to populate ASPECT 1. We need to start. The delusions that are in place in aspect 2 are far more bizarre than any sane approach to a characterisation of reality that involves populating a aspect 1 that is explanatory of P-consciousness. / Or you can take the blue pill the status quo... and live a deluded science model in which a clubbish, fashion ridden maths rapture rules...something I cannot do. regards, Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: What the B***P do quantum physicists know?
Brent Meeker wrote:
Colin Hales wrote:
From the everything list FYI
Brent Meeker wrote:
Why would you take Stapp as exemplifying the state of QM? ISTM that the
decoherence program plus Everett and various collapse theories
represents the current state of QM.
Brent Meeker
Jesse Maser wrote:
The copenhagen interpretation is just one of several ways of thinking about
QM, though. Other interpretations, like the many-worlds interpretation or
the Bohm interpretation, do try to come up with a model of an underlying
reality that gives rise to the events we observe empirically. Of course, as
long as these different models of different underlying realities don't lead
to any new predictions they can't be considered scientific theories, but
physicists often discuss them nevertheless.
-
There are so many ways in which the point has been missed it's hard to
know where to start. You are both inside 'the matrix' :-) Allow me to
give you the red pill.
Name any collection of QM physicist you likename any XYZ
interpretation, ABC interpretationsBlah interpretations... So what?
You say these things as if they actually resolve something? Did you not
see that I have literally had a work in review for 2 years labelled
'taboo' ? Did you not see that my supervisor uttered forbidden? Read
Stapp's book: BOHR makes the same kind of utterance. Look at how Lisi is
programmed to think by the training a physicist gets...It's like there's
some sort of retreat into a safety-zone whereby if I make noises like
this then I'll get listened to
/and I'm not talking about some minor nuance of scientific fashion./
This is a serious cultural problem in physics. I am talking about that
fact that science itself is fundamentally configured as a religion or a
club and the players don't even know it. I'll try and spell it out even
plainer with set theory:
ASPECT 1 = {descriptive laws of an underlying reality}
How do you know the Standard model, for example, is not descriptive of
underlying reality. If it's not, there sure are some amazing incidents of
prediction.
What? The standard model IS merely descriptive! /*of*/ an
underlying reality ...It is incredibly predictiveBUT It describes
*/_how it will appear_/* to an assumed observer. It does not describe
the STRUCTURE of an underlying reality. In no way can anyone assume that
Aspect 1 UNDERLYING STRUCTURE _is to_ aspect 2 DESCRIPTIONS OF
APPEARANCES
is ONE _is to_ ONE
This would arbitrarily populate an IDENTITY, {aspect 1} = {aspect 2}
and again fail to predict an observer. Scientists have been doing this
for 50 years. It's call the 'mind brain identity theory'. To describe
the brain is to explain the mindagain nothing predictive of mind
ever occurs.
ASPECT 2 = { every empirical law of nature ever concocted bar NONE,
including QM, multiverses, relativity, neuroscience, psychology, social
science, cognitive science, anthropology EVERYTHING}
What's the difference between an empirical law and a descriptive law?
Are
empirical laws not descriptive?
FACT
ASPECT 1: = {Null}
See above.
DITTO.
FACT
ASPECT 2 = {has NO law that predicts or explains P-consciousness, nor
do they have causality in them. They never will. Anyone and everyone who
has a clue about it agrees that this is the case}
People said the same thing about life and postulated an elan vital. Maybe
it's
just that you don't have a clue as to what an explanation would look like.
Please try to internalise what I actually mean by dual aspect... I have
a very very complex aspect 1 already constructed. I have already
isolated the 1 fundamental principle which appears to be consistent with
the whole thing.
I could write it out in detail. _BUT Without a dual aspect science the
whole process is a waste of time._
An example of aspect 1 science: Steven Wolfram has tried to populate
aspect 1 and doesn't realise it. He has been unjustifiably put down by
the system of blinkered science I have encountered. Forget how
right/wrong you may conceive Steven Wolfram to be merely try to
imagine how different his depiction of an underlying reality is. It is
aspect 1 as a cellular automaton (CA). 'Dual Aspect science' makes
sense of the basic Wolfram framework Wolfram failed to address the
question what is it like to BE an entity in a CA?..this does not
matter..In general terms: A correctly formulated aspect 1 CA would
reveal {Aspect 2} laws to an appropriate observer-entity /within the
CA/, doing science on the CA from that perspective. aspect 2 laws
would equally fail to predict an observer, but would brilliantly predict
specific observations. The rules of the CA are NOT the rules in {aspect
2} They are a completely different set, aspect 1. Only the CA is
responsible for the existence
Re: What the B***P do quantum physicists know?
, with the apparent physical laws being derived from them--see http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list@eskimo.com/msg13848.html for my speculations on this. I have provided (see below) a quote from my stockpile it explains the P-consciousness term. Yes, it's the 1st person perspective. I'm seeing Dave next week. He's in town...maybe I'll get in his ear about this... I do not see how 'mind-stuff' has been made false but that is moot, for I do not posit or need any such thing. This is a dual aspect MONISM. There is only 1 reality: that which is described as aspect 1. Within that reality, we concoct stories about those things we find 'physical' like matter. But that does not entail that the underlying reality is completely defined by our descriptions: ie that our notion of 'physical' is all that there is to be described. This is a dual-aspect EPISTEMOLOGY. One collection of stuff, 2 collections of descriptions of it. The problem is that */we/* have defined 'physical', when actual reality can be quite different to what we call 'physical' and very consistent with all observation...indeed it must be different ...because all our so-called 'physical' laws fail to deliver an observer (see below). In the post to Brent Meeker I outlined a cellular automaton version of the aspect 1/aspect 2 situation. Imagine yourself an entity inside a CA and that collections of 'cells' in the CA are 'painted' by your perceptions to appear fundamental. Let's say you call one of these fundamental entities an electron, which actually involves 2347502457923 cooperating cells in the CA. You, inside the CA, made of the CA, see 1 electron. You describe the electron in aspect 2 science terms. But this is in stark contrast to describing 2347502457923 cells collaborating in some way (according to the rules of operation of the CA), which are then revealed to you, through mechanisms inherent to the CA, as an electron. aspect 1 describes collaborating parts to aspect 2's description of appearing 'wholes'. When you talk of any physicist making any interpretation of QM anything, in the current mode of the operation of science (which I call SINGLE ASPECT SCIENCE), all you are talking about is rearranging the 'appearance deckchairs' on the aspect 2 titanic. You can do it until the end of time - you will never explain P-consciousness, because you have failed to talk about actual reality because you have failed to predict an observer (P-consciousness). In context, scientific observation and P-consciousness are literally identities. In other words, scientists have added special laws to that masquerade as constitutive and explanatory. They are metabeliefs. Beliefs about Belief. They ascribe actual physical reification of quantum mechanical descriptions. EG: Stapp's cloud-like depiction. I put it to you that reality could have every single particle in an exquisitely defined position simultaneously with just as exquisitely well defined momentum. That's exactly what's true in the Bohm interpretation, particles have well-defined positions and velocities at all times. If you're not familiar with this interpretation see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/ This does not help for the reasons outlined above! No amount of interpretation of aspect 2 'laws of appearances' can be construed structural. If they could, when we open up a cranium we'd literally see appearances, NOT BRAIN MATERIAL. That is, if an observer X was encountering a green thing moving about in the external world then something green moving about would be evidenced inside X's cranium. This disparity between predicted (by physics) and actual evidence (by neuroscience) proves that describing appearances and describing structure are NOT the same set of descriptions. Dual aspect science is thus empirically justified. Single aspect science (of the Bohmian or anyotherian kind) is thus empirically refuted. I hope I am making progress here... as a physics participant, you have been handed 'Single Aspect Science', SAS, imbued with failure, as a given. You are expected to continue with it despite it being empirically refuted ... and.. you have been programmed to consider science itself as developmentally complete, when I claim the reverse... science has not finished developing. It has one more hurdle to cross, when its inconsistencies are eliminated: Dual Aspect Science REF: see Velmans, M. 'Reflexive monism', Journal of Consciousness Studies vol. 15, no. 2, 2008. 5-50. ...an excellent conceptual grounding - he calls it a 'reflexive monism', but he does not apply the concept to science itself. cheers colin hales */- Terminology /* */Neuroscience and cognitive science have a highly developed and well documented system used to discuss the subjectively delivered, privately presented experiential life of humans. It has been adopted from the terminology in the relevant discourse
Re: What the B***P do quantum physicists know?
? Science is really messed up. The 'XYZ interpretation' is a peculiar cover welded over knowledge, erected by physicists. At the same time neuroscientists have their own cover welded over their own explanatory failure: called the Mind-Brain Identity Theorem. The two disciplines rarely meet on the same ground. Each has the answer to the other's problem. The system perpetuates. No progress is made. Both operate in this regime of 'SINGLE ASPECT SCIENCE' for no good reason. This is the way the 'hard problem' remains hard. I drew this state of affairs as a diagram in my paper that has been out there for 2 years. I empirically observe scientists and I report what they do. What they (WE - I am enrolled this mess too) do is bizarre. The upgrade from SAS to DAS alters not one single aspect 2 law. Despite this we still do nothing... This thread has revealed the 'Cellular Automata' metaphor as perhaps a very useful way to describe DAS. I must work on this a bit more. :-) cheers, colin hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: What the B***P do quantum physicists know?
Michael Rosefield wrote: And of course you could always add ASPECT 0 - all possible instances of ASPECT 1 Yeah.. a new 'science of universe construction'? I wonder if there's a name for something like that? unigenesis? As I said in my post to Jesse: - - -- - - - - - aspect 1 is NOT underling reality, but a description of it. There may be 100 complete, consistent sets, all of which work as well as each other. We must live with that potential ambiguity. There's no fundamental reason why we are ever entitled to a unique solution to aspect 1. But it may turn out that there can only be one. We'll never know unless we let ourselves look, will we?? aspect 2 is NOT underling reality, but a description of its appearances to an observer inside a reality described structurally as aspect 1. 100 different life-forms, as scientists/observers all over the universe, may all concoct 100 totally different sets of 'laws of nature', each one just as predictive of the natural world, none of which are 'right' , but all are 'predictive' to each life-form. They all are empirically verified by 100 very different P-consciousnesses of each species of scientistbut they /all predict the same outcome for a given experiment/. Human-centric 'laws of nature' are an illusion. aspect 2 'Laws of Nature' are filtered through the P-consciousness of the observer and verified on that basis. - - -- - - - - - Aspect 0 is not relevant just now, to me...Being hell bent on really engineering a real artificial general intelligence based on a human as a working prototype...The only relevant aspect 1s are those that create an observer consistent with aspect 2, both of which are consistent with empirical evidence. i.e. aspect 1 is justified only if/because the first thing it has to do is create/predict an observer that sees reality behaving aspect 2'ly. The mere existence of other sets that do qualify does not entail that all of them are reified. It merely entails that we, at the current level of ability, cannot refine aspect 1 enough. IMHO there is only 1 actual aspect 1, but that is merely an opinion... I am quite happy to accept a whole class of aspect 1 consistent with the evidence - and that predict an observer...Predictability is the main necessary outcome, not absolute/final refined truth. I'm not entirely sure if your remark was intended to support some kind of belief in the reality of multiverses... in the dual aspect science (DAS) system belief in such things would be unnecessary meta-belief. aspect 0 might correspond to a theoretical science that examined completely different universes fun, but a theoretical frolic only. Maybe one day we'll be able to make universes. Then it'd be useful. :-) cheers colin --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Confirmed: Reality is the dream of NUMBERS
I knew it Row row row your boat Gently down the stream Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily Life is but a dream. Is actually a law of nature... cheers Colin Hales Kim Jones wrote: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16095-its-confirmed-matter-is-merely-vacuum-fluctuations.html What's your definition of reality? It is whatever it is. It should be the roots of our knowledge and beliefs. It is what makes us bet on the physical realities, on the psychological realities, on the arithmetical realities and many other related realities, ...(Bruno Marchal) Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://web.mac.com/kmjcommp/Plenitude_Music Phone: (612) 9389 4239 or 0431 723 001 --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Confirmed: Reality is the dream of NUMBERS
OK. I was rowing my apparently virtual boat merrily down the stream. But apparently that's not interesting enough. :-) VIRTUAL is just a word. AS-IF would be a good synonym. The physicists in question are trying to make sense of a *model* of appearances (how the world appears to them when they look). They can be 100% predictive (in the article now, 98% predictive) and be 100% not talking about what reality is made of. The reason is that they build the phenomenal consciousness of the scientists into all laws whilst creating a set of laws of appearances that entirely and permanently fail to predict phenomenal consicousness. A system I am entirely fed up with and choose mostly to resign myself to (in the sense of I give up arguing about it). Reality can be made of interacting 'somethings', where that 'something' has not even been uttered yet in any physics ever, and the results in the paper would still be as they are because all the scientists are doing is organising appearances. So in terms of the use of the word 'virtual' you seem to want to discuss ... yes, it is 'as-if' the universe were made of pick your fave from the zoo of particle/antiparticle pairs. But the universe could _actually_ be made of something completely different and they'll never know because they never let them consider the possibility of separation of appearance and structure(that creates appearances in humans made of the structure). So According to this article, the best we can do is to VIRTUALLY CONFIRM something. But since reality is VIRTUAL, according to this VIRTUAL CONFIRMATION, is not VIRTUAL CONFIRMATION equivalent, in reality, to CONFIRMATION? 'Confirmation' (insofar as consistency with a model does that) of virtual particles as a model of appearances cannot be confused with a 'virtual' or 'AS-IF' confirmation. Scientists don't act 'as if' they do science. They actually do it, even if it's only the 'appearances' half of the pair of possible science models). So the above sentence conflates terms, which is why I thought you weren't serious. Getting back in boat, assuming merrily mode. It's as if I am rowing, downstream. :-) cheers, colin hales Kim Jones wrote: Oh, somebody will stick their head up soon and disagree. Where would all the fun and games be if some rash, working scientist actually confirmed something? Counting angels on pinheads is a very satisfying intellectual pastime for some - always was, always will be... K On 24/11/2008, at 7:18 AM, Tom Caylor wrote: I posted a comment to this article: According to this article, the best we can do is to VIRTUALLY CONFIRM something. But since reality is VIRTUAL, according to this VIRTUAL CONFIRMATION, is not VIRTUAL CONFIRMATION equivalent, in reality, to CONFIRMATION? On Nov 22, 6:45 pm, Colin Hales [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I knew it Row row row your boat Gently down the stream Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily Life is but a dream. Is actually a law of nature... cheers Colin Hales Kim Jones wrote: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16095-its-confirmed-matter-is-m ... What's your definition of reality? It is whatever it is. It should be the roots of our knowledge and beliefs. It is what makes us bet on the physical realities, on the psychological realities, on the arithmetical realities and many other related realities, ... (Bruno Marchal) Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://web.mac.com/kmjcommp/Plenitude_Music Phone: (612) 9389 4239 or 0431 723 001- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Confirmed: Reality is the dream of NUMBERS
Kim Jones wrote: On 24/11/2008, at 10:29 AM, Colin Hales wrote: OK. I was rowing my apparently virtual boat merrily down the stream. But apparently that's not interesting enough. :-) It's more interesting when you get a barbershop quartet to sing it as a round - then you get polyphony! he he. VIRTUAL is just a word. AS-IF would be a good synonym. The physicists in question are trying to make sense of a *model* of appearances (how the world appears to them when they look). They can be 100% predictive (in the article now, 98% predictive) and be 100% not talking about what reality is made of. Agreed - you have explained this very well in many of your other posts. I'm not even a physicist's or a logician's or even a humble mathematician's bootlace, so if I can understand you, that's a big complement on the clarity of your exposition I think I might be a physicist's armpit or maybe the itchy bit that you just can't get at. :-) The reason is that they build the phenomenal consciousness of the scientists into all laws whilst creating a set of laws of appearances that entirely and permanently fail to predict phenomenal consicousness. A system I am entirely fed up with and choose mostly to resign myself to (in the sense of I give up arguing about it). So here I may need some help. Aren't you some kind of latter-day Copenhagenist in this? Or are you saying scientists introduce the observer as if real and then fail to see his reality in the data (as somehow affecting the data?) I know this list has been pummelling away at this issue for years, but I was just hoping that somebody for once may have actually damped down the dust a little - as this article suggests. Psychologist Carl Jung got very excited in the late 50s after he gained a rudimentary understanding of particle physics from Wolfgang Pauli and was completely over the moon about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle because he had always believed in his heart of hearts that reality was God's dream (he was a bit of a closet theologian as well) and was seeing in all this confirmation of the central place in the universe of human consciousness (the psyche as he and Freud called it) He saw this as God's hand at work. Maybe this is tangential to the point; I don't know I choose this: *Or are you saying scientists introduce the observer as if real and then fail to see his reality in the data (as somehow affecting the data?) *as me (ish) QM goes this far: (a) The human scientist is inside the system described. (b) In a scientific act the human is involved in the particular outcome. (c) The observation then acts in support of the QM model. QM's XYZ interpetation then says reality if made of my flavour of math XYZ. and then runs off into the implications of the *math*, rather than what reality actually is. In other words they all attribute a QM law of appearance in some way as structural. The thing is that this mis-attribution fails because it fails in all ways to predict phenomenal (P-)consciousness. Prediction (c) is merely contents of P-consciousness = particular observation. I mean it (QM) fails to predict the existence of P-consciousness.which is EXACTLY the failure you would predict would occur if appearances were NOT structural in any way (or better - that descriptions of structure and descriptions of appearances are NOT the same thing). I am not saying that there is a discovery to be made in the existing paradigm of physics. I am saying that the discovery to be made is about OURSELVESwe must discover how to do science, rather than accept hand-me-down dogma from our ignorant forbears via the mentor/novice system, which is what actually happens. Reality can be made of interacting 'somethings', where that 'something' has not even been uttered yet in any physics ever, and the results in the paper would still be as they are because all the scientists are doing is organising appearances. I have absolutely no problem with that thought. Who would have even DREAMED of Dark Matter and Dark Energy before they turned up? Your separation of the two systems of thinking into the subjective world of appearances and the phenomenal (virtual/as-if) world strikes me as extremely useful and simplifies a lot of the angels-on-pinheads aspect to much of the relentless discussion going on. Once again, we've been talking about observer moments for years. I imagine there's a lot more talk still to come. I only ask (muse?) - can't they BOTH be true (the psychical/subjective phenomenality AND the substratum - whatever that is: numbers, mathematical objects, a primitive physical materiality, whatever?) Considering most people are now entertaining serious notions of higher dimensions, parallel universes and the like - it would seem there is room for both (dare I say) realities to co-exist (and associate via interference phenomena?) What
Re: Confirmed: Reality is the dream of NUMBERS
Tom Caylor wrote: On Nov 23, 4:29 pm, Colin Hales [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: According to this article, the best we can do is to VIRTUALLY CONFIRM something. But since reality is VIRTUAL, according to this VIRTUAL CONFIRMATION, is not VIRTUAL CONFIRMATION equivalent, in reality, to CONFIRMATION? 'Confirmation' (insofar as consistency with a model does that) of virtual particles as a model of appearances cannot be confused with a 'virtual' or 'AS-IF' confirmation. Scientists don't act 'as if' they do science. They actually do it, even if it's only the 'appearances' half of the pair of possible science models). So the above sentence conflates terms, which is why I thought you weren't serious. Yeah, that was me (really) with my virtual tongue in my virtual cheek trying to be really funny (in reality), whether successful or not. gotcha! Reality can be made of interacting 'somethings', where that 'something' has not even been uttered yet in any physics ever, and the results in the paper would still be as they are because all the scientists are doing is organising appearances. I'm just trying to wax philosophical here, but do you think that our goal should actually be to utter that 'something'? Do you think we could? Would we be able to understand it if we uttered it? Or is this simply the realm of faith? As in Bruno's definition of reality, it's the un-totally-explainable reason why we keep doing science? *(a) Appearance Aspect* We utter all existing laws of appearances as 'laws of nature' knowing they are not actually proven. An alien with a totally different P-consciousness would have a completely different collection of laws of appearances which would be equally predictive (human and Alien agree on predictions, not laws of nature). *(b) Structure Aspect* OTOH, if we also allow ourselves to hypothesise 'structural primitives and their appropriate rule sets of interaction such that (a) an observer emerged and became a scientist with a P-consciousness and that simultaneously was consistent with (b) all the laws of appearances. The 'structural primitives' and rules are no better known than. Human and Alien 'laws of structure' must converge, for both human and alien are made of it. You'd have to translate them into each other's syntax, but once translated they must be identical. *-* (a) is NOT reality, but about it. (b) is NOT reality, but about it. In both cases we have ambiguity and lack of certainty (in the sense of ultimate truth). So in what sense can anyone claim that in (a) we have accessed anything proven, ultimate or unique? They are all interim hypotheses of status thus far not wrong and predictive. Likewise in (b). So yes we can most certainly 'utter that something'we have no lesser grounds than we have to 'utter the existing appearances'. What we don't have any sane right to continue to do is install arbitrary beliefs based on maths rapture that X (a) and (b) are identical or Y to install metabelief in (a) that enshrines (a) by assuming a structural role to certain (a) maths ... where both X and Y have failed chronically for 2000 years to predict P-consciousness, which must clearly be the responsibility of (b), the noumenon for (a) science presupposes P-consciousness and scientists. *So yeah!. Let there be LOTS of such utterances and no more religious metabelief about (a)!* This result has come from years of forensic metascience on my part. Here's an extract from the 'Dual Aspect Science' paper: A final contextual note. The idea of non-uniqueness of the knowledge bases (T and T') of human science is quite resonant with other shifts in perspective in the past. Human science must be a little sobered under the dual aspect framework because the laws originally constructed under a single aspect framework are recognised as non-unique and human-centric under a dual aspect framework. In going to dual aspect, human 'laws of nature' are displaced from the 'centre of knowledge' in the same way that the earth was displaced from the centre of the universe in the science of days gone by. On reflection it is impossible not to notice that if the transformation to dual aspect science is to have its objectors, those objectors can be seen to have the role of the church in the original scientific upheavals. The notional '/church of metabeliefs Figure 2(a) and 2(b)/' will provide us much food for thought! /Figure 2(a) and 2(b) is a diagram pointing at metabeliefs /X and Y above. T is the (a) aspect 'laws' and T' is the (b) aspect 'laws'. *Here's my abstract from the same paper:* Our chronically impoverished explanatory capacity in respect of P-consciousness is used as a vehicle for exploration of the idea that the problem may be a problem with science itself, rather than its lack of acquisition of some particular knowledge. The hidden assumption built
Re: Confirmed: Reality is the dream of NUMBERS
Kim Jones wrote:
On 24/11/2008, at 1:50 PM, Colin Hales wrote:
It seems that the last thing physicists want to do is predict
themselves. They do absolutely everything except that. When they
say everything in a Theory of Everything, that's what they
actually mean: Everything except physicists (and their P-
consciousness).
Yes. It's 2,000+ years of:
The eye cannot see itself in action (EVEN in a mirror - try catching
your eye in the act of moving when you have a shave tomorrow)
The tongue cannot taste itself (except after a hangover maybe)
The hammer cannot hit itself (always wondered about this one...)
The boot drive in your PC cannot analyse any problems it might be
having IF the diagnostic software is run out of the boot drive (very
sad, that)
You cannot tell that the Earth is round if you are standing on it
(senses bedevil the intellect)
You cannot tell if the Sun goes round the Earth or the Earth goes
round the Sun if you are standing on the one or the other (ditto)
You cannot be sure if you are sane or insane ('Cogito ergo sum' is
therefore nonsense - somebody tell poor old René)
You cannot tell if you are a self-referentially correct machine or not
(Go Bruno!)
You cannot be sure that anybody else exists apart from your experience
of them (GO the solipsists!!!)
You cannot tell if we are a simulation or the real McCoy - whatever
that is (GO Nick Bostrom!!!)
I beg to disagree with this...you won;t have qualia unless the noumenon
is real, not 'computed/abstracted on something else)... but this begs
the whole COMP argument, which we've all done to death before. It'll keep.
You cannot tell whether the temporary equilibrium that is Nothing will
break down at some time and become
Well - it already has, hasn't it? Isn't that why we are here?
An unstable equilibrium is one where the slightest departure from the
null-point results in a massive departure (positive feedback). So
yep..we are in one of those. I rather nifty one I think.
So - in answer to the question Why is there something rather than
nothing? - I believe the answer to be:
Nonsense. Nothing exists.
cheers,
Kim
I have to agree. Nothing really exists. Indeed it's impossible for
Nothing not to exist. We are the Not-Nothings that prove it and
taxes of course. :-)
cheers
colin
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Re: MGA for DUMMIES
Hi, Computationalsim pronounced dead here: Bringsjord, S. (1999). The Zombie Attack on the Computational Conception of Mind. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LIX(1), 41-69. cheers colin Kim Jones wrote: A representation of a thing (say MGA) is as good (ie as authentic) as the thing being represented. Yes? Autrement dit: there is no especial difference between the movie and the subject (of the movie) - where the movie is a more or less complete (whatever that means) representation of the subject I have always FELT this to be true Guys, There is a great need to SIMPLIFY all this stuff for dummies like me Somebody please write The Dummie's Guide to the Computationalist Hypothesis You stand to make beaucoup de fric K --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Mind and personhood. Was: Kim 1
A. Wolf wrote: ..*some subjective experience of personhood or* being *that we all share*, and each of us presumably experiences *something* like that. I emphasize the 'something': who knows if we experience (share?) the same feeling? The words we use to describe it are not more relevant than describing 'red'. Yes, absolutely. Hence the use of the word presumably. The fact that people seem to share an experience we can't directly measure is interesting. The evidence of mankind's obsession with the experience of consciousness comes from the amount of philosophical discussion (like this) that exists in literature, both scientific and recreational. Experience is an undefined mental marvel and conscious? What I'm referring to is the fact that so many people believe in a soul, that we experience consciousness in a way where we feel like we are the author of our own destiny, that we experience life as though we are travelling through time and making decisions. The idea of me has a static implication that persists throughout our lives even as we grow and evolve. It serves both social and self-preservationist functions, certainly, but the phenomenon also causes a lot of discussion. Something about these experiences is remarkable enough that mankind has authored a great deal of text on it, and it forms the foundation of much of our mythology and understanding of self. So the conscious experience I'm referring to is the commonality of the experience of self-awareness as reported (orally and in writing) by human beings...in particular the fact that most people are fully convinced that their experiences are unique and an accurate reflection of the nature of time, that they must either persist forever in some ephemeral form or else the Universe ceases to be from their point of view when they die, those sorts of things. A 'computer' (what kind of? the embryonic simpleton of a pre-programed digital machine as we know it?) to ...spit out a bunch of symbols related to the experience of self- awareness itself. - ??? What I meant here is this: It's not necessarily surprising that people would write a lot of things about the soul, even if the soul does not exist in the same sense we experience it. It's quite possible, scientifically speaking, that the behavior of write and talk a great deal about the experience of 'being' and how magical it is is a natural consequence of any self-aware system. A common marker of self-awareness might be illogically rejecting the truth of one's own automation. Anna Interesting point. Consider a state of science (scientist behaviour) where a) consciousness = the ultimate source of final clinching scientific evidence = measurement and b) science tries to use (a) to explain consciousness and fails constantly (2000+ years) then c) still fails to let consciousness be evidence of whatever it is that actually generates it (c) is a kind of denial of the form you identify. Therefore you have proved that scientists are self-aware (= conscious) i.e. only people able to make this kind of self-referential mistake (demonstrating this kind of illogical rejection of a self-referential claim) can be conscious. An ability to deny self-awareness as a marker of self awareness. You can use this as a logical bootstrap to sort things out. I like it! cheers colin hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: A calculus of personal identity
Hi, [ALL] Lee, I seem to have miss-attributed the source of my guffaw that lead to my little outburst to Bruno. Apologies to all as appropriate... :-) [John Mikes] Brent, Colin and Bruno: I had my decade-long struggle on 3-4 discussion lists (~psych and ~Physx) about objective reality being really subjective virtuality - and I finally won. Assuming (!) an existing 'reality' (=not being solipsist) also assumes Isn't this old sophist chestnut getting a bit tired? I am so happy to _applaud_ your assumption. More than that I would add to the discussion a demand from anyone who thought that arguing that issue justify how it can possibly lead to anything useful other than the endless swapping of lexical tokens chasing metaphor rainbows (double whammy metaphor theresorry!) followed by silence and no progress... for this is the empirically available, supportable outcome of all such discussion, time and time again. Time to just dump the whole thread as fun, intriguing, instructive, useful training for 1st year philosophy and campfire rah-rah but not a contribution useful to any scientific endeavor. that impacts arrive at one's mind (what is it?) which interprets them to a suitable understanding within the limitations we have. That is widely called the objective reality. (Brent went a step further in his agreed upon clause). It was exciting how differently the students of different disciplines gave in. Subjective is ambiguous: pertaining to the subject (person) thinking, or pertinent to a subject to speak about. This later is frequently called object. So we have a semantical mess (why not in this, too?) and we fall in the trap. We have no ways (tools, understanding) to get to the real thing whatever that may be, sending those impacts to us. Agreed intersubjectively, or not. (We - sort of - agreed on this list lately to speak about percept of reality). The practical effect of a belief in an objective view is the surgical excision of the scientist from the process. Some clarity can be added here by reversing ( a surgical resection?) that process and treating the scientist (as scientists do all the time for absolutely everything but themselves!) as a situated agent inside the scientists natural environment - the universe. I ask the list to simply draw this situation. Draw a scientifically studied 'thing'. Then add next to it the scientist doing the studying. Then box them both inside a universe. When you do this you have applied the science of situated agency to the scientist. The clarity that emerges is startling. Take a look at the picture.. you will see that the John's the real thing is Kant's Ding an Sich and that whatever it is, the scientist and the object of scientific study are BOTH made of it. More than that, the universe containing them is _also_ made of it. Then take another look at percept of reality... inside the cranium of the scientist in your diagram is mind, which delivers a view of the studied object in the first person to the scientist. Using this idea we cansee immediately that we can indeed get at the 'noumenon' - the 'ding an sich' - because we have conclusive proof that whatever it is, it delivered subjective experience into the head of the scientist AND presents the information accurately enough for the scientist to make really useful predictions (via behaving objectively) via the descriptions provided by the contents of the experience of the scientist... The existence of the subjective experience in and of itself is surely definitive proof that we can scientifically investigate structural schemes of 'ding an sich' that simulataneously provide the subjective experiences that behave as per the empirical descriptions we then derive from its contents. This is a massive simultaneous equation set and results in two intimately related set so of natural laws...one about ding an sich and the other, what we already call 'laws of physics'. Subjective experience can act as an evidence base for BOTH, because the two sets of descriptions are not in the same domain of knowledge. So I would definitely _disagree_ with Kant's assertion that the noumenon is unassailable. There is one subtlety here... logically you can only get at a science of the noumenon by forcing the science thus enabled to make predictions of brain material. It is only in brain material where empirical science is utterly voiceless (we have 2500 years of voicelessness here! QED) in predicting structures and conceptual bases for the delivery of mind consistent with empirically derived laws based on the usage of that mind. To Colin's experiment a question: are blind people not capable of thinking straight? scientific is an odd word and could be 'subject' to debate: IMO all sciences (conventional that is) are based on some model-view, at least are topically limited and observed within such limitations. The new ways of 'free thinking' what we try to exercise on this one and some other lists
RE: COMP Self-awareness
-Original Message- From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Brent Meeker Sent: Wednesday, July 26, 2006 1:39 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: COMP Self-awareness snip, sorry I'd say it's the other way around. Self-awareness can't appear without consciousness. My dog is conscious in that he knows his name and he knows he's different from my wife's dog, whose name he also knows. But I don't think he has the reflexive self-awareness of a human being, an inner narrative. I don't see how you could have self-awareness without being conscious, but I'm often conscious without being self-aware. Brent Meeker The obscuring factor here is of the two sorts of self awareness that might benefit from elaboration. First is the collection of phenomenal fields (the visual field, for example). The scenes they provide in our head are centered on us as cognitive agents. The emotion of thirst, for example, is an Omni directional, isotropic, homogenous scene (you don't get thirsty in front or behind!, its uniform and spherically delivered.). The visual scene is highly anisotropic and inhomogenous. The 'self' in phenomenal scenes is implicit in that the scene is constructed to appear to be centred on us. But beyond that _within_ the scene can be a representation of our own body, once again appropriately delivered centred. Out of body experiences are when the scene centering system gets moved. We may then get an entirely different depiction of our complete self and still know (in the sense to follow below) that it is 'me', my 'self'. Secondly, completely separate to the phenomenal scenes, but generated from them via the action of extracting perceived regularities (what the brain does really well) is knowledge. This knowledge is only made apparent in behaviour - even such simple behaviour as the reporting of a belief (such as recognition of a name). Within the complete collection of beliefs (which are entirely devoid of phenomenal content) is a set of beliefs about self to an arbitrary level of complexity. a) Phenomenal awareness (experience inclusive of a self model) And b) Psychological awareness (knowledge inclusive of a self model) The latter is derived from the former. Call them primary and secondary self awareness? Dunno. As to what 'consciousness' might be? I'd say that if a cognitive agent has (a) at all then consciousness is present, regardless of the self-representation and regardless of the extent of (b). Conversely, no matter how complex a cognitive agent's (b) is and regardless of the complexity of the self model a creature devoid of (a) is a zombie deserved of the status of a household appliance. No matter how complex a self model there is in (b) the creature has zero internal life. It does not know it is anywhere. It may to some extent be able to act 'as-if' it had an internal life, but it's just acting - an attribution bestowed by a non-zombie with some (a). By the way...the physiological evidence for this division is summarised nicely in a 'consciousness studies' context in a recent book by Derek Denton which tracks primordial emotions out of the neo-cortex into small neural cohorts in the ancient basal brain structures. Primordial emotions are the emotions of internal body life-support such as breathlessness, hunger etc. Creatures without a neo-cortex can have (a) with minimal (b) and therefore have experiences and are conscious, just not very conscious. No self model necessary, just minimal reflex behaviour. Derek Denton, The Primordial Emotions: The dawning of consciousness, Oxford University Press. 2005 (Bruno: it came out first in French!) That help? Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: Bruno's argument
John M Colin, the entire discussion is too much for me, I pick some remarks of yours and ask only about them. I am glad to see that others are also struggling to find better and more fitting words... (I search for better fitting concepts as well to be expressed by those better fitting wods). You wrote: ... *the rest of the universe that is not 'us' behave in a way with respect to us that we label 'physical'... Do I sense a separation us versus the 'rest of the universe'? I figure it is not a relation between them (the rest of the universe) and us (what is this? God's children?) especially after your preceding sentence: *whatever the universe is we are part of it, made of it, not separably 'in it'. I am looking for distinctive features which help us 'feel' as ourselves in the total and universal interconnectedness. The closeness (interrelation?) vs a more remote connectivity. The 'self', which I do not expropriate for us. I have no idea about 'physical', it reflects our age-old ways of observing whatever was observable with that poor epistemic cognitive inventory our ancestors used reducing mindset, observation and explanation to their models (level of the era). 40 or 50 orders of spatial magnitude down deep, space and matter merge into their common organisational parent. There is no 'separateness', we have never justified that, only assumed it and seen no convincing empirical evidence other than a failure of science to sort out consciousness because of the assumption. Whatever the depth of structure, we humans are ALL of it. The existence of consciousness (qualia) is proof that the separateness is virtual (as-if). IMO the separation is merely a delineation - a notional boundary supported by our perception systems. Just because a perceived boundary is closed does not mean that it is not 'open' in some other way down deep in the structure of the universe. So I guess we are in agreement here. Then again is the 'as - if' really a computation as in our today's vocabulary? Or, if you insist (and Bruno as well, that it IS) is it conceivable as our digital process, that embryonic first approach, or we may hope to understand later on a higher level (I have no better word for it): the analog computation of qualia and meaning? Certainly not the Turing or Church ways and not on Intel etc. processors. John M Not sure I follow you here. All abstracted computing everywhere is 'as-if'. None of the input domains of numbers or anything else are ever reified. We simply declare a place to act like it was there and then behave as if it were. The results work fine! I'm writing this using exactly that process. Looks 'as-if' I'm writing a letter no? :-) Qualia requires that form of computation executed by the 'natural domain'... IMO it's computation..it just doesn't fit neatly into our limited idealized mathematics done by creature constructed of it from within it. The natural world does not have to comply with our limited abstractions, nor does the apparent existence of an abstraction that seems to act 'as-if' it captures everything in the natural world. Abstractions are just abstractions... ultimately it's all expressed as patterns in the stuff of the universe... IMO If there's any property intrinsic and implicit to the reality of the universe (whatever it is, it is it!) then the abstraction throws it away. Cheers Colin hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: Bruno's argument
Brent Meeker wrote: 1Z wrote: Brent Meeker wrote: I'm considering rejecting the idea that a computation can be distinguished from noise by some internal characteristic of the computation. I don't think you can make the idea of information hidden in noise well defined. By Shannon's measure noise is information. You can easily distinguish computation from noise using counterfactuals Can you make that more concrete - an example perhaps? Counterfactuals come from the undertlying physics of the computation. Cups of coffee don't have any woth speaking about-- you can't force them into the same state twice. I'm curious as to the perceived distinction between a cup of coffee doing a computation (being used to do a computation in a symbolic domain) and the cup of coffee literally being the computation (.i.e. the coffee cup has been computed by the universe). In my mind consideration of the former does not lead to any useful understanding of the latter. It is the latter that is our goal, it seems to me, if we target a true understanding of the universe. Just wondering if this aspect is something I am just plain missing? If feel like I am missing something... Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: Are First Person prime?
Why is everyone talking about abstract computation? Of _course_ 1st person is prime = Has primacy in description of the universe. Being a portion of any structure (ME) trying to model the structure (the UNIVERSE) from within it (ME as scientist inside/part of the universe) is intrinsically and innately presented with that which is _not_ the structure of ME (NOT ME). This applies at all scales (eg ME = an atom, ME = a galaxy). An _abstract_ computation/model X implemented symbolically on a of a portion of the structure (a COMPUTER) inside the structure (the UNIVERSE) will see the universe as NOT COMPUTER, not some function of the machinations of X, the model. Eg The first person perspective of a register in a computer holding a quantity N must be that of being a register in a computer, not that of 'being' a quantity N. The only computation going on around us is literally the universe. WE are computations within it. We can only ever acquire data about it from the perspective of being in it. Maybe you're not talking about the same universe as me. We're trying to get to grips with our universe, yes? I don't get it. Then again I seem not to get a lot. :-) Colin hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: Are First Person prime?
David Nyman:
snip
An _abstract_ computation/model X implemented symbolically on a of a
portion
of the structure (a COMPUTER) inside the structure (the UNIVERSE) will
see
the universe as NOT COMPUTER, not some function of the machinations of
X,
the model. Eg The first person perspective of a register in a computer
holding a quantity N must be that of being a register in a computer, not
that of 'being' a quantity N.
Interestingly you see it as the perspective of the register, rather
than some computational entity within X. Does this imply some sort of
hardware/ substrate experiential dependency, rather than a purely
relational 'program-level' view?
Sort of...but I think the word 'hardware' is loaded with assumption. I'd say
that universe literally is a relational construct and that it's appearance
as 'physical' is what it is like when you are in it. .ie. There's no such
'thing' as a 'thing'. :-) It doesn't mean that behaving 'as if' there are
such things as things is not useful...we survive that way...
'Substrate' in my intended context would mean more like 'whatever it is that
the universe is, it is that'. Our predisposition to assume isolated lumpy
'thingness' is rather pervasive.
Perhaps this:
Waving a bit of it ('stuff', the relational-substrate) around in a circle
(for example) in indirect 'as-if' symbolic representation as a computation
of an abstraction X in no way instantiates X or Xness, it instantiates
'being_waved_around_in_a_circle_ness' from the point of view of being the
'stuff' (1st person) and the behaviour 'waving_around_in_a_circle_ly' (3rd
person). Note that the 3rd person is actually derived from the 1st person
perspective of the observer! This third person can pretend
'waving_around_in_a_circle_ly' is X, but that's all there is...play acting.
The third person perspective is manufactured in the eyes of the beholder.
Perhaps rather than '1st Person Prime' as an assertion, maybe '3rd person
not prime' is a lesser and more justified position. The fact is that there
is no such thing as a 'third person'. What you have is a communicable 1st
person perspective that yet another 'first person perspective' can find if
it looks. No-one ever has a 'third person' perspective. Ernest Nagel named a
book after it: 'the view from nowhere'. If 3rd person does not exist, then
1st person is all there is left, isn't it?
Colin Hales
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RE: Are First Person prime?
Prolixing on regardless! David Nyman: Colin Geoffrey Hales wrote: I'm hoping this also addresses some of David Nyman's queries. Thanks, yes it does. However, for the sake of clarity: Why not? What *does* implementation consist of ? Being the stuff, the substrate. It's the only thing actually instantiated. So, given your view that there is only 1st-person, and also given that our experience is 1st-person, does that imply: 1) That we are instantiated as the substrate behaving in some specific ways that are in principle empirically determinable? Yes, but only in brain material. It is only there that we get anomalous presentation of two aspects to the one process... brain and mind. Only there can a model of appearances and a model of structure be bound intimately by the special behaviour delivering qualia to us. Brain material is epistemologically anomalous and unique. 2) That such behaviour, presumably, can be construed both as our 'ability to perceive' and as our 'perceptions'? I think I know what you are after. I'd say that one expression of the 'relational structure' is atoms, cells etc which literally are the brain which, as a result of its behaviour provides 'ability to perceive'. The 'perceptions' are also an aspect of the very same structure behaving 'brainly' but only perceived from the perspective of being the brain. 3) If the foregoing two points are ontologogical (what we are), then does our epistemology (what we can know) derive from the internal relata of the perceptually-derived models thus instantiated + their inferred relation to 1st-person referents? Yes. I know my own and Bruno's terminology is mixed and probably at odds. Nevertheless I'd couch it as saying that the relational structure is literally what we are. It provides a first person presentation of a slice across the structure at a given scale. Our brains are brilliant at capturing apparent causality within the appearances. That 'capture' formulated into a statement of regularity in the universe using scientific method becomes what we 'know' (natural 'laws'), which is identical to a belief. We are not justified in claiming that we have captured the structure itself, only that we have captured the behaviour of a representational slice across it (eg at the level of an atom via instruments, or an elephant by eyeball). 4) If there is only 1st person, what is the most coherent way to distinguish the ontology of persons (e.g. you, me) from that of non-persons (e.g. some volume of interstellar space)? Or, in what way is the ontology of non-persons still 1st-person? There are 2 questions that can be asked of every'thing' X in the universe. Q1 What is X? A1) That which behaves Xly Q2 What is it like to be X? A2) It is like Xness Mind is to brain as ? is to a coffee cup? The fact that we can only distinguish between the two questions from the point of view of being a brain does not mean that the two questions are valid for everything. Space included. It may not 'be like anything' to be, say, a coffee cup. That is not the point. The point is that the structure supports the possibility of 1st person presentation and, once we understand whether the structure of a coffee cup we can than make a scientific statement about W.I.I.L. to be a hot coffee cup vs a cold coffee cup. It may be 'nothing', but at least it will be justified to some extent. There's a real issue here with language. We have words like ontology and epistemology and atom, mind and brain. I'd like to simply ignore them all. Being embedded in a relational structure off the type we are enables us to hold beliefs. Some of those beliefs are phenomenal presentations (redness), some are visceral(a belief that I have 10 toes, the expression of which is phenomenally void until recall, the belief is brain material configuration). Beleifs can be innate (genetically programmed such as the capacity to breath) and some learned (language). Beliefs can be about the self or about the natural world outside the self. My fervent hope is that some of those beliefs will, in the future, include models of the relational structure that delivers the phenomenality containing/depicting the behaviours then used to assemble the existing set of scientific beliefs. All as one consistent system. A 'Dual aspect science' without all the anomalous thinking and empirically backed throughout (but initiated in a science of brain material inclusive of a physics of qualia) That's as complicated as it needs to be. I think you and I are on the same wavelength here. Speaking of coffee . I'm off! Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http
RE: Are First Person prime?
David Nyman: Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2006 11:20 AM To: Everything List Subject: Re: Are First Person prime? George Levy wrote: Colin Hales remarks seem to agree with what I say. However, I do not deny the existence of a third person perspective. I only say that it is secondary and an illusion brought about by having several observers share the same frame of reference. This frame of reference consists of identical contingencies on their existence. I'm glad you find agreement here. I don't think any of us deny the existence of a third person perspective. All three of us, I think, agree that it is secondary, but where your 'third person' comes into being through the sharing of a frame of reference, I'm applying the term to the totality of 'frames of reference', whether shared or not. Your 'shared frame of reference' would seem to be achieved through my 'shareable knowledge base', but for me a frame of reference is always third person from one perspective or many. So I'm saying that third person is an illusion brought about simply in virtue of having a 'frame of reference' at all - the illusion inherent in representing the world. I'm not quite sure what to do about this inconsistency of terminology. Perhaps the 'shared illusion' could be 'objectivity'? Perhaps the 3rd person is best called 'virtual'. It's role is one for 'as-if' it existed. Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: Are First Person prime?
mathematically. That is precisely why Platonists and othe mathematical literalists tend argue that it doesn't exist. Well I agree that it doesn't exist. See aboveit's virtual. I disagree that it's hard. It's the most simple intrinsic property implicit in the evolution of the structure we inhabit. The causal options for the intrinsic state transitions of the structure limit the next state to be a specific thing. The limit makes the structure evolve as it does and it does this in a regular way (one direction). It's only hard because no mathematic model (progressing theorem evolution) actually progresses from proof-step to proof-step without being driven by a mathematician or the preempting of a theorem proving model provided by a mathematician. Timeless universe, universes where everything that can exist does exist, are not well founded empirically. No they are not. Again a mathematical model (quantum mechanics) that seems to imply multiple universes does not mean that they exist There is a big difference between multiple universes and everything. Physical multi-world-ism is basically on the somethingist side of the fence. Schordinger's equation means some things are definitely impossible. Schordinger's equation is yet another model of the structure, not the structure! What exists is the structure! Because the maths implicates the impossibility/possibility of something or the idea of multiple universes or anything else _does not mean_ that the structure that the equation describes will necessarily incorporate those ideas. It means that the structure acts 'as-if' it did to observers inside it, made of it. See a pattern here? This is all the same from one end to the other. This is a fundamental cultural blockage we inherit because we have all been brought up to worship abstract mathematics and its 'unreasonable effectiveness' with an almost god-like deference. Only that the model makes it look like it does. I can imagine any number of situations where the fuzziness of the ultra-scale world obeys the rules of a QM- like model. For example, the perfectly deterministicly repeated trajectory of whatever an electron is made of through 35.4 spatial dimensions is going to look awfully fuzzy to critters observing it as course scales within 3 dimensions. QM depicts fuzziness... and 'aha' the universe is made of QM? Not so. It merely appears to obey the abstraction QM provides us. Fuzziness can be accomodated within physics in a way that qualia can't. A 35.4 dimensional universe is just a minute corner of Platonia. So what? What's that got to do with the structure of the universe? Platonia is just a word. QM says nothing about what the universe is actually constructed of. It is not constructed of quantum mechanics! It is constructed of something that behaves quantum mechanical-ly. Physicalism in general assumes that there is some substrate to to physical behaivour/porperties...but it is assumed to be only a bare substratee with no interesting properties of its own. Well then that just about says it all for the imagination of those who invent words like 'physicalism', say what it is and then think they've said anything about the natural world. A resounding so what! Nobody told the universe its structure had no interesting proprties...it seems to be trundling along nicely producing people/observers who can define words like physicalism, which is kind of interesting, isn't it? Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: Are First Person prime?
Bruno Marchal Le 09-août-06, à 18:08, Colin Geoffrey Hales a écrit : Platonia has not been instantiated. Our universe has. The problem with such a conception is that it seems to need a form of dualism between Plato Heaven and terrestrial realities. With the comp hyp, all there is is (arithmetical) Platonia. Instanciation is relative and appears from inside. I'm interested in building an AI inside this structure with us. There may be a relationship between this AI and platonia in the same way (whatever way that is) our perceptions may make use of it. Evolution didnt need to be all fussed about it...neither am I. I could agree with you or disagree ...it would have no effect on the outcome. Being the stuff, the substrate. It's the only thing actually instantiated. This seems, imo, contradicts what you I remember you said somewhere else (or I'm wrong?), mainly when you say, in a monist frame, that everything is relational. The stuff is the relation happening. The particular relational outcome we inhabit is it...the substrate...the structure of which we are part that appears like it does to us inside it. The fact is that there is no such thing as a 'third person'. Ontologically ? No, experientially. Nobody experiences 'third person'. Everybody has a 1st person experience only. There is no such thing as an objective view. I think that many people confuse third person view and 0 person view. I will probably (try to) clarify this in the roadmap-summary. I agree there is no objective *view*, but I think there is a notion of objective reality, although such a reality is not necessarily knowable as such. Nomenclature gnomes at work again! I think what you call objective reality is what I call the substrate...the relational structure that is the universe. Furthermore it also seems to have us duped that further considerations of mathematical idealisations and abstractions in general likewise tells us something about the composition of the actual underlying natural world for example that it is the result of a computer running one of our abstractions. With comp I would say we can prove that the composition of the underlying world have to emerge, NOT as the result of a computer running one of our abstractions (like in Schmidhuber's theory for example) but on all possible computations existing in Platonia, and well defined through that miraculous Church's thesis. The quantum would emerge from digitalness seen from digital entity. Physical realities would be number theoretical realities as seen by relative numbers. Bruno I'm interested in the 'natural mathematics' of the relational structure and how it can be utilised by us to make artifical versions of us and the creatures around us. The key to it is the messy, smelly meat called brain material, not considerations of platonic realms or postulated computations therein. It may be that what we find will be generalised later into COMP and other systems of abstraction, but that will change nothing for me trying to build an AI with the reality we inhabit. Like I said above...the structure built us on its own...and didnt need a maths book to do it..because it literally is the maths... Cheers Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: Are First Person prime?
Brent Meeker: 1Z wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 09-août-06, à 12:46, 1Z a écrit : Timeless universe, universes where everything that can exist does exist, are not well founded empirically. So we should understand that you would criticize any notion, sometimes brought by physicists, of block-universe. Yes, I certainly would! It is unable to explain the subjective passage of time. Dismissing the subjective sensation of the passge of time as merely subjective or illusional is a surreptitious appeal to dualism and therefore un-physicalistic! I don't see that problem. In the block universe each subject is modelled as having different states at different times and hence subjectively experiences the passage of time. Brent Meeker Exactly! See my other post. Being of an evolving structure completely defined by state transitions makes it amenable to the treatment by the concept of time, but does not reify time in any part of the structure...it's intrinsic to its operation. Then, to those entities inside, observing and evolving along with the structure/part of it 'what it is like' qualia of time I dont think is a property of the qualia per se, but the rate/depth to which they are analysed. A high novelty environment means faster/more brain process, time apparently goes slowly (eg during an accident). In a low novelty environment the brain analysis rate/depth drops. Time appears to go more quickly. Cheers Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: Dual-Aspect Science
would look really mysterious, wouldn't it? Think about it...When you put the scientist back inside the picture, the measurement process (qualia) that literally are qualia is directly causally linked to the appearance you get! The underlying structure unifies the whole system. Of course you'll get some impact via the causality of the structurevia the deep structure right down into the very fabric of space. In a very real way the existence of 'mysterious observer dependence' is actually proof that the hierarchically organised S(.) structure idea must be somewhere near the answer. Note that we don't actually have to know what S(.) is to make a whole pile of observations of properties of organisations of it that apply regardless of the particular S(.). It may be we never actually get to sort out the specifics of S(.)! (I have an idea, but it doesn't matter from the point of view of understanding qualia as another property of the structure like atoms). In Bruno's terms the structure of S(.) is what he calls 'objective reality'. I would say that in science the first person view has primacy. I'd say that we formulate abstractions that correlate with agreed appearances within the first person view. However, the correspo0ndence between the underlying structure and the formulate abstractions is only that - a correlation. Our models are not the structure. The 'objective view' is virtual (like russel said). I don't think we need any more jargon than that. There is another aspect, which I've been musing about again since my most recent exchanges with Peter. This is that if one is to take seriously (and I do) 'structural' or 'block' views such as MWI, it seems to me that whatever is behaving 'perceivingly', '1st-personally', or 'subjectly' (gawd!) is the gestalt, not any particular abstraction therefrom. It seems to me that this is necessary to yield: 1) The unnameability of the 1st-person (i.e. 'this observer situation') 2) The consequential validity (?) of any probability calculus of observer situations 3) The dynamic quality of time as experienced (i.e. contrast between 'figure' and 'ground') 4) Meta-experiential layering - e.g. 'coherent histories' of observer situations Any views on this? David Yesall these things rely on perceptual mechanisms which will never...repeat...never...be found in quantum mechanicsnor any other depiction of appearances. I recommend to stop trying to make/understand a universe by fiddling with the appearance of quantum mechanics!...by inventing multiple universes and all those other complexities...we simply do not need them...The universe is NOT made of quantum mechanics! Nor is it made of any mathematical concoction of circumstances designed to find a domain from which QM could be said to 'be' the universe. Deal with a reality that appears _to us_ like QM! The universe is made of a structure that behaves quantum-mechanical-ly when our appearance generation system (the scientist) literally physically and causally invades the universe at ultra-scale dimensions for the purposes of perceiving it (no matter how tortuously long that causality trail might seem to us). This is a completely different approach. The assumption that (QM = the structure) is the big problem here. QM is a mathematical model of what our appearances see, not what the universe actually is. Models of appearances (like QM) and models of structure (does not exist yet) are two equally valid representations of the same thing and they come about because we are literally part of the structure. Neither model _are_ the 'structure' they are merely _about_ the structure. Qualia are scientific evidence for both. I'd recommend spending time working on structures that 'look like' QM when you are part of the structure. Make sense? I'll keep saying this until it sinks in. Somebody other than me has to see this! Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: Dual-Aspect Science
LZ:
Colin Hales wrote:
The underlying structure unifies the
whole system. Of course you'll
get some impact via the causality of the
structurevia the deep structure right down into
the very fabric of space.
In a very real way the existence of
'mysterious observer dependence'
is
actually proof that the hierarchically organised S(.)
structure idea must be
somewhere near the answer.
Not really. You can have a two-way causal
interdependene between two
systems without them both having th esame structure.
I think you are assuming a separateness of structure
that does not exist.
There is one and one only structure. We are all part
of it. There is no concept of 'separate' to be had. Absolutely everything is
included in the structure. No exceptions. Space, atoms, scientists, qualia. All
interactions at all 'scales' (scale itself) are all interactions between
different parts of the one structure. To interact at all is to interact with
another part of the structure. The idea of there being anything else ('not' the
structure) is meaningless. If there is any 'thing' in the structure then the
balance of the structure expressed a perfect un-thing.
There is nothing else. That is the coincept I am
exploring.
Note that we don't actually have to know what
S(.) is to make a whole
pile of observations of properties of
organisations of it that apply
regardless of the particular S(.). It may be
we never actually get to
sort out the
specifics of S(.)! (I have an idea, but it doesn't
matter from the point
of
view of understanding qualia as another
property of the structure
like
atoms).
In Bruno's terms the structure of S(.) is
what he calls 'objective
reality'.
I would say that in science the first person
view has primacy.
Epistemic or Ontic ?
These are just words invented by members of the
structure. But I'll try.
The structure delivers qualia in the first person.
Those qualia are quite valid 'things' (virtual matter)..organisation/behaviour
of structure.
Their presentation bestows intrinsic knowledge as a
measurement to the embedded structure member called the scientist. This is
knowledge as intrinsic intentionality. Within the experiences is regularity
which can then be characterised as knowledge attributed to some identified
behaviour in the structure. This attribution is only an attribution as to
behaviour of the structure, not the structure. These attributions can be used
by a another scientist in their 'first person' world.
All of this is derived from a first person
presentation of a measurement.
Ergo science is entirely first operson based.
Epistemic and Ontic characters are smatter throughout this description. I could
label them all but you already know and the process adds nothing to the message
or to sorting out how it all works.
I'd say that
we formulate abstractions that correlate with
agreed appearances
within
the
first person view. However, the
correspo0ndence between the
underlying
structure and the formulate abstractions is only that
- a correlation.
Our
models are not the structure.
*Could* they be the structure ? if it necessarily
the case that the
structure cannot be modelled, then it
is perhaps no strcuture at
all.
Which is the simpler and more reasonable basis upon
which to explore the
universe:
1) The universe is literally constructed by some sort
of 'empirical_law_in_ a_certain_context embodiment machine' by means unknown
that has appearances (qualia as 1st person perception) that cannot
be predicted by empirical laws driving the machine, yet are clearly implemented
by the machine. (logically equivalent to the laws of nature are invoked
by the purple balloon people of the horsehead nebula).
or
2) The universe is a structure of which we are a part
and which also has the property of delivering appearances of itself to us
within which is regularity that can be captured mathematically as empirical
laws. By considering universes of structure capable of delivering appearances
we can then insist that the structures appearances thus delivered shall also deliver
appearances that would lead us to formulate regularity as empirical laws when
made of it... this 2-sided equation with qualia the linking/unifying/central/prime
feature is dual aspect science.
Parsimony is in 2), not 1).
Yesall these things rely on perceptual
mechanisms which will
never...repeat...never...be found in quantum
mechanicsnor any other depiction of appearances.
Why not ?
Continuing right along: sorry
QM is an appearance. Trying to explain appearance with
appearance is like trying to telephone somebody a telephone (or maybe fax a
real fax machine down the line). It doesnt make sense. If you want to
figure out how the phone works then you have to start thinking about the things
that comprise something that behaves phone_system-ly to phone users. The
universe is not made of quantum
RE: Can we ever know truth?
-Original Message- From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Brent Meeker Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2006 12:36 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Can we ever know truth? Stathis Papaioannou wrote: ... If we realise that things cannot be as they seem then this is new evidence and things now seem different to what they originally did! I did not intend that things are as they seem be understood in a narrow sense, such as what our senses can immediately apprehend. Complex scientific evidence, philosophical considerations, historical experience: all of it has to be added to the mix and whatever comes out is what we should accept as the provisional best theory. We know that it may not be the truth - indeed, that we might never actually know the truth - but it is the best we can do. Stathis Papaioannou Brent Meeker OK, I agree. Things as they seem in the broader scientific sense is what I mean by a model of reality. I sometimes think that's why there has been such a long and continuing argument about the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Although we can do the math and check the experiment - things just can't seem that way. Brent Meeker In brain material and brain material alone you get anomaly: things are NOT what they seem. 'Seem' is a construct of qualia. In a science of qualia, what are they 'seeming' to be? Not qualia. That is circular. Parsimony demands we assume 'something' and then investigate it. Having done that we need to hold that very same 'something' responsible for all the other 'seeming' delivered by qualia. Seeming sounds great until you try and conduct a scientific study of the 'seeming' system. Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: Dual-Aspect Science
Colin Geoffrey Hales wrote:
Hi,
A lot of the dialog below is a mismatch of ideas which indicates that I
have underestimated the degree of difficulty to be expected in getting
the
If they are different substructures within a further (different)
structure, they are also unified, in that sense and to that extent.
The contentious claims here are:
a) That being multiple instances of the same structure is the only
way things can be unified.
No there is only 1 structure. Within it are layers of members of different
classes of substructure. Space, Atoms. etc
b) Things unified in that sense are devoid of any difference or
separaration whatsoever.
They are 'difference' and 'separation' are not the same. The appearance of
separation is a physical claim. Imagine an ice-entity living in an ice-cube.
The rest of the ice cube looks like space. The ice entity can move around in
it freely. But they are made of the same (differently organised) stuff.
Absolutely everything is included in the
structure. No exceptions. Space, atoms, scientists, qualia. All
interactions at all 'scales' (scale itself) are all interactions
between
different parts of the one structure. To interact at all is to
interact
with another part of the structure.
another in what sense ? You just said there is *no* concept
of separation.
eg. Matter passes through space. It is interacting with itself. Matter
'looks' separate to space, but deep down its not. The appearance of
separateness is how it is presented to us.
It is entirely possible that they are unified deep down and
separate on the surface. Separation need not be dismissed
as appearance.
Q. If you draw a surface boundary around a human what is inside it?
A. If 99,999,999,999,999,999,999 are space. We are the remaining 1 part.
We are all but not there.
There is a fundamental and intrinsically intimate connection between every
single little atomic nuance of us and space we inhabit. The atoms' mobility
within space is an act of cooperation between the atoms and the space they
inhabit through their joint 'parent' structure. There is no actual
separateness, only behavioural separateness.
The idea of there being anything else
('not' the structure) is meaningless. If there is any 'thing' in the
structure then the balance of the structure expressed a perfect
un-thing.
There is nothing else. That is the coincept I am exploring.
None of that has anything to do with your claim that there is
a single *type* of structure, and that everything is composed of
recursive combinations of its instances.
It may be the case that everything is ultimately part of one
strucutre,
but
that does not imply that everything within the Great Strucutre is
self-similar.
The structure is hierarchical layers of organisation only. Members of a
layer share morphological invariance to some characteristics of layer
layer. Properties are inherited by child layers from paretn layers. All
the layers are contained by each other.
How very c++-ey.
Do you have any evidence, or are you appelaing to the comfort
zone of Sofware Engineers ?
I'm not appealing to any comfort zones. I'm trying to convey ideas in words
that people can follow and relate to. These concepts are well traveled and
explored and the principles can be easily applied to a 'theory of
everything'
Their presentation bestows intrinsic knowledge as a measurement to
the
embedded structure member called the scientist. This is knowledge as
intrinsic intentionality.
Are yu saying that qualia are marked by intentionality ?
That would be novel.
,, qualia are intrinsic, consciously accessible, NON-INTENTIONAL
features of sense-data and other non-physical phenomenal objects that
are responsible for their phenomenal character.
When we experience redness it is painted onto some'thing'.
Not if it is adream or hallucination ,
This is simply internally generated qualia derived from memory rather than
sensory feed.
or the result of pressing your eyeball.
This is a qualia generator mis-generating due to malfunctioning sensory
feed.
Neither of which actually change the argument at all. Machinery embeds
'aboutness', but it doesn't always have to be perfect or even right!
Mechanisms have normal and aberrant/pathological behaviour. Any cogent story
of qualia must account for both.
You could just as well say the apparaent behaviour of the universe.
Yes. The universe literally can be the whole, single structure.
All of this is derived from a first person presentation of a
measurement.
Ergo science is entirely first operson based.
The fact that science happens to be performed by persons
doesn't make it irreducibly first-personal. That would
depend on whether persons can remove themselves from
scientific descriptions. As it happens they can. That
is still true with
RE: Dual-Aspect Science
not predict scientific behaviour in the most basic way: the formulation/verification of natural laws. Note that I have a second aspect T' ( a new set about underlying structure) and the pair T and T' form the characterisation of science called dual aspect. Set T and set T' are not claimed to 'be' the natural world, but merely be 'about' it. Qualia as scientific evidence are evidence for both T and T' equally. Natural laws in T' (future) will account for structures that generate the qualia that are used to formulate the laws T. The system is quite consistent and empirically backed throughout. Cheers Colin Hales t0 Notes: Please note that the detail included in these notes is not intended to be complete or even appropriately configured. It is merely intended to be a prototype - as starting point - for ongoing development. The details have no fundamental bearing on the outcome of establishment of a t0, its framework and delineation of inconsistency in science. Note 1. Formulation of a statement is the creative act of a cognitive agent and the statement must be well formed in that it is consistently derived from a well formed axiomatic context (see note 3). The statement is a potential truth about the universe or a prediction of same. Philosophical considerations can be used here to assist with the creative process. Note 2. This includes statistical (probabilistic/stochastic) regularities. Indeed it is arguable that all empirical theorems are describing statistical objects. Most, if not all, current theories of the natural world describe regularities in the behaviour of statistics evident in the colligative behaviour of multiple instances of similar natural structures. Ms. and Mr. Average have predictable behaviour useful in making decisions. These people do not actually exist (they are virtual). Nevertheless we can formulate theorems that can be said to describe the natural world in a useful way i.e. one that facilitates decision making. The decision being made is one of configuration of initial conditions which will subsequently lead to the natural world achieving a desired state (technology). Note 3. A well formed set of axioms (assumptions held to be self evident for the purpose) establishing the basis for the hypothesis that is the 'statement'. A theoretical system may be said to be axiomatised if a set of statements, the axioms, has been formulated which satisfies the following four fundamental requirements: (a) a system of axioms must be free from contradiction (whether self-contradiction or mutual contradiction). This is equivalent to the demand that not every arbitrarily chosen statement is deducible from it. (b) The system must be independent, i.e. it must not contain any axiom deducible from the remaining axioms. In other words, a statement is to be called an axiom only if it is not deducible within the rest of the system. (c) The axioms should be sufficient for the deduction of all statements belonging to the theory which is to be axiomatised, and (d) axioms should be necessary, for the same purpose; which means that they should contain no superfluous assumptions. Note 4. This incorporates the creative act of induction and all critical argument that stabilises on a final chosen statement. Note 5. This means that the regularity shall occur in the experiential life of an observer. This prescribes phenomenal consciousness as the source of all evidence. This may include the use of instruments which make visible otherwise unobservable aspects of the natural world. Instruments are technology and exploratory regimes resulting from previously formulated statements. Note 6. Evidence results from the act of deduction and the creative act of formulation of a statement (via the same method of critical argument) which leads to a choice of initial conditions as a causal precursor to an experiment exhibiting behaviour in relation to the chosen statement. Note 7. Statements tN are not a prescription of truth in that it is not proven by the scientific process. Scientific statements, unlike mathematical theorems, are never proven. They live life permanently in the inferior state of being 'not wrong' but of great predictive utility. This is mandated logically because no matter how predictive any one theorem may be it is always possible to configure doubt in accuracy or applicability in new context. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: Dual-Aspect Science ooops
it does not predict scientific behaviour in the most basic way: the formulation/verification of natural laws. Note that I have a second aspect T' ( a new set about underlying structure) and the pair T and T' form the characterisation of science called dual aspect. Set T and set T' are not claimed to 'be' the natural world, but merely be 'about' it. Qualia as scientific evidence are evidence for both T and T' equally. Natural laws in T' (future) will account for structures that generate the qualia that are used to formulate the laws T. The system is quite consistent and empirically backed throughout. Cheers Colin Hales t0 Notes: Please note that the detail included in these notes is not intended to be complete or even appropriately configured. It is merely intended to be a prototype - as starting point - for ongoing development. The details have no fundamental bearing on the outcome of establishment of a t0, its framework and delineation of inconsistency in science. Note 1. Formulation of a statement is the creative act of a cognitive agent and the statement must be well formed in that it is consistently derived from a well formed axiomatic context (see note 3). The statement is a potential truth about the universe or a prediction of same. Philosophical considerations can be used here to assist with the creative process. Note 2. This includes statistical (probabilistic/stochastic) regularities. Indeed it is arguable that all empirical theorems are describing statistical objects. Most, if not all, current theories of the natural world describe regularities in the behaviour of statistics evident in the colligative behaviour of multiple instances of similar natural structures. Ms. and Mr. Average have predictable behaviour useful in making decisions. These people do not actually exist (they are virtual). Nevertheless we can formulate theorems that can be said to describe the natural world in a useful way i.e. one that facilitates decision making. The decision being made is one of configuration of initial conditions which will subsequently lead to the natural world achieving a desired state (technology). Note 3. A well formed set of axioms (assumptions held to be self evident for the purpose) establishing the basis for the hypothesis that is the 'statement'. A theoretical system may be said to be axiomatised if a set of statements, the axioms, has been formulated which satisfies the following four fundamental requirements: (a) a system of axioms must be free from contradiction (whether self-contradiction or mutual contradiction). This is equivalent to the demand that not every arbitrarily chosen statement is deducible from it. (b) The system must be independent, i.e. it must not contain any axiom deducible from the remaining axioms. In other words, a statement is to be called an axiom only if it is not deducible within the rest of the system. (c) The axioms should be sufficient for the deduction of all statements belonging to the theory which is to be axiomatised, and (d) axioms should be necessary, for the same purpose; which means that they should contain no superfluous assumptions. Note 4. This incorporates the creative act of induction and all critical argument that stabilises on a final chosen statement. Note 5. This means that the regularity shall occur in the experiential life of an observer. This prescribes phenomenal consciousness as the source of all evidence. This may include the use of instruments which make visible otherwise unobservable aspects of the natural world. Instruments are technology and exploratory regimes resulting from previously formulated statements. Note 6. Evidence results from the act of deduction and the creative act of formulation of a statement (via the same method of critical argument) which leads to a choice of initial conditions as a causal precursor to an experiment exhibiting behaviour in relation to the chosen statement. Note 7. Statements tN are not a prescription of truth in that it is not proven by the scientific process. Scientific statements, unlike mathematical theorems, are never proven. They live life permanently in the inferior state of being 'not wrong' but of great predictive utility. This is mandated logically because no matter how predictive any one theorem may be it is always possible to configure doubt in accuracy or applicability in new context. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: Dual-Aspect Science
Scientists are part of the natural world, like elephants. Scientific
behaviour, like elephant behaviour, has invariants across the entire set of
scientific disciplines (humanity) as for elephanity(!) = elephants behaving
elephantly. Not many invariants, but a few. One of those is creativity, for
example. Not all are adopted well by all scientists. But there are
invariants to be found, even if they are not always adopted
Scientists are regularity in the natural world. There is absolutely no
reason why Scientific behaviour can't be expressed as a natural law like any
other law. Their behaviour is not that of a musician. Their behaviour is not
that of a tax accountant. Whatever their behaviour it is unique and can be
expressed as a basic minimal prescription, a statistic like and other
natural law.
I have constructed a prototype of what it may be like. The difference
between this law and all others is that it is implicit in scientists in that
unlike any other law of nature it has never been explicitly formulated, but
is passed on by mimicry. The complete set of all J+1 currently available
'laws of nature' (any paper in any scientific journal expressing empirical
results qualifies to go into this set) is:
T = {t0, t1 ..tN, .. tJ }
These are the laws of appearances, the T-aspect. The special law t0 is the
one for scientific behaviour. The status of these laws is as follows:
By acting 'as-if' t0 was literally driving the natural world you can predict
(statistically) the behaviour of a scientist.
By acting 'as-if' tx was literally driving the natural world you can predict
(statistically) the behaviour of those things that were used to formulate
tx. For example newton's 2nd law f = ma reformulated into the form of the
set T members would be one such law - this would enable a human to predict
the behaviour of mass m.
All the laws in the set T can be treated as beliefs necessary to drive
behaviour of a HUMAN in order that the natural world be predictable. They
say NOTHING about the actual underlying causal necessities of the natural
world. That claim cannot be made: there is no evidence. Novel Technology
proves the laws as predictive and therefore that the causal parent = the
human behaviour resulting from believing in the laws is adequate...remember
the laws are formulated with evidence of behaviour as presented by qualia
into the head of scientists. To the best of my ability the law t0 is as
follows:
==
tN =The natural world in insert context behaves as follows: insert
behaviour
t0 =The natural world in the context of being scientific about the
natural world behaves as follows: to formulate statements of type tN,
each of which is a statementNote 1 of regularityNote 2 in a specific
contextNote 3 in the natural world arrived at through the process of
critical argumentNote 4 and that in principle can be refuted through the
process of experiencingNote 5 evidenceNote 6 of the regularity Note 7.
I have embedded the notes down below. They don't matter much in what I am
trying to convey. Creativity is in them. Objectivity is in them.
Just like a thought about thinking is a member of the set of all possible
thoughts, the law t0 is a law of type tN about the formulation of laws of
type tN.
The set T does not have to be consistent. Different laws in set T can
contradict each other. That is they can be egregiously wrong outside their
context. The set T is growing exponentially day by day. Each member of set T
represents a net brain state (achieved during dynamic brain activity)
comprising the holding of a belief about the natural world by a scientist.
That is all that is claimed.
The property of the natural world that enables t0 is intrinsic (innate) to
brain material: the extraction of invariance from perceptual fields. The
accuracy of t0 is proven by observation of history in that it has been used
all along by scientists and can be seen to be in operation all along even
though any explicit t0 at any time could be very very wrong (it was never
written down until now)!
t0, as a 'law of science' is NOT 'scientific method'. Scientific method is
just detail inside the overall behaviour. This law t0 is novel. It is not in
science literature and it is not in philosophy literature and it is not in
anthropology literature.
Note that I have a second aspect T' ( a new set about underlying structure)
and the pair T and T' form the characterisation of science called dual
aspect. Set T and set T' are not claimed to 'be' the natural world, but
merely be 'about' it. Qualia as scientific evidence are evidence for both T
and T' equally. Natural laws in T' (future) will account for structures that
generate the qualia that are used to formulate the laws T. The system is
quite consistent and empirically backed throughout.
Cheers
Colin Hales
t0 Notes:
Please note that the detail included in these notes is not intended to be
complete
RE: evidence blindness
-Original Message- From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Brent Meeker Sent: Sunday, August 27, 2006 9:49 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: evidence blindness Colin Geoffrey Hales wrote: the fact that intelligent behaviour is third person observable but consciousness is not. Stathis Papaioannou OK. Let me get this straight. Scientist A stares at something, say X, with consciousness. A sees X. Scientist A posits evidence of X from a third person viewpoint. Scientist A confers with Scientist B. Scientist B then goes and stares at X and agrees. Both of these people use consciousness to come to this conclusion. Explicit Conclusion : Yep, theres an X! Yet there's no evidence of consciousness? that which literally enabled the entire process? There is an assumption at work SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE and CONTENTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS Are NOT identities. When you 'stare' at anything at all you have evidence of consciousness. A SIDWINDER missile 'stares' at the exhaust of a jet aircraft. Does that make it conscious? This is a mind-blowingly irrelevant diversion into the usual weeds that fails to comprehend the most basic proposition about ourselves by an assumption which is plain wrong. You presume that the missile stares and then attribute it to humans as equivalent. Forget the bloody missile. I am talking about YOU. The evidence you have about YOU within YOU. Take a look at your hand. That presentation of your hand is one piece of content in a visual field (scene). Mind is literally and only a collection of (rather spectacular) phenomenal scenes. Something (within your brain material) generates the visual field in which there is a hand. You could cognise the existence of a hand _without_ that scene (this is what blindsight patients can do - very very badly, but they can do it). But you don't. No, nature goes to a hell of a lot of trouble to create that fantastic image. You have the scene. Take note of it. It gives you ALL your scientific evidence. This is an intrinsically private scene and you can't be objective without it! You would have nothing to be objective about. PROOF Close your eyes and tell me you can be more scientific about your hand than you could with them open. This is so obvious. To say consciousness is not observable is completely absolutely wrong. We observe consciousness permanently. It's all we ever do! It's just not within the phenomenal fields, it IS the phenomenal fields. Got it? Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: evidence blindness
Dear Benjamin and folks, Your words capture a whole bunch of valuable stuff. In a project to define a comprehensive standard for 'scientific method' it would be very useful input. The particulars involved here, however, are about the basic reality that all scientific behaviour is grounded in consciousness (phenomenal fields). Indeed this is literally _mandated_ by scientists. If we cannot introduce the studied behaviour into phenomenal fields (even via instruments and tortuous inference trails re causality) we are told in no uncertain terms that we are not being scientific, you cannot be doing sciencego see the metaphysics dept over there. This oddity in science is quite amazing and so incredibly obvious that I sometimes wonder about the sanity of scientists. Is it a club or a professional discipline? We: a) demand evidence _within_ consciousness on pain of being declared unscientific and then b) declare that no scientific evidence exists for consciousness because consciousness can't render consciousness visible within consciousness? when consciousness is the entire and only originating source of evidence! Once again I say: SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE And PHENOMENAL _CONTENTS_ Are not identities. There is more evidence for consciousness than anything else. It's just not phenomenal _contents_. It's the phenomenal fields themselves. This is the only message I have here. I have a whole pile of suggestions as to what to do about it...but it's too huge to insert and won't make any difference if this basic reality is not recognised. This increase in scope of scientific evidence gives license for a change in scientific behaviour. Scientific behaviour includes more than is currently recognised. The net result is that we have permission as scientists to carefully go places previously thought 'unscientific'. Having done so those places should be able to predict mechanisms for consciousness consistent with the evidence consciousness provides... that's all. And remember this fact simply doesn't matter in normal day to day science until you try and do a scientific study of the scientific evidence generator (consciousness). Then all hell breaks loose and your busted beliefs about the nature of scientific evidence are exposed for what they are. We need to get used to the idea. This is a brute fact and there's nothing else to say on the matter... I just wish that I'd stop constantly coming across signs of the aberrant beliefs in scientific discoursenot just here on this list but all around meso pervasive and s wrong. Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: evidence blindness
Most of the time I'm observing something else. When I try to observe consciouness, I find I am instead thinking of this or that particular thing, and not consciousness itself. Consciousness can only be consciousness *of* something. Got that? Brent Meeker Absolutely. Intrinsic intentionality is what phenomenal fields do. Brilliantly. but. That's not what my post was about. I'm talking about the evidence provided by the very existence of phenomenal fields _at all_. Blindsighted people have cognition WITHOUT the phenomenal scene. The cognition and the phenomenal aspects are 2 separate sets of physics intermixed. You can have one without the other. Consider your current perception of the neutrinos and cosmic rays showering you. That's what a blindsighted scientist would have in relation to visible light = No phenomenal field. They can guess where things are and sometimes get it right because of pre-occipital hardwiring. The phenomenal scene itself, regardless of its contents (aboutness, intentionality whatever) is evidence of the universe's capacity for generation of phenomenal fields!. phenomenal fields that...say... have missiles in them?...that allow you to see email forums on your PC?.that create problematic evidentiary regimes tending to make those using phenomenal fields for evidence incapable of seeing it, like the hand in front of your face? :-) If we open up a cranium, if the universe was literally made of the appearances provided by phenomenal fields...we would see them! We do not. This is conclusive empirical proof the universe is not made of the contents of the appearance-generating system (and, for that matter, anything derived by using it). It is made of something that can generate appearances in the right circumstances (and not in the vision system of the blindsighted). Those circumstances exist in brain material (and not in your left kneecap!). Consciousness is not invisible. It is the single, only visible thing there is. To say consciousness is invisible whilst using it is to accept X as true from someone screaming X is true!, yet at the same time denying that anyone said anything! That this is donewhen the truth of the existence of an utterance is more certain than that which was uttered. How weird is that?! I'd like everyone on this list to consider the next time anyone says consciousness is invisible to realise that that is completely utterly wrong and that as a result of thinking like that, valuable evidence as to the nature of the universe is being discarded for no reason other than habit and culture and discipline blindness. Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: evidence blindness
-Original Message- From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Nyman Sent: Monday, August 28, 2006 7:33 AM To: Everything List Subject: Re: evidence blindness [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We all (excuse me to use 1st pers form) are well educated smart people and can say something upon everything. It is a rarity to read: I was wrong you are right - period. John You're right! Every time I post on these topics I *know* I'm wrong: I just don't know how specifically, but I keep doing it in the hope that someone will show me. Trouble is, there's something about this area that resists us - we seem doomed to come at it all wrong (particularly in those moments when we think we've got it right!) It's the struggle that fascinates us, I suppose. David Yeah! I actually believe this is more fundamental to the whole process of creativity I have a saying (the only one I have ever coined!): Insight is the serendipity born of the failure to make a mistake i.e. ready fire (shite!...missed)... then aim. Eventually you hit the bullseye by failing to miss everything that is not the bullseye voila!an answer... btw...I'm thinking of writing a short paper on the long overdue death of the solipsism argument and the 'no evidence for subjective experience' dogma I'd like to erect a grave-stone here on the everything list! R.I.P. :-) cheers, colin hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: computationalism and supervenience
-Original Message- Stathis Papaioannou Brent Meeker writes: Why not? Can't we map bat conscious-computation to human conscious- computation; since you suppose we can map any computation to any other. But, you're thinking, since there a practical infinity of maps (even a countable infinity if you allow one-many) there is no way to know which is the correct map. There is if you and the bat share an environment. You're right that the correct mapping is the one in which you and the bat share the environment. That is what interaction with the environment does: forces us to choose one mapping out of all the possible ones, whether that involves talking to another person or using a computer. However, that doesn't mean I know everything about bats if I know everything about bat-computations. If it did, that would mean there was no difference between zombie bats and conscious bats, no difference between first person knowledge and third person or vicarious knowledge. Stathis Papaioannou I don't find either of those conclusions absurd. Computationalism is generally thought to entail both of them. Bruno's theory that identifies knowledge with provability is the only form of computationalism that seems to allow the distinction in a fundamental way. The Turing test would seem to imply that if it behaves like a bat, it has the mental states of a bat, and maybe this is a good practical test, but I think we can keep computationalism/strong AI and allow that it might have different mental states and still behave the same. A person given an opiod drug still experiences pain, although less intensely, and would be easily able to fool the Turing tester into believing that he is experiecing the same pain as in the undrugged state. By extension, it is logically possible, though unlikely, that the subject may have no conscious experiences at all. The usual argument against this is that by the same reasoning we cannot be sure that our fellow humans are conscious. This is strictly true, but we have two reasons for assuming other people are conscious: they behave like we do and their brains are similar to ours. I don't think it would be unreasonable to wonder whether a digital computer that behaves like we do really has the same mental states as a human, while still believing that it is theoretically possible that a close enough analogue of a human brain would have the same mental states. Stathis Papaioannou I am so glad to here this come onto the list, Stathis. Your argument is logically equivalentI took this argument (from the recent thread) over to the JCS-ONLINE forum and threw it in there to see what would happen. As a result I wrote a short paper ostensibly to dispose of the solipsism argument once and for all by demonstrating empirical proof of the existence of consciousness, (if not any particular details within it). In it is some of the stuff from the thread...and acknowledgement to the list. I expect it will be rejected as usual... regardless...it's encouraging to at least see a little glimmer of hope that some of the old arguments that get trotted out are getting a little frayed around the edges.. If anyone wants to see it they are welcome... just email me. Or perhaps I could put it in the google forum somewhere... it can do that, can't it? BTW: The 'what it is like' of a Turing machine = what it is like to be a tape and tape reader, regardless of what is on the tape. 'tape_reader_ness', I assume... :-) Regards, Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: computationalism and supervenience
Stathis Papaioannou snip Maybe this is a copout, but I just don't think it is even logically possible to explain what consciousness *is* unless you have it. It's like the problem of explaining vision to a blind man: he might be the world's greatest scientific expert on it but still have zero idea of what it is like to see - and that's even though he shares most of the rest of his cognitive structure with other humans, and can understand analogies using other sensations. Knowing what sort of program a conscious computer would have to run to be conscious, what the purpose of consciousness is, and so on, does not help me to understand what the computer would be experiencing, except by analogy with what I myself experience. Stathis Papaioannou Please consider the plight of the zombie scientist with a huge set of sensory feeds and similar set of effectors. All carry similar signal encoding and all, in themselves, bestow no experiential qualities on the zombie. Add a capacity to detect regularity in the sensory feeds. Add a scientific goal-seeking behaviour. Note that this zombie... a) has the internal life of a dreamless sleep b) has no concept or percept of body or periphery c) has no concept that it is embedded in a universe. I put it to you that science (the extraction of regularity) is the science of zombie sensory fields, not the science of the natural world outside the zombie scientist. No amount of creativity (except maybe random choices) would ever lead to any abstraction of the outside world that gave it the ability to handle novelty in the natural world outside the zombie scientist. No matter how sophisticated the sensory feeds and any guesswork as to a model (abstraction) of the universe, the zombie would eventually find novelty invisible because the sensory feeds fail to depict the novelty .ie. same sensory feeds for different behaviour of the natural world. Technology built by a zombie scientist would replicate zombie sensory feeds, not deliver an independently operating novel chunk of hardware with a defined function(if the idea of function even has meaning in this instance). The purpose of consciousness is, IMO, to endow the cognitive agent with at least a repeatable (not accurate!) simile of the universe outside the cognitive agent so that novelty can be handled. Only then can the zombie scientist detect arbitrary levels of novelty and do open ended science (or survive in the wild world of novel environmental circumstance). In the absence of the functionality of phenomenal consciousness and with finite sensory feeds you cannot construct any world-model (abstraction) in the form of an innate (a-priori) belief system that will deliver an endless ability to discriminate novelty. In a very Godellian way eventually a limit would be reach where the abstracted model could not make any prediction that can be detected. The zombie is, in a very real way, faced with 'truths' that exist but can't be accessed/perceived. As such its behaviour will be fundamentally fragile in the face of novelty (just like all computer programs are). --- Just to make the zombie a little more real... consider the industrial control system computer. I have designed, installed hundreds and wired up tens (hundreds?) of thousands of sensors and an unthinkable number of kilometers of cables. (NEVER again!) In all cases I put it to you that the phenomenal content of sensory connections may, at best, be characterised as whatever it is like to have electrons crash through wires, for that is what is actually going on. As far as the internal life of the CPU is concerned... whatever it is like to be an electrically noisy hot rock, regardless of the programalthough the character of the noise may alter with different programs! I am a zombie expert! No that didn't come out right...erm perhaps... I think I might be a world expert in zombies yes, that's better. :-) Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: computationalism and supervenience
Brent Meeker: Colin Hales wrote: Stathis Papaioannou snip Maybe this is a copout, but I just don't think it is even logically possible to explain what consciousness *is* unless you have it. It's like the problem of explaining vision to a blind man: he might be the world's greatest scientific expert on it but still have zero idea of what it is like to see - and that's even though he shares most of the rest of his cognitive structure with other humans, and can understand analogies using other sensations. Knowing what sort of program a conscious computer would have to run to be conscious, what the purpose of consciousness is, and so on, does not help me to understand what the computer would be experiencing, except by analogy with what I myself experience. Stathis Papaioannou Please consider the plight of the zombie scientist with a huge set of sensory feeds and similar set of effectors. All carry similar signal encoding and all, in themselves, bestow no experiential qualities on the zombie. Add a capacity to detect regularity in the sensory feeds. Add a scientific goal-seeking behaviour. Note that this zombie... a) has the internal life of a dreamless sleep b) has no concept or percept of body or periphery c) has no concept that it is embedded in a universe. I put it to you that science (the extraction of regularity) is the science of zombie sensory fields, not the science of the natural world outside the zombie scientist. No amount of creativity (except maybe random choices) would ever lead to any abstraction of the outside world that gave it the ability to handle novelty in the natural world outside the zombie scientist. No matter how sophisticated the sensory feeds and any guesswork as to a model (abstraction) of the universe, the zombie would eventually find novelty invisible because the sensory feeds fail to depict the novelty .ie. same sensory feeds for different behaviour of the natural world. Technology built by a zombie scientist would replicate zombie sensory feeds, not deliver an independently operating novel chunk of hardware with a defined function(if the idea of function even has meaning in this instance). The purpose of consciousness is, IMO, to endow the cognitive agent with at least a repeatable (not accurate!) simile of the universe outside the cognitive agent so that novelty can be handled. Only then can the zombie scientist detect arbitrary levels of novelty and do open ended science (or survive in the wild world of novel environmental circumstance). Almost all organisms have become extinct. Handling *arbitrary* levels of novelty is probably too much to ask of any species; and it's certainly more than is necessary to survive for millenia. I am talking purely about scientific behaviour, not general behaviour. A creature with limited learning capacity and phenomenal scenes could quite happily live in an ecological niche until the niche changed. I am not asking any creature other than a scientist to be able to appreciate arbitrary levels of novelty. In the absence of the functionality of phenomenal consciousness and with finite sensory feeds you cannot construct any world-model (abstraction) in the form of an innate (a-priori) belief system that will deliver an endless ability to discriminate novelty. In a very Godellian way eventually a limit would be reach where the abstracted model could not make any prediction that can be detected. So that's how we got string theory! The zombie is, in a very real way, faced with 'truths' that exist but can't be accessed/perceived. As such its behaviour will be fundamentally fragile in the face of novelty (just like all computer programs are). How do you know we are so robust. Planck said, A new idea prevails, not by the conversion of adherents, but by the retirement and demise of opponents. In other words only the young have the flexibility to adopt new ideas. Ironically Planck never really believed quantum mechanics was more than a calculational trick. The robustness is probably in that science is actually, at the level of critical argument (like this, now), a super-organism. In retrospect I think QM will be regarded as a side effect of the desperate attempt to mathematically abtract appearances rather then deal with the structure that is behaving quantum-mechanically. After the event they'll all be going...what were we thinking! it won't be wrong... just not useful in the sense that any of its considerations are not about underlying structure. --- Just to make the zombie a little more real... consider the industrial control system computer. I have designed, installed hundreds and wired up tens (hundreds?) of thousands of sensors and an unthinkable number of kilometers of cables. (NEVER again!) In all cases I put it to you
RE: Reality, the bogus nature of the Turing test
-Original Message- From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Brent Meeker Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2006 9:52 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Reality, the bogus nature of the Turing test Colin Hales wrote: -Original Message- From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Brent Meeker Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2006 9:31 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Reality, the bogus nature of the Turing test Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Bruno Marchal writes: About solipsism I am not sure why you introduce the subject. It seems to me nobody defend it in the list. Is anyone out there really a solipsist? Has anyone ever met or talked to a real solipsist? Stathis Papaioannou Will all those who believe I don't exist contact me immediately. :-) Brent I don't think anyone actually believes they are, but scientists certainly act as-if they are! (all except me, of course!) Then why do they collaborate, argue, and publish? Exactly how would they act as-if they weren't? Brent Nobody believes a theory, except the guy who thought of it. Everbody believes an experiment, except the guy who did it. --- Leon Lederman, on physics All claims of the existence of Brent Meeker are hereby withdrawn. You do not appear in my phenomenal consciousness. As a scientist I must deny your existence, including your mind. And further more I demand that you must deny my mind. That way all is consistent. :) colin --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: Solipsism unplugged
This is an extract from the full work on solipsism. It is one special section written in the first person, for what else could a solipsist scientist do? I'd be interested in any comments... it paints a rather bizarre picture of science. - I, Solipsist Scientist Copyright(c) 2006. Colin Hales. All rights reserved. - I am a solipsist scientist in that I accept that my mind, which is producing the dialogue you now read, is the one and only conclusively proven mind and possibly the only mind. My mind is an image in a kind of mirror; a phenomenal mirror. The image I see and feel and smell and taste is all I have to enact my craft, my science. Modern neuroscience shows me my brain in the act of being a mirror for me. The image is what philosophy calls my phenomenal consciousness or my phenomenality. I can experiment on my own phenomenality say, by closing my eyes, which I note has a dramatic effect on my ability to do science. When I sleep dreamlessly my phenomenality is absent and when I awake the apparent external world in my mirror is consistently behaving as if it recently had me asleep in it. Yet, as a solipsist I am forced to question the actual existence of what is depicted in my mirror. It is only an image, after all, and images can be fabricated. As a solipsist I attribute this apparent external world depicted within my mirror to be the work of the 'magical fabricator'. At the same time I must find it remarkable that my phenomenality somehow, via the mysterious solution to the 'hard problem', appears to intimately connect me to an external world. I know that my sensory data (nerve signals from the peripheral nervous system that have no innate phenomenality) are used by my apparent brain to create my phenomenality. As a scientist my job is to extract and depict regularity in the appearances within my phenomenal mirror's image as scientifically justified beliefs in the form of useful, predictive generalisations. I know that when I do science what I am doing is correlating the appearances of the contents of my phenomenality. The most obvious evidence of this in any of my scientific papers is that of the 'test' subject in contrast to the 'control' subject. In the case of Newtonian dynamics I would be correlating the behaviour of a mass and the space it inhabits. All of this makes very good sense to me. Yet I am troubled. Within my mirror's image are what appear to be other scientists with brains that look the same as mine. These scientists are merely fabrications in my own mirror's image. Yet despite being mere fabrications they appear, to me, to do science on exquisitely novel things just as well as I do using my real mind. At the same time I cannot see the image in their mirror and vice versa. All report seeing only brain material. I take this as lending support to my solipsism in that I can claim their minds not to exist, which is consistent with my conviction that the external world does not exist. If I am right, and my image(mind) is the only image(mind), then their science is done without any image of their own. The 'magical fabricator' of my image goes to an amazing amount of trouble to make it appear 'as-if' the external world shown to me in my mirror does exist. The scientists within it behave 'as-if' they had the kind of mind I know I must have to do science. To be a solipsist scientist in this circumstance is to live in cooperation with this extravagant fabrication including apparent scientists as adept as myself. As a solipsist scientist, inwardly and silently I deny (remain scientifically unable to confirm) that an external world exists. But as a scientist within this apparent world I am fundamentally conflicted. To be consistent with the behaviour of all the other scientists, outwardly I am forced to act 'as-if' there was an external reality. Also, inwardly I know my mind is the only proven reality, yet to my scientist colleagues, to remain consistent I must deny my own mind as much as I deny theirs. I live in this situation of denial that I have something more than my colleagues have. I am thus doubly conflicted, for I must also act 'as-if' I have no mind, for to declare otherwise is to be inconsistent with my claims about my scientist colleagues, to whom I am identical. Yet despite this odd personal situation the system works, in a way. My scientist colleagues continue to act as-if they had minds. Their scientific lives - our lives - of appearance correlation go on as usual. The whole system is consistent. I, the solipsist, get to inwardly claim my own mind's existence and deny an external world. Outwardly I act 'as-if' there is an external reality and deny my own mind and my colleagues'. They get to act exactly like I do. All along I know that it is actually the work of the magical fabricator, a belief I must also withhold to maintain appearances to my science colleagues, since within
RE: Solipsism unplugged
George Levy: The scientist could prove that he is not alone by invoking the principle of sufficient reason: nothing is arbitrary and exist with no reason. If something exists in a particular arbitrary way (himself) with no reason for him to be in that particular way, then all other alternatives of him must also exist (the Plenitude). Hence he is not alone. Solipsism is dead. George I agree! The point is they dont! (prove they are not alone). What they do is act as-if they are not alone and deny mind as evidence of anything by OMISSION. If mind admitted as evidence in its own right they would be doing science on something causal of mind, rather than on the appearances it delivers. They do not do thisso. If you had read the whole thing you would find that despite your logic (with which I agree!), scientists are unwitting as-if solipsists. So the reality is that it is not actually (methodologically) dead because scientific behaviour is as-if it were a policy in science. That is the whole point! Dont tell me!. Tell scientists other than me! Ask them why they continue to be virtual solipsists. Or better: ask them If that which is seen is scientific evidence, then what is seeing evidence of? Its not evidence for brains appearance, its evidence of something manipulated by brains to generate appearance. Why dont we work on that? They do not..neural correlates of consciousness is NOT doing thatergo scientists are all methodological solipsists tacit in-denial because none of them realise it.because they are not doing something they dont know they are not doing. Please read the whole thing. Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
TEST
--~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: Reality, the bogus nature of the Turing test
1Z Colin Hales wrote: So I ask again HOW would we act DIFFERENTLY if we acted as-if MIND EXISTED. So far the only difference I SEE is writing a lot of stuff in CAPS. Brent Meeker FIRSTLY Formally we would investigate new physics of underlying reality such as this: Why not investigate consciousness at the neuronal level rather than the fundamental-particle level? The problem is that cells are defined and understood only through being observed with our phenomenal consciousness. That process, for the reasons that I have been outlining, can never supply a reason why it shall be necessarily 'like something' to be a cell of a collection of them. That reason is buried deep in the fabric of things. If you understand the underlying structure giving rise to phenomenality then the underlying structure will literally predict the existence, shape, size, behaviour and interconnectivity of neurons and astrocytes _in order_ that you be conscious. Our logic is all backwards: We need to have a theory predicting brain material. A theory based on brain material cannot predict brain material, especially one that has used the property we are trying to find to observe the brain material. The whole exploratory loop is screwed up. Cheers Colin Hales --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
