Kelly,
Since you told me that you accept comp, after all, and do no more
oppose it to your view, I think we agree, at least on many things.
Indeed you agree with the hypothesis, and your philosophy appears to
be a consequence of the hypothesis. That is all my work is about.
Indeed I show you are right in a constructive way, which leads to the
testability of the computationalist hypothesis.
It remains possible that we have a disagreement concerning the
probability, and this has some importance, because it is the use of
probability (or credibility) which makes the consequences of comp
testable. More in the comment below.
Also, I will from now on, abandon the term machine for the term
number. Relatively to a fixed chosen universal machine, like
Robinson arithmetic, such an identification can be done precisely. I
will come back on this to my explanation to Kim, if he is still
interested, and patient enough ...
On 27 May 2009, at 09:05, Kelly Harmon wrote:
On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 11:21 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be
wrote:
Actually I still have no clue of what you mean by information.
Well, I don't think I can say it much better than I did before:
In my view, there are ungrounded abstract symbols that acquire
meaning via constraints placed on them by their relationships to other
symbols.
Exactly. And those constraints makes sense once we make explicit the
many universal numbers involved. I will have opportunities to say more
on this later.
The only grounding comes from the conscious experience
that is intrinsic to a particular set of relationships.
I agree, but only because I have succeeded to make such a statement
utterly precise, and even testable.
To repeat my
earlier Chalmers quote, Experience is information from the inside;
physics is information from the outside.
Again this is fuzzy, and I think Chalmers is just quoting me with
different terms (btw). I prefer to avoid the word information because
it has different meaning in science and in everyday talk. Either you
use it in the sense of Shannon, or Kolmogorov, or Solomonov, or
Solovay or even Landauer (which one precisely?), in which case
information = consciousness is as much non sensical than saying
consciousness is neuron's firing, or you use it, as I think you do,
in the everyday sense of information like when we ask do you know the
last information on TV?. In that case information corresponds to what
I am used to call first person view, and your identity
consciousness = information is correct, and even a theorem with
reasonnably fine grained definitions. So we are OK here.
It is this subjective
experience of information that provides meaning to the otherwise
completely abstract platonic symbols.
As I said.
Going a little further: I would say that the relationships between
the symbols that make up a particular mental state have some sort of
consistency, some regularity, some syntax - so that when these
syntactical relationships are combined with the symbols it does make
up some sort of descriptive language. A language that is used to
describe a state of mind. Here we're well into the realm of semiotics
I think.
Here you are even closer to what I say in both UDA and AUDA. No
problem. It takes me 30 years of work to explain this succesfully to a
part of the experts in those fields, so as to make a PhD thesis from
that. Sorry to let you know that this has been already developed in
details. My originality is to take computer science seriously when
studying computationalism.
To come back to our disagreement, what is it that a Turing machine
does that results in consciousness?
From the third point of view, one universal number relates the 3-
informations.
From the first person point of view, all universal and particular
numbers at once imposes a probability measure on the histories going
through the corresponding 1-information.
It would seem to me that
ultimately what a Turing machine does is manipulate symbols according
to specific rules.
In the platonic sense, yes. And it concerns 3-information or relative
computational states.
But is it the process of manipulating the symbols
that produces consciousness?
No. Nothing, strictly speaking, ever produce consciousness. It will
appear to be the unavoidable inside view aspect of numbers in
arithmetical platonia. AUDA explains this thanks to the fact that self-
consistency belongs to the G* minus G theory. It is the kind of things
which a number (machine) can produce as true without being able to
communicate it scientifically (prove) to another machine, including
itself.
OR is it the state of the symbols and
their relationships with each other AFTER the manipulation which
really accounts for consciousness?
Preferably indeed. The manipulations are all existing in the static
Platonia.
I say the latter. You seem to be saying the
