On the computability of consciousness
This is old hat, but I've been thinking about it on awakening every morning for the last week. Is consciousness - i.e. the actual first- person experience itself - literally uncomputable from any third- person perspective? The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. Further, if we believe that 3-p process is a closed and sufficient explanation for all events, this of course leads to the uncomfortable conclusion (referred to, for example, by Chalmers in TCM) that 1-p conscious phenomena (the raw feels of sight, sound, pain, fear and all the rest) are totally irrelevant to what's happening, including our every thought and action. But doesn't this lead to paradox? For example, how are we able to refer to these phenomena if they are causally disconnected from our behaviour - i.e. they are uncomputable (i.e. inaccessible) from the 3- p perspective? Citing identity doesn't seem to help here - the issue is how 1-p phenomena could ever emerge as features of our shared behavioural world (including, of course, talking about them) if they are forever inaccessible from a causally closed and sufficient 3-p perspective. Does this in fact lead to the conclusion that the 3-p world can't be causally closed to 1-p experience, and that I really do withdraw my finger from the fire because it hurts, and not just because C-fibres are firing? But how? David -- 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: On the computability of consciousness
Hi, Is there a problem with the idea that 3-p can be derived from some combinatorics of many interacting 1-p's? Is there a reason why we keep trying to derive 1-p from 3-p? Onward! Stephen -Original Message- From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-l...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of David Nyman Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 1:08 PM To: Everything List Subject: On the computability of consciousness This is old hat, but I've been thinking about it on awakening every morning for the last week. Is consciousness - i.e. the actual first- person experience itself - literally uncomputable from any third- person perspective? The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. Further, if we believe that 3-p process is a closed and sufficient explanation for all events, this of course leads to the uncomfortable conclusion (referred to, for example, by Chalmers in TCM) that 1-p conscious phenomena (the raw feels of sight, sound, pain, fear and all the rest) are totally irrelevant to what's happening, including our every thought and action. But doesn't this lead to paradox? For example, how are we able to refer to these phenomena if they are causally disconnected from our behaviour - i.e. they are uncomputable (i.e. inaccessible) from the 3- p perspective? Citing identity doesn't seem to help here - the issue is how 1-p phenomena could ever emerge as features of our shared behavioural world (including, of course, talking about them) if they are forever inaccessible from a causally closed and sufficient 3-p perspective. Does this in fact lead to the conclusion that the 3-p world can't be causally closed to 1-p experience, and that I really do withdraw my finger from the fire because it hurts, and not just because C-fibres are firing? But how? David -- 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: On the computability of consciousness
David Nyman wrote: This is old hat, but I've been thinking about it on awakening every morning for the last week. Is consciousness - i.e. the actual first- person experience itself - literally uncomputable from any third- person perspective? The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. Further, if we believe that 3-p process is a closed and sufficient explanation for all events, this of course leads to the uncomfortable conclusion (referred to, for example, by Chalmers in TCM) that 1-p conscious phenomena (the raw feels of sight, sound, pain, fear and all the rest) are totally irrelevant to what's happening, including our every thought and action. But doesn't this lead to paradox? For example, how are we able to refer to these phenomena if they are causally disconnected from our behaviour - i.e. they are uncomputable (i.e. inaccessible) from the 3- p perspective? Citing identity doesn't seem to help here - the issue is how 1-p phenomena could ever emerge as features of our shared behavioural world (including, of course, talking about them) if they are forever inaccessible from a causally closed and sufficient 3-p perspective. Does this in fact lead to the conclusion that the 3-p world can't be causally closed to 1-p experience, and that I really do withdraw my finger from the fire because it hurts, and not just because C-fibres are firing? But how? David I think one idea is that consciousness is connected to language (c.f. Julian Jaynes) which was originally just another perception - as animals give and hear warning cries - but with the evolution of culture it became a way of passing more detailed information, and then of storing (memory) information and this led to have an internal narrative as a way of remembering what was important (what you paid *attention* to). Some evidence for this theory is that when thinking about something, the same parts of the brain are activated as when perceiving it. Not very complete, but it's a hint. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-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: On the computability of consciousness
On 17 February 2010 05:07, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: This is old hat, but I've been thinking about it on awakening every morning for the last week. Is consciousness - i.e. the actual first- person experience itself - literally uncomputable from any third- person perspective? The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. Further, if we believe that 3-p process is a closed and sufficient explanation for all events, this of course leads to the uncomfortable conclusion (referred to, for example, by Chalmers in TCM) that 1-p conscious phenomena (the raw feels of sight, sound, pain, fear and all the rest) are totally irrelevant to what's happening, including our every thought and action. But doesn't this lead to paradox? For example, how are we able to refer to these phenomena if they are causally disconnected from our behaviour - i.e. they are uncomputable (i.e. inaccessible) from the 3- p perspective? Citing identity doesn't seem to help here - the issue is how 1-p phenomena could ever emerge as features of our shared behavioural world (including, of course, talking about them) if they are forever inaccessible from a causally closed and sufficient 3-p perspective. Does this in fact lead to the conclusion that the 3-p world can't be causally closed to 1-p experience, and that I really do withdraw my finger from the fire because it hurts, and not just because C-fibres are firing? But how? Consciousness could be computable in the sense that if you are the computation, you have the experience. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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: On the computability of consciousness
Is there a problem with the idea that 3-p can be derived from some combinatorics of many interacting 1-p's? Is there a reason why we keep trying to derive 1-p from 3-p? I suspect there's a problem either way. AFAICS the issue is that, in 3-p and 1-p, there exist two irreducibly different renditions of a given state of affairs (hence not identical in any non-question-begging sense of the term). It then follows that, in order to fully account for a given set of events involving both renditions, you have to choose between some sort of non-interacting parallelism, or the conundrum of how one causally closed account becomes informed about the other, or the frank denial of one or the other rendition. None of these options seems satisfactory. The way out would be if both 3-p and 1-p were reconcilable in terms of a more fundamental level, in terms of which the special relevance of each partial narrative was linked to its proper range of outcomes. In point of fact, of course, this is the folk psychological position, and it seems all too easy simply to dismiss this as terminating in naive dualism. However, my early-morning musings include a glimmering of how this might be made to work - without doing terminal violence to either rendition - but unfortunately there is insufficient space in the margin of this post to write it down (as yet). David On 16 February 2010 18:19, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: Hi, Is there a problem with the idea that 3-p can be derived from some combinatorics of many interacting 1-p's? Is there a reason why we keep trying to derive 1-p from 3-p? Onward! Stephen -Original Message- From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-l...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of David Nyman Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 1:08 PM To: Everything List Subject: On the computability of consciousness This is old hat, but I've been thinking about it on awakening every morning for the last week. Is consciousness - i.e. the actual first- person experience itself - literally uncomputable from any third- person perspective? The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. Further, if we believe that 3-p process is a closed and sufficient explanation for all events, this of course leads to the uncomfortable conclusion (referred to, for example, by Chalmers in TCM) that 1-p conscious phenomena (the raw feels of sight, sound, pain, fear and all the rest) are totally irrelevant to what's happening, including our every thought and action. But doesn't this lead to paradox? For example, how are we able to refer to these phenomena if they are causally disconnected from our behaviour - i.e. they are uncomputable (i.e. inaccessible) from the 3- p perspective? Citing identity doesn't seem to help here - the issue is how 1-p phenomena could ever emerge as features of our shared behavioural world (including, of course, talking about them) if they are forever inaccessible from a causally closed and sufficient 3-p perspective. Does this in fact lead to the conclusion that the 3-p world can't be causally closed to 1-p experience, and that I really do withdraw my finger from the fire because it hurts, and not just because C-fibres are firing? But how? David -- 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: On the computability of consciousness
On 16 February 2010 22:21, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: Consciousness could be computable in the sense that if you are the computation, you have the experience. Yes, but that's precisely not the sense I was referring to. Rather the sense I'm picking out is that neither the existence, nor the specifically experiential characteristics, of any 1-p component over and above the 3-p level of description is accessible (computable) in terms of any such 3-p narrative. Consequently any reference to such a component at the 3-p level seems inexplicable. This leads some (e.g. Dennett, if I've understood him) to try to finesse this by claiming that 1-p experience only seems to exist - IOW that when 3-me refers to 3-my conscious experience this is merely a 3-p reference to some equivalent computational aspect which is fully sufficient to account for all the resultant 3-p phenomena. The 1-p seeming is then supposed to be, in some under-defined sense, identical to this computation. But for two manifestly distinct levels of description to have any prospect of being seen as identical, they must be capable of being discarded individually, in order to be jointly reconciled in terms of a single more fundamental level clearly compatible with both - this is the only manoeuvre that could validate any non-question-begging ascription of identity. ISTM that the Dennettian approach is merely to *assert* - given the undeniable seeming of conscious experience - that this *must* be the case, whilst offering no glimmer of what the nature of such a transcendent level of reconciliation could possibly be. David On 17 February 2010 05:07, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: This is old hat, but I've been thinking about it on awakening every morning for the last week. Is consciousness - i.e. the actual first- person experience itself - literally uncomputable from any third- person perspective? The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. Further, if we believe that 3-p process is a closed and sufficient explanation for all events, this of course leads to the uncomfortable conclusion (referred to, for example, by Chalmers in TCM) that 1-p conscious phenomena (the raw feels of sight, sound, pain, fear and all the rest) are totally irrelevant to what's happening, including our every thought and action. But doesn't this lead to paradox? For example, how are we able to refer to these phenomena if they are causally disconnected from our behaviour - i.e. they are uncomputable (i.e. inaccessible) from the 3- p perspective? Citing identity doesn't seem to help here - the issue is how 1-p phenomena could ever emerge as features of our shared behavioural world (including, of course, talking about them) if they are forever inaccessible from a causally closed and sufficient 3-p perspective. Does this in fact lead to the conclusion that the 3-p world can't be causally closed to 1-p experience, and that I really do withdraw my finger from the fire because it hurts, and not just because C-fibres are firing? But how? Consciousness could be computable in the sense that if you are the computation, you have the experience. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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: On the computability of consciousness
David Nyman wrote: Is there a problem with the idea that 3-p can be derived from some combinatorics of many interacting 1-p's? Is there a reason why we keep trying to derive 1-p from 3-p? I suspect there's a problem either way. AFAICS the issue is that, in 3-p and 1-p, there exist two irreducibly different renditions of a given state of affairs (hence not identical in any non-question-begging sense of the term). It then follows that, in order to fully account for a given set of events involving both renditions, you have to choose between some sort of non-interacting parallelism, or the conundrum of how one causally closed account becomes informed about the other, or the frank denial of one or the other rendition. None of these options seems satisfactory. I don't see that my 1-p experience is at all causally closed. In fact, thoughts pop into my head all the time with no provenance and no hint of what caused them. Brent The way out would be if both 3-p and 1-p were reconcilable in terms of a more fundamental level, in terms of which the special relevance of each partial narrative was linked to its proper range of outcomes. In point of fact, of course, this is the folk psychological position, and it seems all too easy simply to dismiss this as terminating in naive dualism. However, my early-morning musings include a glimmering of how this might be made to work - without doing terminal violence to either rendition - but unfortunately there is insufficient space in the margin of this post to write it down (as yet). David -- 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: On the computability of consciousness
David Nyman wrote: On 16 February 2010 22:21, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: Consciousness could be computable in the sense that if you are the computation, you have the experience. Yes, but that's precisely not the sense I was referring to. Rather the sense I'm picking out is that neither the existence, nor the specifically experiential characteristics, of any 1-p component over and above the 3-p level of description is accessible (computable) in terms of any such 3-p narrative. Consequently any reference to such a component at the 3-p level seems inexplicable. This leads some (e.g. Dennett, if I've understood him) to try to finesse this by claiming that 1-p experience only seems to exist - IOW that when 3-me refers to 3-my conscious experience this is merely a 3-p reference to some equivalent computational aspect which is fully sufficient to account for all the resultant 3-p phenomena. The 1-p seeming is then supposed to be, in some under-defined sense, identical to this computation. But for two manifestly distinct levels of description to have any prospect of being seen as identical, they must be capable of being discarded individually, in order to be jointly reconciled in terms of a single more fundamental level clearly compatible with both - this is the only manoeuvre that could validate any non-question-begging ascription of identity. But suppose we had a really good theory and understanding of the brain so that we could watch yours in operation on some kind of scope (like an fMRI, except in great detail) and from our theory we could infer that David's now thinking X. And it's going to lead him to next think Y. And then he'll remember Z and strenghten this synapse over here. And... Then wouldn't you start to regard the 1-p account as just another level of description, as when you start you car on a cold day it wants a richer fuel mixture and the ECU remembers to keep the idle speed up until it's warm. Brent ISTM that the Dennettian approach is merely to *assert* - given the undeniable seeming of conscious experience - that this *must* be the case, whilst offering no glimmer of what the nature of such a transcendent level of reconciliation could possibly be. David On 17 February 2010 05:07, David Nyman david.ny...@gmail.com wrote: This is old hat, but I've been thinking about it on awakening every morning for the last week. Is consciousness - i.e. the actual first- person experience itself - literally uncomputable from any third- person perspective? The only rationale for adducing the additional existence of any 1-p experience in a 3-p world is the raw fact that we possess it (or seem to, according to some). We can't compute the existence of any 1-p experiential component of a 3-p process on purely 3-p grounds. Further, if we believe that 3-p process is a closed and sufficient explanation for all events, this of course leads to the uncomfortable conclusion (referred to, for example, by Chalmers in TCM) that 1-p conscious phenomena (the raw feels of sight, sound, pain, fear and all the rest) are totally irrelevant to what's happening, including our every thought and action. But doesn't this lead to paradox? For example, how are we able to refer to these phenomena if they are causally disconnected from our behaviour - i.e. they are uncomputable (i.e. inaccessible) from the 3- p perspective? Citing identity doesn't seem to help here - the issue is how 1-p phenomena could ever emerge as features of our shared behavioural world (including, of course, talking about them) if they are forever inaccessible from a causally closed and sufficient 3-p perspective. Does this in fact lead to the conclusion that the 3-p world can't be causally closed to 1-p experience, and that I really do withdraw my finger from the fire because it hurts, and not just because C-fibres are firing? But how? Consciousness could be computable in the sense that if you are the computation, you have the experience. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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: On the computability of consciousness
On 17 February 2010 00:06, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: I don't see that my 1-p experience is at all causally closed. In fact, thoughts pop into my head all the time with no provenance and no hint of what caused them. The problem is that if one believes that the 3-p narrative is causally sufficient, then the thoughts that pop into your head - and their consequences - are entirely explicable in terms of some specific 3-p rendition. If you also seem to have the 1-p experience of the sound of a voice in your head, this is entirely gratuitous to the 3-p thought-process and its consequences. More problematic still, neither the existence nor the experiential characteristics of 1-p experience is computable from the confines of the 3-p narrative. So how can it be possible for any such narrative to *refer* to the experiential quality of a thought? David David Nyman wrote: Is there a problem with the idea that 3-p can be derived from some combinatorics of many interacting 1-p's? Is there a reason why we keep trying to derive 1-p from 3-p? I suspect there's a problem either way. AFAICS the issue is that, in 3-p and 1-p, there exist two irreducibly different renditions of a given state of affairs (hence not identical in any non-question-begging sense of the term). It then follows that, in order to fully account for a given set of events involving both renditions, you have to choose between some sort of non-interacting parallelism, or the conundrum of how one causally closed account becomes informed about the other, or the frank denial of one or the other rendition. None of these options seems satisfactory. I don't see that my 1-p experience is at all causally closed. In fact, thoughts pop into my head all the time with no provenance and no hint of what caused them. Brent The way out would be if both 3-p and 1-p were reconcilable in terms of a more fundamental level, in terms of which the special relevance of each partial narrative was linked to its proper range of outcomes. In point of fact, of course, this is the folk psychological position, and it seems all too easy simply to dismiss this as terminating in naive dualism. However, my early-morning musings include a glimmering of how this might be made to work - without doing terminal violence to either rendition - but unfortunately there is insufficient space in the margin of this post to write it down (as yet). David -- 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: On the computability of consciousness
On 17 February 2010 00:16, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: But suppose we had a really good theory and understanding of the brain so that we could watch yours in operation on some kind of scope (like an fMRI, except in great detail) and from our theory we could infer that David's now thinking X. And it's going to lead him to next think Y. And then he'll remember Z and strenghten this synapse over here. And... Then wouldn't you start to regard the 1-p account as just another level of description, as when you start you car on a cold day it wants a richer fuel mixture and the ECU remembers to keep the idle speed up until it's warm. In short, yes. But that doesn't make the problem as I've defined it go away. At the level of reconciliation you want to invoke, you would have to stop putting scare quotes round the experiential vocabulary, unless your intention - like Dennett's AFAICS - is to deny the existence, and causal relevance, of genuinely experiential qualities (as opposed to seemings, whatever they might be). At bottom, 1-p is not a level of description - i.e. something accessed *within* consciousness - it *is* the very mode of access itself. The trouble comes because in the version you cite the default assumption is that the synapse-strengthening stuff - the 3-p narrative - is sufficient to account for all the observed phenomena - including of course all the 3-p references to experiential qualities and their consequences. But such qualities are entirely non-computable from the 3-p level, so how can such a narrative refer to them? And indeed, looked at the other way round, given the assumed causal closure of the 3-p level, what further function would be served by such 1-p references? Now, if we indeed had the robust state of affairs that you describe above, this would be a stunning puzzle, because 1-p and 3-p are manifestly not identical, nor are they equivalently levels of description in any relevant sense. Consequently, we would be faced with a brute reality without any adequate explanation. However, in practice, the theory and observations you characterise are very far from the current state of the art. This leaves scope for some actual future theory and observation to elucidate interaction between 1-p and 3-p with real consequences that would be inexplicable in terms of facile identity assertions. For example, that I withdraw my hand from the fire *because* I feel the pain, and this turns out to both in theory and observation to be inexplicable in terms of any purely 3-p level of description. Prima facie, this might seem to lead to an even more problematic interactive dualism, but my suspicion is that there is scope for some genuinely revelatory reconciliation at a more fundamental level - i.e. a truly explanatory identity theory. But we won't get to that by ignoring the problem. David David Nyman wrote: On 16 February 2010 22:21, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: Consciousness could be computable in the sense that if you are the computation, you have the experience. Yes, but that's precisely not the sense I was referring to. Rather the sense I'm picking out is that neither the existence, nor the specifically experiential characteristics, of any 1-p component over and above the 3-p level of description is accessible (computable) in terms of any such 3-p narrative. Consequently any reference to such a component at the 3-p level seems inexplicable. This leads some (e.g. Dennett, if I've understood him) to try to finesse this by claiming that 1-p experience only seems to exist - IOW that when 3-me refers to 3-my conscious experience this is merely a 3-p reference to some equivalent computational aspect which is fully sufficient to account for all the resultant 3-p phenomena. The 1-p seeming is then supposed to be, in some under-defined sense, identical to this computation. But for two manifestly distinct levels of description to have any prospect of being seen as identical, they must be capable of being discarded individually, in order to be jointly reconciled in terms of a single more fundamental level clearly compatible with both - this is the only manoeuvre that could validate any non-question-begging ascription of identity. But suppose we had a really good theory and understanding of the brain so that we could watch yours in operation on some kind of scope (like an fMRI, except in great detail) and from our theory we could infer that David's now thinking X. And it's going to lead him to next think Y. And then he'll remember Z and strenghten this synapse over here. And... Then wouldn't you start to regard the 1-p account as just another level of description, as when you start you car on a cold day it wants a richer fuel mixture and the ECU remembers to keep the idle speed up until it's warm. Brent ISTM that the Dennettian approach is merely to *assert* - given the undeniable seeming of conscious
Re: On the computability of consciousness
David Nyman wrote: On 17 February 2010 00:06, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: I don't see that my 1-p experience is at all causally closed. In fact, thoughts pop into my head all the time with no provenance and no hint of what caused them. The problem is that if one believes that the 3-p narrative is causally sufficient, then the thoughts that pop into your head - and their consequences - are entirely explicable in terms of some specific 3-p rendition. If you also seem to have the 1-p experience of the sound of a voice in your head, this is entirely gratuitous to the 3-p thought-process and its consequences. I'm not sure in what sense you mean gratuitous. In a sense it is gratuitous to describe anything - hence the new catch-phrase, It is what it is. If one is just a different description of the other then they have the same consequences - in different terms. More problematic still, neither the existence nor the experiential characteristics of 1-p experience is computable from the confines of the 3-p narrative. How do you know that? In my computation of what's happening in your brain I might well say, And *there's* where David is feeling confused. Brent So how can it be possible for any such narrative to *refer* to the experiential quality of a thought? David David Nyman wrote: Is there a problem with the idea that 3-p can be derived from some combinatorics of many interacting 1-p's? Is there a reason why we keep trying to derive 1-p from 3-p? I suspect there's a problem either way. AFAICS the issue is that, in 3-p and 1-p, there exist two irreducibly different renditions of a given state of affairs (hence not identical in any non-question-begging sense of the term). It then follows that, in order to fully account for a given set of events involving both renditions, you have to choose between some sort of non-interacting parallelism, or the conundrum of how one causally closed account becomes informed about the other, or the frank denial of one or the other rendition. None of these options seems satisfactory. I don't see that my 1-p experience is at all causally closed. In fact, thoughts pop into my head all the time with no provenance and no hint of what caused them. Brent The way out would be if both 3-p and 1-p were reconcilable in terms of a more fundamental level, in terms of which the special relevance of each partial narrative was linked to its proper range of outcomes. In point of fact, of course, this is the folk psychological position, and it seems all too easy simply to dismiss this as terminating in naive dualism. However, my early-morning musings include a glimmering of how this might be made to work - without doing terminal violence to either rendition - but unfortunately there is insufficient space in the margin of this post to write it down (as yet). David -- 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: On the computability of consciousness
David Nyman wrote: On 17 February 2010 00:16, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: But suppose we had a really good theory and understanding of the brain so that we could watch yours in operation on some kind of scope (like an fMRI, except in great detail) and from our theory we could infer that David's now thinking X. And it's going to lead him to next think Y. And then he'll remember Z and strenghten this synapse over here. And... Then wouldn't you start to regard the 1-p account as just another level of description, as when you start you car on a cold day it wants a richer fuel mixture and the ECU remembers to keep the idle speed up until it's warm. In short, yes. But that doesn't make the problem as I've defined it go away. At the level of reconciliation you want to invoke, you would have to stop putting scare quotes round the experiential vocabulary, unless your intention - like Dennett's AFAICS - is to deny the existence, and causal relevance, of genuinely experiential qualities (as opposed to seemings, whatever they might be). At bottom, 1-p is not a level of description - i.e. something accessed *within* consciousness - it *is* the very mode of access itself. I think accessed creates the wrong image - as though there is some you outside of this process that is accessing it. But I'm not sure that vitiates your point. The trouble comes because in the version you cite the default assumption is that the synapse-strengthening stuff - the 3-p narrative - is sufficient to account for all the observed phenomena - including of course all the 3-p references to experiential qualities and their consequences. But such qualities are entirely non-computable from the 3-p level, How can you know that? so how can such a narrative refer to them? And indeed, looked at the other way round, given the assumed causal closure of the 3-p level, what further function would be served by such 1-p references? Function in the sense of purpose? Why should it have one? Now, if we indeed had the robust state of affairs that you describe above, this would be a stunning puzzle, because 1-p and 3-p are manifestly not identical, nor are they equivalently levels of description in any relevant sense. Consequently, we would be faced with a brute reality without any adequate explanation. However, in practice, the theory and observations you characterise are very far from the current state of the art. This leaves scope for some actual future theory and observation to elucidate interaction between 1-p and 3-p with real consequences that would be inexplicable in terms of facile identity assertions. For example, that I withdraw my hand from the fire *because* I feel the pain, and this turns out to both in theory and observation to be inexplicable in terms of any purely 3-p level of description. Prima facie, this might seem to lead to an even more problematic interactive dualism, but my suspicion is that there is scope for some genuinely revelatory reconciliation at a more fundamental level - i.e. a truly explanatory identity theory. But we won't get to that by ignoring the problem. My intuition is that once we have a really good 3-p theory, 1-p will seem like a kind of shorthand way of speaking about brain processes. That doesn't mean you questions will be answered. It will be like Bertrand Russell's neutral monoids. There are events and they can be arranged in 3-p relations or in 1-p relations. Explanations will ultimately be circular - but not viciously so. Brent David David Nyman wrote: On 16 February 2010 22:21, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: Consciousness could be computable in the sense that if you are the computation, you have the experience. Yes, but that's precisely not the sense I was referring to. Rather the sense I'm picking out is that neither the existence, nor the specifically experiential characteristics, of any 1-p component over and above the 3-p level of description is accessible (computable) in terms of any such 3-p narrative. Consequently any reference to such a component at the 3-p level seems inexplicable. This leads some (e.g. Dennett, if I've understood him) to try to finesse this by claiming that 1-p experience only seems to exist - IOW that when 3-me refers to 3-my conscious experience this is merely a 3-p reference to some equivalent computational aspect which is fully sufficient to account for all the resultant 3-p phenomena. The 1-p seeming is then supposed to be, in some under-defined sense, identical to this computation. But for two manifestly distinct levels of description to have any prospect of being seen as identical, they must be capable of being discarded individually, in order to be jointly reconciled in terms of a single more fundamental level clearly compatible with both - this is the only manoeuvre that could validate any non-question-begging ascription of identity.
Re: On the computability of consciousness
You guys should Read Chalmers: Philosophy of Mind, Classical and contemporary Readings and Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Richard Rorty In particular The Concepts of Counsciousness By Ned Block and Mental Causation by stephen Yablo will get you nearer to where you are trying to get. Best wish for all Diego Caleiro Philosopher of Mind University of São Paulo. On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 12:39 AM, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.comwrote: David Nyman wrote: On 17 February 2010 00:16, Brent Meeker meeke...@dslextreme.com wrote: But suppose we had a really good theory and understanding of the brain so that we could watch yours in operation on some kind of scope (like an fMRI, except in great detail) and from our theory we could infer that David's now thinking X. And it's going to lead him to next think Y. And then he'll remember Z and strenghten this synapse over here. And... Then wouldn't you start to regard the 1-p account as just another level of description, as when you start you car on a cold day it wants a richer fuel mixture and the ECU remembers to keep the idle speed up until it's warm. In short, yes. But that doesn't make the problem as I've defined it go away. At the level of reconciliation you want to invoke, you would have to stop putting scare quotes round the experiential vocabulary, unless your intention - like Dennett's AFAICS - is to deny the existence, and causal relevance, of genuinely experiential qualities (as opposed to seemings, whatever they might be). At bottom, 1-p is not a level of description - i.e. something accessed *within* consciousness - it *is* the very mode of access itself. I think accessed creates the wrong image - as though there is some you outside of this process that is accessing it. But I'm not sure that vitiates your point. The trouble comes because in the version you cite the default assumption is that the synapse-strengthening stuff - the 3-p narrative - is sufficient to account for all the observed phenomena - including of course all the 3-p references to experiential qualities and their consequences. But such qualities are entirely non-computable from the 3-p level, How can you know that? so how can such a narrative refer to them? And indeed, looked at the other way round, given the assumed causal closure of the 3-p level, what further function would be served by such 1-p references? Function in the sense of purpose? Why should it have one? Now, if we indeed had the robust state of affairs that you describe above, this would be a stunning puzzle, because 1-p and 3-p are manifestly not identical, nor are they equivalently levels of description in any relevant sense. Consequently, we would be faced with a brute reality without any adequate explanation. However, in practice, the theory and observations you characterise are very far from the current state of the art. This leaves scope for some actual future theory and observation to elucidate interaction between 1-p and 3-p with real consequences that would be inexplicable in terms of facile identity assertions. For example, that I withdraw my hand from the fire *because* I feel the pain, and this turns out to both in theory and observation to be inexplicable in terms of any purely 3-p level of description. Prima facie, this might seem to lead to an even more problematic interactive dualism, but my suspicion is that there is scope for some genuinely revelatory reconciliation at a more fundamental level - i.e. a truly explanatory identity theory. But we won't get to that by ignoring the problem. My intuition is that once we have a really good 3-p theory, 1-p will seem like a kind of shorthand way of speaking about brain processes. That doesn't mean you questions will be answered. It will be like Bertrand Russell's neutral monoids. There are events and they can be arranged in 3-p relations or in 1-p relations. Explanations will ultimately be circular - but not viciously so. Brent David David Nyman wrote: On 16 February 2010 22:21, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: Consciousness could be computable in the sense that if you are the computation, you have the experience. Yes, but that's precisely not the sense I was referring to. Rather the sense I'm picking out is that neither the existence, nor the specifically experiential characteristics, of any 1-p component over and above the 3-p level of description is accessible (computable) in terms of any such 3-p narrative. Consequently any reference to such a component at the 3-p level seems inexplicable. This leads some (e.g. Dennett, if I've understood him) to try to finesse this by claiming that 1-p experience only seems to exist - IOW that when 3-me refers to 3-my conscious experience this is merely a 3-p reference to some equivalent computational aspect which is fully sufficient to account for all the
