Brent,
I notice that the link that I forwarded opens on the 3rd page; just
select "view all," toward the upper right of the page.
This brief article on consciousness as integrated information may also
be interesting:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/a-bit-of-theory-consciousness-as-integrated-information
William
On Mar 18, 2010, at 1:00 PM, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 3/18/2010 12:03 PM, L.W. Sterritt wrote:
Brent,
There are some quite interesting observations in the paper by Koch
and Tonini, e.g.
"Remarkably, consciousness does not seem to require many of the
things we associate most deeply with being human: emotions, memory,
self-reflection, language, sensing the world and acting in it..."
I couldn't find their paper (do you have link or a elex copy?) but
the above sounds doubtful to me. Could you dream without having any
memory? I never dream I'm an animal or a machine. I never dream
I'm on Jupiter. My dreams may include things I've never
experienced, but they are made up out of pieces that I have
experienced. And of course if I didn't remember them how would I
know I'd dreamed?
"When we dream, for instance, we are virtually disconnected from
the environment - we acknowledge almost nothing of what happens
around us, and our muscles are largely paralyzed. nevertheless, we
are conscious , sometimes vividly and grippingly so. This mental
activity is reflected in electrical recordings of the dreaming
brain showing that the corticothalamic system, intimately involved
with sensory perception, continues to function more or less as it
does in wakefulness..."
The output of a neural network computer is not entirely
predictable, not running on an instruction set like this computer.
So then, If we succeed in building conscious machines, and they
happen to be mostly "dreaming," is it easier or harder to test them
for consciousness?
I don't think dreaming can so easily be disconnected from
perception. As I recall experiments with sensory deprivation tanks,
which were a fad in the 60's, found that after an hour or so of
sensory deprivation the brain tended to enter a loop. When you're
sleeping, and dreaming, you are not sensorially deprived.
Brent
William
On Mar 18, 2010, at 10:29 AM, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 3/18/2010 10:06 AM, L.W. Sterritt wrote:
Bruno and others,
Perhaps more progress can be made by avoiding self referential
problems and viewing this issue mechanistically. Where I start:
Haim Sompolinsky, "Statistical Mechanics of Neural Networks,"
Physics Today (December 1988). He discussed "emergent
computational properties of large highly connected networks of
simple neuron-like processors," HP has recently succeeded in
making titanium dioxide "memristors" which behave very like the
synapses in our brains, i.e. the memristor's resistance at any
time depends upon the last signal passing through it. Work is
underway to make brain-like computers with these devices; see Wei
Lu, Nano letters, DOI:10.1021/nl904092h. It seems that there is
a growing consensus that conscious machines will be built, and
perhaps with the new Turing test proposed by Koch and Tonini,
their consciousness may be verified.
But the question is,"How does a Turing test verify
consciousness?" Is it possible for something to act in a way that
seems conscious to us (as my dog does) yet not have the inner
experiences that I have. It seems highly implausible that an
being whose structure and internal function is very similar to
mine (another person) could act conscious but not be conscious.
But it's not at all clear that would be true of an artificially
intelligent being whose internal structure and function was quite
different.
Incidentally, it is often forgotten that Turing proposed that the
test be a contest between a man and a computer to see which one
could better emulate a woman.
Brent
Then we can measure properties that are now speculative. I guess
I'm in the QM camp that believes that what you can measure is
what you can know.
William
On Mar 18, 2010, at 1:44 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 17 Mar 2010, at 19:12, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 3/17/2010 10:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 17 Mar 2010, at 13:47, HZ wrote:
I'm quite confused about the state of zombieness. If the
requirement
for zombiehood is that it doesn't understand anything at all
but it
behaves as if it does what makes us not zombies? How do we
not we are
not? But more importantly, are there known cases of zombies?
Perhaps a
silly question because it might be just a thought experiment
but if
so, I wonder on what evidence one is so freely speaking about,
specially when connected to cognition for which we now
(should) know
more. The questions seem related because either we don't know
whether
we are zombies or one can solve the problem of zombie
identification.
I guess I'm new in the zombieness business.
I know I am conscious, and I can doubt all content of my
consciousness, except this one, that I am conscious.
I cannot prove that I am conscious, neither to some others.
Dolls and sculptures are, with respect to what they represent,
if human in appearance sort of zombie.
Tomorrow, we may be able to put in a museum an artificial
machine imitating a humans which is sleeping, in a way that we
may be confused and believe it is a dreaming human being ...
The notion of zombie makes sense (logical sense). Its
existence may depend on the choice of theory.
With the axiom of comp, a counterfactually correct relation
between numbers define the channel through which consciousness
flows (select the consistent extensions). So with comp we
could argue that as far as we are bodies, we are zombies, but
from our first person perspective we never are.
But leaving the zombie definition and identification apart, I
think
current science would/should see no difference between
consciousness
and cognition, the former is an emergent property of the
latter,
I would have said the contrary:
consciousness -> sensibility -> emotion -> cognition ->
language -> recognition -> self-consciousness -> ...
(and: number -> universal number -> consciousness -> ...)
Something like that, follows, I argue, from the assumption
that we are Turing emulable at some (necessarily unknown)
level of description.
and
just as there are levels of cognition there are levels of
consciousness. Between the human being and other animals
there is a
wide gradation of levels, it is not that any other animal
lacks of
'qualia'. Perhaps there is an upper level defined by
computational
limits and as such once reached that limit one just remains
there, but
consciousness seems to depend on the complexity of the brain
(size,
convolutions or whatever provides the full power) but not
disconnected
to cognition. In this view only damaging the cognitive
capacities of a
person would damage its 'qualia', while its 'qualia' could
not get
damaged but by damaging the brain which will likewise damage
the
cognitive capabilities. In other words, there seems to be no
cognition/consciousness duality as long as there is no brain/
mind one.
The use of the term 'qualia' here looks like a remake of the
mind/body
problem.
Qualia is the part of the mind consisting in the directly
apprehensible subjective experience. Typical examples are
pain, seeing red, smell, feeling something, ... It is roughly
the non transitive part of cognition.
The question here is not the question of the existence of
degrees of consciousness, but the existence of a link between
a possible variation of consciousness in presence of non
causal perturbation during a particular run of a brain or a
machine.
If big blue wins a chess tournament without having used the
register 344, no doubt big blue would have win in case the
register 344 would have been broken.
Not with probability 1.0, because given QM the game might have
(and in other worlds did) gone differently and required
register 344.
Correct but irrelevant. We don't assume QM at the start, and if
you use QM, you have to reason on the QM normal words to make
the point relevant. Or you assume QM-comp, and not comp. It is
physicalism. And you beg the point, which is that comp -> QM-
comp. (assuming QM is correct on the "physical world").
Some people seems to believe that if big blue was conscious in
the first case, it could loose consciousness in the second
case. I don't think this is tenable when we assume that we are
Turing emulable.
But the world is only Turing emulable if it is deterministic
and it's only deterministic if "everything" happens as in MWI QM.
Newton mechanics is a counter-example. You lost me. I don't know
in which theory you reason.
Also, arithmetical truth is "deterministic" although only a tiny
part of it is computable. Consciousness, matter are higher order
notion, some nameable (by numbers), some not. Most, by comp, are
not computable. Computable things can have non computable
qualities. By incompleteness, this is a very general phenomenon.
The full first order arithmetical "Noûs", that first order G*,
is Pi_1 complete *in* the oracle of Arithmetical Truth.
It means that even with an oracle capable of answering any
sigma_i or pi_i questions, some intellectual truth about machine
our numbers remain de type Pi_i difficult! The first order G is
Pi_2-complete. Quite above the computable, which is the Sigma_1
complete. The mystery with comp is why does the appearance seems
computable, given the radical first person indeterminacy which
occurs at some level.
The whole many coupling consciousness/realities arises through
the attempt of a swarm of numbers to understand themselves. At
least I show why it has to be like that once we say "yes" to the
doctor.
Is it so astonishing? It explains where the laws of physics come
from, and why it hurts. It is just more near Pythagorus, Plato,
Plotinus than Aristotle.
A physicalist who, like *some* radical atheist, makes
physicalism a given of science illustrates a lack of rigor in
ontology or theology.
Scientists does not know, and will never (publicly) know. (As
scientist).
But if you believe you are Post-Church-Turing emulable, then you
have to believe that 0, the successor, addition and
multiplication are enough to explain why eventually universal
numbers believe in e, i, pi, 24, and in some relatively winning
universal numbers (like probably modular functors, quantum
topologies, non commutative geometry). And why it hurts. Thanks
to the Gödel-Solovay gap between proof (G) and truth (G*), which
is inherited by the intensional variants of the logics of self-
reference, we get a theory of quanta *and* of the qualia.
It is math, of course.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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